by Mike Edison
9
MADE IN JAPAN
“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?”
Rhea was steamed.
“You quit your job, you’re up giving up your apartment, you’re joining a rock band, and you’re going to Japan—and it didn’t even cross your mind to ask me what I thought?”
No whimsical explanation about following my muse was ever going to placate her. She was all set to play house with me. It seemed like the next logical step, and although we hadn’t really discussed it, she had gone so far as to shop for old jelly jars for me to drink Jim Beam out of, just like in the George Jones song. When a girl does that for a fella, it sends a pretty clear signal. Naturally, my reaction was to flee the country.
The Raunch Hands’ timing was sublime. Up at Drake, the bloom was definitely off the rose. A year before, I could have spent an entire morning joyously composing cover lines, egging myself on to new heights of licentious lyricism and glee. After putting the finishing touches on a sophisticated turn of phrase like “Soaked Panty Face Squat,” I’d be so pleased with the radiant levels of sibilance and internal assonance that I could breathe into a mere five-seventeenths of smutty haiku that I’d spend the rest of the day dancing around my office like the star in my own cherry blossom pageant. These days I was just waddling through a swamp of cheap alliteration (“Bagging Betty’s Bouncing Boobs,” “Sex-Crazed Sluts Snack on Poolside Snatch,” etc.) and spending my downtime aimlessly pondering the fate of twenty-five-year-old pornographers.
I was crazy about my girlfriend. Hell, not being everyone’s cup of tea, I was grateful to have one. But I was starting to have reservations about the long-term possibilities of dating a career bartender. She made fat money, about eight hundred bucks a week, cash, a lot more than I was making at my fancy-pants publishing gig. And she had a great employer who had a health-care plan for all of his employees. It was tough to beat. There was no reason for her to ever leave, except that in five years she’d still be working in the same bar, pouring boiler-makers for the same assholes. And that takes its own toll: a gaggle of gin-blossomed gargoyles arguing about the ’74 World Series for the fourteen thousandth time is not a soaring testament to the human spirit. She was already beginning to show the dim pallor of a lifer. A change of environment would have done her a world of good, but she wasn’t going anywhere—not making that kind of dough while working only four nights a week; it was a trap. Sartre would have had a field day with that setup.
When I told Carmine that I was off to Japan to play the drums, he was decidedly more enthusiastic about my decision. “I like your work,” he told me, “but you’re getting bored, and I have no place to put you.” He also appreciated that I did the right thing—I told him I was leaving as soon as I knew, instead of just giving him the usual two weeks’ notice before I shipped out. In fact, I gave him almost two months’ warning, plenty of time to restaff without going nuts.
“You’ve been great to me,” I said, not too solicitously, “and I am not going to leave you in the lurch. I want to finish the books I’m working on and give you time to get someone else while I’m still around to show them the, uh, subtleties of what we do here.” He loved that.
The best part was that I was now a lame-duck editor, and within a month after I announced that I was leaving, I had very little to do except oversee the next fool who had my job. I didn’t even have an office to work in, since the new guy had already moved in. Carmine was happy with me floating through the halls for only a few minutes each day to make sure everything was ducky. Actually, without a desk anymore, me being around and killing time with the Happiness Boys was more of a pain in the ass for him than anything else. Meanwhile, every cartoonist and local stripper I had ever been nice to and had featured in one of the books wanted to take me out for a boozy lunch, and who was I to let them down? Work had turned into a movable feast. At some point I was told to stop coming in. But they kept on paying me. I left on the best possible terms, and years later they were still tossing me freelance work.
Rhea had calmed down and we were enjoying our time together, sleeping in, and having lunch at B&H Dairy every day before she went to work. I would do a quick pop-in at the office and then go off to rehearse and record with the Raunch Hands. At the end of the night I would pick her up at the bar and we’d go drinking in the East Village. It was a sweet schedule, but clearly the calm before the storm.
