by Alan Paul
“This whole trip has been one of the highlights of my life,” I said. “It was incredibly cool to have a giant Chinese crowd responding to our music like that.”
“I was thinking about what this must mean to you and Dave . . . trying to imagine doing this in a different country.”
“That gives it so much meaning, but the thing is, it never would have happened at home. This band has allowed me to discover something inside of me, something that I always hoped was there but was never sure about.”
I took a sip and thought for a moment before continuing. “I owe you so much for helping me tap into that—for making this happen.”
Woodie flicked his hands in a dismissive wave and shook his head. “You don’t owe me anything. You made it happen. We did it together. And it means a lot to me, too.”
I sipped my tea and thought about that. Woodie had played so many more gigs than I had, touring throughout China and Australia, that I couldn’t believe that these performances had as much meaning for him.
“Why has this been so special to you?” I asked.
“It’s the music in my heart,” he said. “This is the first band that I really felt was mine. Other times I’ve been playing the parts that fit the music, or what someone else wanted to hear. This is the music that I love and when I play, it is coming from inside.”
He paused, trying to gather his thoughts and express himself properly in English. “That’s . . . well, it’s just so different.”
“It’s the best, Woodie,” I said. “I’m glad you pushed us, by arranging the songs and asking me to practice more.”
“I really didn’t think you’d say yes. You were so busy with so many things . . . the kids and everything.”
“Yeah, but I always felt like this could be special; and when I realized you did, too, I wanted to go for it. Especially since when you said you wanted to talk about the band, I thought you were going to tell me you wanted to break it up.”
Woodie howled with laughter. “No! I wouldn’t have called a meeting to break up the band; I would have just stopped returning your phone calls and e-mails. But I always loved playing with you. From the first time you jammed with Sand, I took you seriously as a musician—not as an expat asshole showing off—because of the way you carried yourself.”
“Wow,” I said. “We should have talked more.”
Woodie nodded, and we both sipped our Iron Buddha before I spoke again.
“Let’s kick ass tonight. Full speed ahead.”
I raised my little cup and we clinked in a toast to that evening’s performance—and to finally talking about everything we had been living for the past year. For as much time as we had spent together and how important we had become to each other, Woodie and I had taken precious little time to just talk. And he was just getting started.
“I had a bad drinking problem, you know. That’s why I quit.”
I didn’t tell him that I had always suspected as much, instead just sticking with the facts: “I never saw you drink too much.”
“I was good at hiding it, but I would go home after our shows and keep drinking by myself. I lost my business, which was doing really well, because of my drinking and I finally had to face up to it and accept that I was an alcoholic and needed to stop.”
Woodie’s Purple Buzz guitar business had simply disappeared. One day he had it, the next he was working as a relocation consultant, shepherding expat executives around Beijing housing compounds and schools. He never explained what happened and I never pried. In many ways, Woodie was a closed book and I wasn’t sure if not trying harder to open him up made me a very good friend or a very bad one.
“Do Zhang Yong and Lu Wei know that you were an alcoholic?”
“I am an alcoholic; it doesn’t go away. They know that I drank too much—I did it way more in the other band, without you and Dave around. But we Chinese don’t really have this concept of the alcoholic. I had to face up to it when an Australian friend sent me articles of tests to take and I clicked “yes” to everything and that made it obvious.
“I really struggled quitting and that’s why some of the shows we played were so hard. I was falling back and forth and having a hard time learning how to make music sober, which I had never done before. I’m really happy I did it.”
Our musical collaboration felt entirely intimate, and it seemed proper for our dialogue to finally be the same. Maybe we should have taken a trip outside of Beijing together a long time ago.
Zhang Yong also plays the guqin, a traditional seven-stringed Chinese instrument, and that night he and I opened our second festival performance with an improvised acoustic guitar/guqin duet. We were creating an East/West fusion on the fly. I walked onstage confident, absent of the nerves of the first night there, and was able to step outside myself. I could stop thinking and allow the music to flow effortlessly from the first note. I now took it for granted that everything would be fine and aimed higher, pushing it to be great. I was no longer embarrassed to be bold.
Back at the hotel, I moved right through the congregated businessmen and their dates for the night. I needed to rest; I was in the middle of an important business trip.
Chapter 30
Bittersweet Surrender
Lu Wei, our drummer, whipped out his phone and pushed a button. “Father,” he exclaimed. “I am in Hunan!” We were still on the plane, pulling up to the gate in Changsha.
A native of the province, Lu Wei hadn’t been home since he left for Beijing eight years earlier when his father told him not to come back until he was “a big success.” Despite growing acclaim in Beijing and endorsement deals with two large European drum companies, he still did not feel ready to return. A third-generation drummer, Lu Wei dropped out of school at age thirteen to study with his father and had dedicated his life to music. I offered to buy a train ticket to have his father come see the shows, but he politely declined.
His hometown was on the other side of the province, a ten-hour drive away, and he had never been to Changsha. Still, Lu Wei felt like he was home, beaming as he reveled in the soulful, spicy food and insisting on ordering for the whole table every time we entered a restaurant, choosing frog’s leg stew, sautéed beef, huge steamed rolls, fiery crayfish, and crisp strips of pork sautéed with black beans and peppers.
