by Tim Anderson
While they warm up and start jamming, I get my viola out to tune it and rosin my bow. But when I reach for my bow in its usual resting position in the case, I realize with horror that it isn’t there. I must have forgotten to put it back in the last time I practiced. So I am left with only a viola to pluck while the others fill the air with the screams of their own instruments. I will never be able to compete.
They continue playing while I sit and impotently pluck my viola into my microphone, which, let’s face it, won’t bring the house down. The guys eventually stop playing, remember I am there, and look at me curiously.
“Yeah, I, uh, kind of forgot my bow,” I say. “Yeah, my…my bow…it’s not here.”
Nabe informs the players in Japanese of my predicament.
“Do you play any other instruments?” he asks.
“Not really,” I say, still lamely plucking the strings of my viola, wishing I were invisible.
“How about you wanna to try drums?” he suggests. Hmm. We don’t have a drummer today, and I’ve always wanted to play. And look, there are some drumsticks right over there on the stool!
“Sure, I’ll give it a try.” Infused with a new energy, I sweep up the sticks, hop behind the kit, and start pounding away. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but psychologically it feels right. And as a gay man, I naturally have a solid sense of rhythm, of course. The guys follow my lead, and we tear through a few improvisations like fourteen-year-olds in their parents’ garage. When we finish our session, the guys bow slightly to each other.
Kawano says, adjusting his Buddy Holly glasses, which have slipped down his nose, “.” “Cool, huh?”
The next week I get an e-mail from Nabe:
Whaaazzaaaap, Tim-san!!!!?? How was the last session? Actually, Kawano-san (a crazy singer whom you saw last week) loves your drumming. I and Kawano-san talked abuot the band, and you should play drum for us as well as you play your veola. The sound of your druming is cool, because you are the beginner. It was like a drum from some gararge bands. Well, we don’t even know where the direction should be. What we are doing now is like a trial and error, but also making music, is like a problem solving as well (that’s why I keep making music.). We are planning to have a session on this Sunday, too. So, let me know whether you are coming or not.?
Nabe
The next week I bring my bow and a new pair of drumsticks I got from the Yamaha store in Shibuya. This time it’s me, Nabe, and Kawano. Nabe had brought some of his recording equipment, so we decide to record our session. I hop behind the drum kit and start pounding. Nabe soon chimes in with some guitar, and then in comes Kawano with some otherworldly yelping, hemming, hawing, and rhythm guitar. There are no verses and no choruses, just one long odyssey of noise, piss, and vinegar. Yes, that’s what it is, a thirty-three-minute odyssey through rock and roll’s primitive passions. By the twentieth minute I’m drenched with sweat and I start having trouble holding on to the drumsticks, but I’m bound and determined not to let this moment—this exceedingly long moment—end. I hang on to them for dear life. I’m the captain of this Viking ship, after all, and it is my duty to steer the vessel through the treacherous waters of modern rock, to take up the hammer of the gods and smite any pretenders to the throne or John Mayer fans I find in my path. That’s my duty, right?
After we finally careen to a graceless finish, Nabe suggests that next time I should give them a nod when I’m ready to finish, otherwise they won’t know when to stop and Kawano might feel the need to, as Nabe put it, “keep to singing.”
We practice for a few more hours and record everything. After finishing our allotted time at the practice studio, we decide to walk back to Nabe’s place in Koenji to listen to our session on his sound system. We pack up the guitars, my viola, and Nabe’s portable recording equipment, pay our bill for the three hours we used the studio, and, all six of our arms occupied with equipment, start down the stairs to the street.