The Raunch Hands had a different approach to making records than Sharky’s Machine. The first thing they did was start with a giant mess of cocaine, a great, sprawling slick of white powder that was left out in the studio for anyone to hit when they felt they needed a lift. It was replenished frequently. Somehow, this was included in the recording budget. I was amazed. For liquid refreshment I brought along a portable bar, a gimmicked-up doctor’s bag fitted with a set of liquor bottles and a cocktail shaker. I filled a bucket with ice and kept us in drinks the entire time.
Mike Chandler, the Raunch Hands’ prodigiously drunk singer, took it all in stride.
“As you get older,” he told me, “the clubhouse gets better.” He punctuated this by knocking back a full shaker of Tom Collins in one gulp, ice cubes and all. I hear Babe Ruth liked to drink ’em that way, too.
After the childish tumult of Sharky’s Machine, this was a dream. The four Raunch Hands—Chandler, Mariconda, bassist George Sulley, and me—got along famously. And these guys could play. Unfortunately, there is just no good way to explain the amped-up attack of dirty boogaloo and between-the-eyes guitar assaults that the Raunch Hands perpetrated on the public. You have to hear it, you have to live it.
To help drive these monsters over the top, I employed a new snare drum, a military-grade Sonor with a brass shell that weighed about as much as the Liberty Bell and sounded like a thunderclap every time I hit the backbeat. It could cut through a barrage of artillery fire or a wall of loud electric guitars and saxophones. It was more like a weapon than a musical instrument.
Mean little monkeys that we were, Mariconda and I innovated a dangerous new technique, now commonly referred to in European conservatories as “throwing the fireball.” It is the musical equivalent of carpet bombing. In the past, this was sometimes called a “rave-up.” The Yardbirds and a few others had attempted it with mixed results, but we had escalated the attack to near genocidal levels.
We also carried a mercenary saxophone player with us. He was undeniably talented and entirely capable of launching flamethrower blasts of yakkety sax, but he needed to be beaten periodically to keep his personality disorder in line. He called himself Dan. He had wide shoulders and was always bent over his horn like a vulture. I called him Asshole. I’m pretty sure his mother did, too.
All sax players have mental deficiencies, largely because they spend their lives blowing through narrow brass tubes, and all that pressure backs up into their heads, stretching out their brain tendons. In the case of Dan, the result was not only massive damage to his cerebral cortex, which made it difficult for him to remember what band he was playing in—given his onstage shtick, I am guessing he thought it was Sha Na Na—but also a massive Jewfro, which grew from his skull like an azalea bush and made him look like a fuzzy kosher lollipop. At least he knew enough to wear a hat.
He played brilliantly in the studio, but on gigs he made us all insane, overblowing his parts and mugging like a Muppet at a toga party. I rode him mercilessly for his frat-boy bullshit. It would take only a few days into the tour before I got called into the van for a meeting of the Secret Inner Circle.
“You gotta take it easy on Dan.” I have rarely seen Mariconda so serious. I was a little taken aback. “It’s hard to find a guy who plays baritone as well as tenor and will put up with us,” he explained. “Look, I don’t like him either,” he added flatly. “I also don’t like having diarrhea every day on tour. But I’ve gotten used to it.”
“Are you comparing Dan to diarrhea?”
“Yes. I am.”
Well all right, then. George ga
ve me a reassuring pat on the back as I was climbing out of the van. “Don’t worry, Sharky,” he told me. “I got the same talk last year.”
By the end of the tour, Mariconda had apparently had enough and had begun to amuse himself by replacing the six-thousand-dollar Selmer saxophone in Dan’s case with a rusty sledgehammer, a Mafia-inspired warning that had the desired effect of scaring the shit out of Dan, who suddenly became very careful to kill the honky jive dance and blast his parts exactly the way Mariconda had written them. Mariconda definitely has a way with sax players.
As we got closer and closer to our trip to Tokyo, Rhea was getting more and more agitated. Things had been going well, but now we were fighting all the time.
The band was going to Japan for two weeks, back to New York for a few days, and then off to Europe for about two months. And then, as far as I knew, I was coming back.
