Although Bass Player killed 10 of my articles, they rejected only one. There's a difference. Rejections are easier to take than killings. This one was rejected because they felt that the readers would learn nothing useful from it. I think they also thought it was mighty presumptuous of me to submit it. Since the story wasn't about me, I disagree. Anyway, here it is, my only outright rejection from Bass Player, written in 1996:
The Tokyo Years
Recently I came across a dusty box of cassette tapes I'd forgotten I still had. These two dozen Maxells represent a four-year struggle to make it as a pop band in Tokyo. They contain every live performance we did. Almost every live performance. Listening to these tapes for the first time in six years, as a 34-year old bassist who's put away youthful dreams, all I can say is, my God we were awful.
I'd gone to Tokyo at 22 to study business, so naturally I ended up teaching English and playing in bar bands. It was 1985, the peak of Japanese economic strength. At one of the schools where I taught, a colleague--a Canadian named Steiv--found out I played bass. He suggested we start a band to play in the hundreds of live-music clubs that formed the nucleus of the orgiastic Tokyo nightlife. By agreeing, I took the first step of an amazing, painful odyssey that kept me in Japan years longer than Id intended.
Steiv played guitar and sang. His demo sounded like faster, bouncier Roxy Music. From the other teachers we rounded up a lead guitarist, a keyboard player, and a drummer, all Americans who'd lived in Japan for years. We rented out a practice studio--which like the live-music clubs are found on every street corner--and tried a jam session. It seemed to work.
We cobbled together about thirty original tunes and started getting gigs, but we didnt play three shows with the same band members. The original keyboardist and lead guitarist left immediately, replaced by Kazuo and Miki, the two who stayed with us the longest. Though Kazuo was a great guitarist, he was so paralyzed by stage fright that hed stand in exactly the same spot the entire night, staring at his feet. Often he missed his solos because he was frozen in terror. In photos taken of us, he looks like a cardboard cutout, a band prop. Miki was a fair keyboard player, but she always turned her volume down after the sound check, rendering her inaudible during the concert. Extremely nice people who made me want to wring their necks.
Tom, our original drummer, had no sense of rhythm whatsoever. While he was with us, the rehearsal tapes always sounded as though the batteries in the recorder were dying. Up-tempo songs became ballads and vice versa, depending on the day we practiced. No two versions of the same song were alike. After months of pleading, we once got him to wear an electronic metronome, and the rehearsal went wonderfully. When it was over, he asked, "Did you see an improvement?" We told him he was much better. "Well, guess what," he crowed, "I didn't have it turned on!"
After Tom, we played with drummers from almost every nation on earth, most lasting no more than two engagements. One of them, a Senegalese, never showed up one night, forcing us to perform an unscheduled acoustic gig in a dance club. While we took our intermission, I was at the bar ordering a triple scotch when I heard someone behind me ask, "How's the band?" His friend blew a huge raspberry that went on and on, echoing in my head for weeks.
We finally recruited our best drummer, a Dutchman named Rene. Though he taught me how to slap my bass like Louis Johnson, he was dangerously unstable and had the strength of ten longshoremen. The walls of his apartment were riddled with fist holes, evidence of the violent scuffles he had with himself. If a wolf or bear could speak English, it would sound like Rene. "You're so bad," hed snap. "Why are your lines so boring? I'll show you something better!" And with that hed tear my bass right off my body, knocking my arms into my face and sending my glasses flying across the room. Once I stupidly resisted his lesson. Our tiny keyboardist intervened before Rene compressed me like an accordion.
The most infuriating aspect of our band was that Steiv, the front man, refused to learn the formats of his own songs. Every performance included a moment where hed launch into a chorus while the rest of us played a verse or a bridge. After the twentieth such fiasco, he told us, "You gotta back me up out there! If I mess up, follow me!" So, the next time it happened, we switched over to the chorus, just in time for him to go back to the verse. After the show, he said, "What the hell's wrong with you guys, anyway? Don't follow me if I mess up. Play what you're supposed to!
In those four years, we shed personnel like autumn leaves. Among the sixteen or so musicians who graced our stage was a great guitarist from New Zealand. His spectacular looks drew the massive college-age female audience, and he owned forged press passes that allowed us backstage for every major act that toured Japan. We hated to lose him. We also hired Steve, a British sax player who'd melt quietly into the background when the rest of us fought, something we did on a daily basis. For our final few performances we took on a Chinese-American percussionist-keyboardist. Sticks flying, she danced and strutted, whipping her hair. Drunken Australians gathered next to the stage and bayed at her like basset hounds.
Eventually it was clear that we all hated the sight of each other and were going nowhere, so the band fell apart. A few months after the formal break-up, and a couple of weeks before I escaped Japan, we attended a Battle of the Bands that included several local groups. Near the end of the three-hour thrash fest, the emcee asked us to do a number. Overcome with beer and nostalgia, we stumbled onstage and did "The Dinosaur Song," a silly, two-chord slapping riff I wrote about an ex-girlfriend making me feel like a dinosaur: "Great big body and a real small brain..."
Like former lovers having a unexpected fling, we connected like never before, all our fears, hopes, and inhibitions gone. We blew the roof off. Steiv was in perfect pitch, and we followed his every improvisation without hesitation. Kazuo gyrated across the stage like a madman as his howling solo put Adrian Belew to shame. Rene was sublime, trading off with our slinky percussionist in a frenetic question-response that left them both panting. Miki deafened us with a rousing honky-tonk piano, and gentlemanly Steve blasted out the raunchiest, filthiest saxophone break ever. For my part, I slapped my Sting Ray to pieces, doing the only bass solo of my career. We stretched a three-minute pop ditty into fifteen minutes of crowd pleasing, totally self-indulgent exhibitionism, and when we were done, the audience literally screamed for more.
That was our only live performance we didn't get on tape.