With Dave back in Beijing trying to keep the world economy on its axis, we were scheduled to perform as a four-piece. When the club owners objected, wanting us to sound “just like on the Internet,” Woodie hired Tianxiao, the owner of the Jianghu bar who took the fifteen-hour train from Beijing, arriving with only his sax case. He didn’t bring a single piece of clothing other than what was on his body.
Leaving for our first sound check, Lu Wei walked out of the elevator and into the hotel lobby trailed by a clean-cut, friendly young man. Carrying the drummer’s cymbals, Lu Wei’s friend bowed slightly toward me, said “Ni hao,” and picked up my guitar. As the lone foreigner and the oldest member of the band, I was receiving priority service, but I had no idea who the kid was.
“He’s a fan of Lu Wei’s who has come to help him set up,” Woodie explained, as we walked out to flag down a cab. “Basically, he’s our roadie.”
“How does Lu Wei have a fan who will be our roadie in Changsha?”
I thought this was astounding, but Woodie just shrugged. “He has a very popular website where he gives video drum lessons and advice in a forum. This kid is a drum student who really looks up to him.”
We would go on to play in four other cities around China and at least one of these guys showed up every time. Back in Beijing, Lu Wei, who did not have a day job, also had a personal assistant, a driver, and several other young acolytes who followed him around. He would soon hire a manager to handle his endorsement deals and book him gigs with touring pop stars. We may have been the only band who did not have a manager, but whose drummer did.
Our first gig was at Coco’s “private club for successful people,” a members-only establishment that looked like the bastard child of a 1970s fondue restaurant and a high-end brothel, with burnished wood and red banquettes everywhere. It also featured an impressively stocked cigar humidor and an extensive private bottle collection where members kept their own wine, cognac, and scotch.
The packed crowd cheered loudly before and after every song, a remarkably enthusiastic reception for American roots music in Chairman Mao’s home province. Though it was a Wednesday night, people were partying hard.
When we kicked into our next-to-last song, “Hey Hey Guniang,” the hard-charging Chinese jump blues sung by Zhang Yong, three beefy tough guys and their beautiful molls started dancing right in front of the stage. I had noted them all night as they alternated between drinking cognac in their banquette booth and leaping up to cheer. One of the men stumbled toward me, with something in his hand. I couldn’t make out what it was until he stuck a giant Cuban cigar in my mouth and raised his lighter with an unsteady hand.
I continued to pound away on my guitar, the giant stogie protruding out of my crooked grin. My hand was aching and bleeding under the bandages from a cut I received from a broken beer bottle in Xiamen, but I didn’t even notice. As we segued into the American jump blues “Kansas City,” I held the cigar in my left hand and spread my arms wide as I belted out, “I’m going to Kansas City, Kansas City here I come.” Watching all these Chinese people grow almost delirious, dancing with abandon, I growled out the lyrics:
They got some crazy little women there and I’m gonna get me one.
When we ended the night with “Soulshine,” the crowd clapped along, swaying to the music and waving lighters in the air. I thought of Warren Haynes, the Allman Brothers Band guitarist who wrote the song, and remembered all the time I had spent listening to his music, watching him play, and interviewing him on his tour bus and in his New York apartment. I imagined how happy he would be to have his music spread so far from home, and for the first time I understood the ecstasy of the evangelist. I felt like a preacher spreading the gospel into the farthest reaches of China.
When we finished playing, the tough who had given me the cigar pulled me down into his banquette and poured me a glass of Courvoisier. He and his buddies patted me on the back, as two long-legged beauties slid in on either side of me. When one of the thick-necked men raised his snifter in salute, I realized that the girls were just like the cigar and the cognac to them—rewards offered for a job well done.
Before I could sneak away, I felt a hand on each of my thighs. One of the women pulled me close and whispered into my ear, in slurred, drunken English.
“What is the name of your bass player?”
“Zhang Yong.”
“If you bring me to Zhang Yong, you can touch me anywhere.”
She squeezed my thigh hard. Then the other one pulled me to her and put her lips inside my ear. “Don’t bring her to your bass player.” She was equally drunk. “Bring me.”
The first one yanked me back. “Touch me anywhere!”
I laughed at the fact that the first time I had groupies they were just trying to get to Zhang Yong, but I wasn’t surprised. The quiet, self-possessed bassist had several beautiful girlfriends in Beijing, sometimes showing up at an afternoon gig with one and an evening performance with another. When I asked him once, in Chinese, how many girlfriends he had, he laughed and responded, in English, “Many, many girlfriends.”
I just wanted to get away from both of these women. The path of least resistance was to lead the more persistent one to Zhang Yong, who could certainly handle her more easily than I could. “Just come with me,” I said.
She slid out of the booth and rose onto unsteady feet. When I got up, she put her arm around my waist and leaned into my side. We walked into the back room where the band was sitting at a discreet corner table. Surprise washed over everyone’s faces at the sight of this beautiful Chinese woman draped over me. “Don’t worry,” I said in Chinese. “She wants Zhang Yong.”