She confronted me. “I know what you do when you guys are on the road. Alec told me what you were like with Sharky’s Machine.” (I knew I should have killed him when I had the chance.) “If you go on tour with the Raunch Hands, don’t expect to see me when you get back. You’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus.”
I don’t negotiate with terrorists. I left for the Land of the Rising Sun wearing snakeskin boots and Ray-Bans.
The party started on the flight to Tokyo. Along with the Raunch Hands was our art director, underground comic artist Cliff Mott, an avuncular punk also quick to mop up the cocktails or whatever other accelerants might be lurking around.
I had been up partying all night and crashed as soon as I hit the plane. When I woke up a couple of hours later, somewhere over the North Pole, ready to enjoy the hospitality of the fine people of Japan Airlines, I was told very politely that they had run out of sake.
Run out of sake?? In the first three hours of a fourteen-hour flight??? I looked over at my crew, who were drunk as skunks and laughing hysterically. They had drunk so many little bottles of sake in such a short period of time that they had been cut off. Apparently, no one had ever drunk like that on a plane before, and there was genuine concern from the flight deck over the possibilities of an international incident.
I did what I had to do. I went into my carry-on, changed my shirt, put on a baseball cap and different sunglasses (I always carry two or three pairs), changed my seat, and did my best to pretend that not only was I not with these round-eyed Satans, but that I, too, was appalled at their loutish American behavior. I didn’t fool the stewardess for a second. Of course they had not run out of sake; that was just the polite way of saying “no more.” Once I had convinced her that I was going to play it suave, she took mercy on me and gave me a few drinks, the whole time nodding her head in subtle but palpable disgust at my companions, who were howling in boozy mirth at the pink Japanese vomit bag. I clearly had a choice—drink free sake or hang out with my friends. I went for the sake. It was going to be a long tour.
On our last night in Japan, I had sex with a beautiful Japanese girl in the hallway of the Star Hotel in Tokyo. I wasn’t given much of a choice.
Since the first day we arrived in Tokyo, Halloween 1990, it had been like A Hard Day’s Night—if, instead of four lovable mop tops, it starred Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah.
We were met by fans at the airport and whisked to a costume party where an all-girl band dressed as Playboy bunnies was playing “Louie, Louie.” At the hotel that night—aided by members of Supersnazz, the four cutest girls in all of Japan, who played a charmingly inept version of American garage sludge—we learned that the tea makers in every room were also good for superheating magnums of sake. It wasn’t long before we were playing Punk Rock Samurai, waging fire-extinguisher wars dressed in our complimentary kimonos.
The gigs were spectacular. In Tokyo, we played at the Jam Club with the 5.6.7.8’s, who were later featured in Kill Bill. In Nagoya, we played a tiny room on the sixteenth floor of an office building—space was at such a premium in Japan that sometimes nightclubs were housed alongside dentists’ and lawyers’ offices. It was by far the single hottest room I have ever been in. Even the walls were sweating. There was no use trying to work our normal show, a twenty-song marathon. We ditched the “pussy pleasers”—the striptease numbers and slow drags—and cut it down to the most bulletproof of the lot, a twelve-song hit-it-and-quit-it set that we branded “The Nagoya Destroya.” That night, people were fainting.
After every show there were rowdy dinners for us, fifteen or twenty people at long, traditional Japanese banquet tables. We’d kick off our shoes and kneel or sit cross-legged in front of low tables. Fortunately, I was prepared for this and had come with a wide selection of pimped-out hosiery. Only losers got caught in Tokyo with white tube socks.
The tables were reserved for a predetermined amount of time—say three hours—and it was “all you can drink” for that period, plus whatever food set we ordered, which usually started with shumai and gyoza (shrimp and pork dumplings) and then moved on to piles of perfectly greasy tatsuta age (fried chicken) served with hot mustard, piles of charred yakitori (grilled skewers of chicken, pork, onions, garlic, and whatever else the chef had lying about) with crushed hot pepper and lemon wedges, and then the sashimi, which always got a round of applause. We’d settle in, and cases of Kirin beer would just seem to materialize, with a dozen or so flagons of hot sake and cups and glasses for everyone. In Japan it is considered rude to fill your own glass and also rude not to pay attention to your neighbor’s glass. When you see a beer glass or sake cup that is less than half full, fill it up. The beer and sake just seemed to disappear, and then another sortie of bottles would overtake the table. It was like the world’s most civilized drinking game. Everybody was getting smashed. There was never an empty glass on the table. Everyone just kept drinking and saying arigato—thank you— and bowing politely to each other while filling each other’s glasses. Which made for quite the revelry among drunks.