It is a sweltering August evening, and Koenji is in the middle of its summer matsuri, or festival, so we find ourselves exiting onto a narrow brick shopping street brimming with festival-goers standing on the sidelines of a long and winding parade of men and women dancing in traditional matsuri garb: men crouch and stomp around dressed in short yukata robes and handkerchiefs on their heads with corners tied together between their noses and upper lips, a misguided aesthetic choice if ever there was one; women stand in formation with their hands raised doing a more subtle and mannequin-like dance in unison, dressed in white kimono with pink sleeves, black waist wraps, and what looks like big bamboo placemats folded in half and placed on their heads; then there are the drummers, the flutists, and the blue kimono-clad band of men carrying the giant mikoshi, or shrine, on their shoulders. It is the best parade I’ve ever been to (except for that one where I saw two guys on a float dressed as hot lumberjacks making out against a giant inflated ball sack—that was a little better).
We squeeze ourselves out into the flow of traffic on the street, Nabe leading, Kawano following, and me bringing up the rear, each of us struggling to keep our grips on our instruments in the press of people around us. The smells of yakitori, grilled octopus, and beer hang deliciously in the air as we push our way through the throngs of people. After a good twenty-minute crusade through the thick of the celebration, we duck down a tiny side street leading to Nabe’s “room,” as he’d called it. We are soon there, and, well, he wasn’t lying. It is a room with a loft bed, the tiniest of bathrooms, and a hotplate.
Kawano and I take a load off as Nabe cues up the minidisk on which he’d recorded our practice. I brace myself for the inevitably disappointing result, but I am pleasantly surprised to hear that it sounds OK. Especially the drums. Can I have been a rock god all this time without even knowing it? God, the wasted teenage years spent playing in orchestras when I could have been just hitting things with sticks and getting laid!
We listen to our thirty-three-minute opus, which in all honesty really starts to drag after the first five minutes. As the music continues, Nabe and Kawano have a discussion in Japanese, their heads nodding and brows furrowed as if they’re talking about something very grim, like Japan’s strained relationship with China. Then their faces brighten into toothy smiles as if they’ve just figured out how to fix it.
“Tim-san,” Nabe says, “you wanna be a band?”
“Yeah,” I say, flushed and feeling as if I’ve just been asked to the prom. “We should give it a try.”
Nabe and Kawano further discuss China and then move on to the demilitarized zone of the Koreas. Then Kawano smiles and nods his head again, clearly having solved the problem of how to deal with Kim Jong-Il. He tries to say something in English to me.
“We…in…band. I……friend…have…girlfriend. She work……live house…”
I nod and smile, having just gotten to the bottom of the West Bank issue, and consider Kawano’s words. What do they mean, exactly?
“Kawano-san has a friend,” Nabe explains. “He knows guy who has friend who have girlfriend who work at live house. He say maybe she can help us get gig there.”
It sounds so complex, but we are all so full of enthusiasm that the odds don’t matter.
And after a number of beers, we come up with a name, inspired by our love of the Absurdists, our passion for the free-form ideals of the Beats, and most importantly the bilingual magazine that is sitting on Nabe’s floor. Our name: Thighbone Trumpet Ikiru, which translates roughly to, um, Thighbone Trumpet Living. (Better not to translate, I think.) Now, what should our first album be called, and what will I wear on the CD sleeve?
The next week we get together at the same practice studio in Koenji to rock the roof off the fucking place. We try to play the song we recorded the week before, but none of us can really remember it, so we just jam for a while, taking a journey through a rock and roll wonderland, traveling to the ends of the sonic universe, riding the gargantuan waves of human drama and emotion one can only experience when beating th
ings with a wooden stick or screaming an imaginary language into a microphone.
As I sit at the drums, pounding away and imagining my image plastered on teenage girls’ rooms across Japan, I start writing our rock bio in my head, from our humble beginnings at a Koenji practice space to headlining at civic centers across the country. I have our band member personalities all figured out. Nabe will be the cerebral one, the real musical backbone of the band. In interviews, he will be soft-spoken, his words carefully chosen. The girls will really go for his smoldering, reserved sexuality. And he will, naturally, really go for the girls. Kawano will be the eccentric lead guy who will be just as likely to play the Burmese flute as strum a guitar and who will lie his way through interviews, saying he was raised by she-wolves on the northern tip of Hokkaido, where he lived until he was eighteen when he went south to Tokyo to study mapmaking. And I will be the big, weird, foreigner guy who in interviews always comes out with controversial sound bites that will fascinate and electrify the Japanese tabloids, statements like, “Any person who has bought an Alanis Morrissette album should be completely stripped of their human rights. Period.”