He got up and laughed when I told him to be careful. They walked off together, and five minutes later he returned alone and said that he had walked outside and put her in a cab.
The next day, we did three radio interviews, performing live at each station. The last appearance was at the biggest station in town. The glass-enclosed studio sat high above the city’s biggest intersection. The two female DJs were very professional, and in and out of commercial breaks they played a clip promoting our appearance. It featured “Beijing Blues” and “Wo de Baobei,” with a loud classic radio voice intoning, in Chinese, “The Woodie Alan Band—Beijing’s finest blues band. Live in Changsha. Right here on the Live Show!”
We answered a few question from listeners calling in and played another song live, then sat listening to “Beijing Blues” booming through the studio monitors. I turned to Woodie, sitting by my side. “Can you believe this?” I asked.
“I’m proud of us,” he said, smiling. “Just really proud.”
Woodie and I sat reveling in this exciting, unlikely moment, playing out exactly like a scene in a music biopic. Zhang Yong broke our reverie when he suddenly acknowledged the elephant in the room. “It’s too bad you’re leaving, Alan,” he said in Chinese with a wry smile. “Look at us.”
None of us had discussed my impending departure, though it hung over the entire week, lending everything added emotional intensity and bittersweet shading. The Xiamen promoters had offered an extensive tour of Fujian Province, and one of the radio hosts wanted to book us onto one of China’s most popular television shows the next time we came to Changsha. We all knew that neither was likely to happen. This trip was instead going to be the beginning of the end of us as an everyday touring band.
On our third and final night in town, we sold out Coco’s largest venue, packed with 350 people who paid 40 RMB (about $6) each to hear us. It felt like the shows on this tour had been our first ever in China, because there were only a handful of Westerners in the crowds. No one knew us or was there because we were their friends. Instead, they all had laid down money to be entertained, and I was proud to send them home satisfied.
We were getting better from playing so many shows and spending so much time together. Our performances were like conversations, becoming more intimate and cohesive and less predictable, even to us. We all listened intently to one another and filled in little gaps and aural white space, often with subtle prods that could send a song in another direction. I felt an increasing ability to connect with and pull any crowd into the music.
As Woodie started playing his extended intro solo that kicked off “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” I raised my hands over my head and started clapping. A chill ran down my spine when most of the crowd joined in. I was helping a roomful of Chinese people feel the power of a traditional American song of mourning and redemption.
Singing this music made me acutely aware of what being an American meant to me: a deep, personal freedom that had little to do with politics and everything to do with individuality. I knew that I never could have pulled this deeply held feeling out of myself without the prodding of these great Chinese musicians. That to me was the very definition of global harmony.
It also made me ponder my own relationship to the blues I loved so much. I had been so amazed to discover Woodie and his tattoo of Stevie Ray Vaughan. It seemed so exotic to have found a Chinese person who had been so deeply affected by this profoundly American music. And indeed it was an unlikely journey for Woodie from his hometown of Langfang, an hour south of Beijing, to being a thoroughly legitimate bluesman—a journey that began with late-night radio broadcasts and pirated cassette tapes purchased at a flea market. But what made my own situation any more probable?
I was the son of an upper-middle-class Jewish pediatrician from Pittsburgh. Woodie was the working-class son of a Chinese small-business owner. We had b
oth been drawn to the blues, feeling a profound emotional connection to this music born of African American suffering and advanced by white southerners like Vaughan and the Allman Brothers. Woodie was twelve years younger than I, and both of us were born long after the music was truly contemporary, but nothing else touched either of us in remotely the same way. The hold this music had on us was hard to explain; that it had drawn us together and bonded us like brothers was impossible to deny.
After the show we had our fifth and final meal at the twenty-four-hour noodle restaurant that had become our Changsha home base. It was a humble place, serving a small variety of fresh, delicious noodles for less than two dollars a bowl. We supplemented the main dish with a variety of cold, marinated sides selected from a cart. The guys all grabbed little plates of cilantro-laden, pickled root vegetables, tripe, pigs’ feet, and other things that tasted so good that I didn’t want to know what they were.
It was 2:30 a.m. and a car was picking me up to take me to the airport in five hours. I would be back in time to coach Jacob’s soccer game at noon. I was wiped out and needed sleep, but I would never skip one of these great postgig meals. Besides, I had a lot of questions. We had traveled an incredible distance in just a year together, yet had barely discussed any of it. My teatime conversation with Woodie left me wondering how the other guys felt about the band. I asked if they had heard my singing improve.
Zhang Yong shrugged. “To me, your singing was always good. You just lacked confidence. The thing that wasn’t good enough at first was your guitar playing.”
We all laughed. Lu Wei, smoking a cigarette, scolded Zhang Yong for speaking so bluntly, but I encouraged him. “I want to know. What about as a bandleader? Could you tell I hadn’t done this before?”
“To me, you are just a man who loves music,” Lu Wei said. “You are the best bandleader I have met.”
That answer was so unexpected that I was rendered momentarily speechless as Lu Wei plowed ahead.