The very first night, after about an hour of this game, I looked up and got an eyeful of Chandler and Cliff Mott dancing on the table. Inexplicably, Mott had fish cakes covering his eyes. He was playing peek-aboo with a delighted audience.
Our Japanese hosts were convinced that this is what Americans did when they were drunk and happy in restaurants, and soon, just to be polite, the girls from Supersnazz were on the table doing the Fishcake Dance, too. What they had not realized was that Mott and Chandler had drunk so much sake—which, as anyone who has ever gone the distance with a few hot liters of the stuff will tell you, has a pronounced psychedelic effect—and were now hallucinating so wildly that they were reliving their senior proms, albeit with fried seafood patties. Not only would this be considered a faux pax in most of postcolonial America, it would definitely get you tossed in the klink for “drunk and disorderly” anywhere else in the Western world. And yet this behavior was received with great enthusiasm by our new friends. Any other reception would have been rude.
Every night, after a festive round of table dancing, which had become firmly established as a ritual (for all I know, they are still doing it in Shinjuku ward), the party would carry on at a bar. Another quaint Japanese custom is to dispense with the formality of drinks, in lieu of the whole bottle. I’d sit down, and kerplunk! there’d be a fifth of Jim Beam in front of me. I felt like Jack Palance in Shane.
The practice in these bars was to buy a bottle. They’d put your name on it, and they would hold it for you for when you came back. No one was expected to plow through that much liquor in one sitting. The bottles we were inhaling were left by tourists and businessmen who the bartenders knew for sure would never be back, so they just gave them to us. There were no complaints from our camp, who were hellbent on raising the Japanese per capita liquor consumption that week.
After the bars, the hard cores would stagger back to the hotel to carry on. By this time we’d have lost most of the gang to attrition, but there were always those who could make it till dawn.
The only place to g
et more beer at that time of night was from one of the vending machines that famously pepper the streets of Japan. You could get anything from a Japanese vending machine: socks, pornography, motor oil, you name it. And everything seemed to have its own Zen koan inscribed on the package, translated into English as only the Japanese can do. A package of toothpaste offered “Hygiene for good fun and clean!” One night we bought a bottle of Scotch that promised “this whisky to create a new lifestyle.” We drank it very seriously.
These robot storefronts dispensed not only normal-size cans of beer but also monster-size four-liter barrels. You had to put a lot of coins in the slot to get one, but it was worth it just to hear the sound it made when it came dropping down through the machine—not that dissimilar from the sound a TV set makes when it hits the ground after being tossed from a Japanese hotel window.
On our day off, our hosts were very kind and brought us to Kamakura, the ancient capital of Japan once ruled by shoguns. Surrounded by mountains on three sides and open water on the fourth, it is a natural, bucolic fortress, famous for its beautiful temples and shrines. In the center is a towering bronze Buddha, the most famous of all the Buddhas, and not because Bob Dylan put it on an album cover. In the fifteenth century a tsunami wiped out the temple that housed the statue—which is ten stories tall—and the entire town around it, but the Buddha did not move an inch. It is a giant, humbling presence.
It was a calming day. The perfect opportunity to center ourselves and find a little peace among the chaos. We even saw Zen archers practicing at their monastery.
And then Dan had to go and make a spectacle of himself, making an offering to the Buddha by lighting a joss stick and praying. He was like one of those pathetic Jews who cross themselves when they visit Notre Dame as tourists, just to look as if they belong. You can spot these assholes from a mile away. One of our Japanese friends told us that it was very embarrassing, but he could not tell Dan, because that would be rude. So he politely told us, so we could mock Dan.