One day after completing our first national tour, during which we will have played in front of sold-out crowds from Fukuoka to Sapporo, we will come back to Tokyo a full-on phenomenon, and when asked about our early days in television interviews, I will explain playfully in a British accent, “It was quite lovely, actually, the way it all came about. I’d done something bloody stupid and left my viola bow at home, so Nabe, silly old tart that he is, suggested I pop behind the drums and, sort of, you know, give it a go…”
The next record will be moodier, with more keyboards and guest appearances by Lou Reed and Chrissie Hynde on backing vocals, Stevie Nicks on timpani, Siouxsie Sioux on eyeliner, and David Lee Roth on spandex. There will also be a massive viola solo that I will perform wearing only a sweater vest and some boxer briefs. We’ll branch out into different forms of music, ignoring the record company’s preferred pigeonhole for us and following up a platinum-selling ska disc with a brassy show tunes record. Then, when we start laying down tracks for our flamenco-flavored German rock opera…
“Tim-san!” Nabe says, waving his arms at me. He and Kawano are starting to unplug their guitars and pack them up.
“Time is over. We must to leave.”
Even though I leave my viola in its case during my jam sessions with the Ikiru boys, I don’t forsake it altogether. Under the influence of Thighbone Trumpet Ikiru, my practices with Toru become a little more spirited. My playing is less measured, I’ve developed a certain swagger (if a viola player can be said to have swagger), and I’ve begun to play like a man unafraid to make mistakes and let what happens happen. Even if it sounds like a bird being strangled by a piano wire. Toru appreciates my enthusiasm, though he really wishes I could play the damn third movement without getting to the end of the piece before he does. What he doesn’t know is that the reason I’m playing so fast is because I’m trying to resist the urge to swing my bow and hit something, like this stack of magazines or that potted plant or the grand piano over there. I’ve got drum fever in me, and like the Hulk in Bill Bixby or the gay in Tom Cruise, it’s desperate to get out.
For the next month, the three of us—Nabe, Kawano, and I—become a kind of posse, going around town together after rehearsals, hanging out at rock shows, drinking a lot, and passing out in Nabe’s room. We have nothing in common but a love of music, Beat Takeshi movies, and Kirin Ichiban beer. And yakitori. But it is a bond strong enough to hold us together at least through each weekend. I never ask much about Nabe or Kawano-san’s personal lives, and they remain ignorant of my history of manic pole-smoking, but these gaps in our awareness of each other’s lives create a healthy tension that feeds our music. Or something. That’s how I explain it to myself, at least.
It does start to bother me a little that, though we’ve been rehearsing for weeks now, we haven’t written a proper song yet. And we do have a tendency to practice for three hours, record our sessions, go back to Nabe’s place with a bunch of beers, and listen to what we’d recorded without gleaning anything more from it than that we really should start to think about adding a trombone somewhere. Sure, Kawano’s psychotic singing style has started to grate, and yeah, maybe Nabe’s guitar playing could use a little variation. But the drumming is perfect. And the backbone of any band is its drummer. Just ask Ringo Starr.
One night we go to a used bookstore/clothing boutique in Kichijyoji, west of Koenji, where Yu, the bassist from the very first music session who is a sort of punk rock performance artist who also dabbles in apocalyptic woodblock prints and illustrations, is holding court. In a small, unfurnished room off to the side of the main merchandise area, Yu kicks her drum machine on and begins maniacally strumming her guitar strings, creating a cacophony of blistering noise that she then hollers on top of. This is no verse-chorus-verse arrangement. It is more scream-strum-stomp-kick the wall-scream. While it isn’t something I would choose to listen to while, say, house cleaning or curling my hair, her performance is brilliant as pure spectacle. The ten or so people in the audience watch with rapt attention as she takes one of her guitars and starts beating it against the drum machine, shutting it off. She then moves on to the wall and the floor, smashing that naughty guitar until it’s a gangly mess, all the while screaming into the microphone, which she is holding like a phone between her head and shoulder. All the while, a tall, lanky guy dressed in black with an art house goatee and librarian glasses sits on a stool off to the side quietly strumming a mandolin with his eyes closed. At one point, as Yu is slamming her guitar against the wall, he answers his cell phone and talks for a few minutes.
When Yu is satisfied that she’s proven her point, she picks up another guitar, which is wrapped in a leather jacket and fastened with a black electrical cord, unwraps it, kicks the drum machine back on, barks three times, and starts over.
I take a break and walk around, checking out the merchandise. There’s a lot of local art, zines, self-released CDs, and photographs, plus locally made clothing, shoes, hats, scarves, and washi paper. I pick up a few things that look interesting—a yellow sticker with a radiation symbol on it that says “BIG DRUNK PIG” and a homemade manga graphic novel with a picture of a young guy on a subway reading the newspaper dressed only in tight underwear—pay, and make it back to the other room just in time to see Yu commence the destruction of some of her own giant woodblock prints.
“Damn, I would have bought that one,” I think as she jumps repeatedly on top of a print depicting two lovers making out in front of a towering inferno and then picks it up and throws it out the window.
So much destruction. A metaphor for something. But what? Is it a symbolic breaking out of the box that Japanese society has put her in as a woman with an asymmetrical haircut? A tirade against the sociocultural stoicism she sees around her? A bold, tragic statement on the ephemeral nature of art? Is she just a good old-fashioned psychotic deconstructionist? What?
The next week I have to cancel a practice at the last minute, and then the week after Kawano is a no-show. I don’t hear from Nabe about when the next practice is. I e-mail and call him several times, but he never gets back in contact with me. He has disappeared.
About a month later I run into Kawano-san at the Tsutaya video shop in Shinjuku where he appears to now be working. He is dressed in the standard blue Tsutaya collared T-shirt and carrying a stack of videos, on the top of which I see What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? We have a very difficult discussion, me speaking in my broken Japanese, him in his broken English and, I think, bits of his imaginary language:
“Why do we not meet anymore for play our song?” I ask in Japanese.
“ You no can tell…we don’t have never think to be indygooten,” is his mysterious multilingual reply.
“Ummmm. Yeah, so Nabe did not to call me very much,” I say, again in Japanese, trying to keep the conversation monolingual.
“ playing
guitar …cannot to be showing faces to phsnraaaanksu…”
I nod, smile, put a friendly hand on his shoulder, and say softly in my mother tongue, “I have no idea what the hell you just said.”
He seems distracted and uncomfortable around me. I wonder if I have at some point committed a social offence I wasn’t aware of. Should I not have left in the middle of Yu’s performance to shop around? Do I sweat too much during my drum solos? Am I just too tall? Or—oh shit—did they somehow find out about my history of manic pole-smoking?
Kawano smiles and indicates by picking up Baby Jane and angling his head towards the American Classics section that he needs to get back to work.
I wave, bow slightly, say goodbye, and exit the store.
A few weeks later I’m sitting in Morgan Café chatting with a friend of a friend of one of the owners, telling her that the bassist in one of her favorite bands, Superchunk, is a friend of a friend of mine.
“??” she says. “Really??”
“!” I answer. “Yes, really!”
“.” “Cool.”
While I’m basking in the afterglow of convincing someone that I know someone I don’t, I look over and see Yu walking in carrying a stack of orange papers.
“!” “Hey Yu! Long time no see!”
“!?” she says, surprised. “Oh, Timsan, hey! Doing OK?”
Yu has brought flyers for her next show. This will be a more low-key affair. Just some of her drawings and watercolors. The flyer shows an impeccable drawing of a kitchen fire. I tell her I’ll definitely be there. Then I ask if she’s seen Nabe, and she shakes her head.