R on bass and vocals

Now that the bitter taste of a founding member departing has worn off a bit, an appreciation is order. Since the purpose of this blog is to chronicle in all honesty the meanderings of an American's experience in a Japanese rock band, I am going to cast an eye backwards on what, by all measures, was a propitious start in the year After Elvis 34, largely thanks to the musician who has moved on.

This time last year I met R at the café where she still works full-time. It is one of the few non-smoke cafés in town and a place where one can sit and study to the backdrop of quiet, chatty voices and tasteful pop music. It's locally run, and the sweets are baked in house rather than shipped in from distant parts as they are in the chain cafés. I used to sit there reading Malcolm X's Autobiography in English, with the Japanese-language translation in tow for reference. It was during one of those study sessions that R and I started talking and soon hit upon our common interest in music. I had a music player on me with some files of demos I'd made, and I asked her to listen to my sweet potato song. She told me that she rehearsed regularly with a band, playing cover songs. I told her I had no band but would like to join one. It wasn't long before she arranged our first rehearsal with K playing drums, which went swimmingly. 

I don't mean for this to sound like an obituary, so I'm switching to the present tense. R sings flawlessly in English, Japanese, and French, and it's going to be very difficult to find someone as flexible as her in that regard. She picks up a tune as fast as anyone and can usually identify the note at once. The Fender bass guitar she plays is a bit heavy for her svelte frame, but somehow, despite this, when she's in top form, she lifts herself off her feet in a bouncy motion while playing. You can see the pleasure she gets out of thumping at the fat strings and singing.

One of my favorite moments from our time in the rehearsal studio was when we were working through the song "UCB" and she recommended extending the second refrain by a few lines. The amazing thing about it is that it seemed that all three of us had hit upon the exact same suggestion at the exact same moment. It was certainly on my mind, and I could see K looking up from behind the cymbals with an air of urgency just before R spoke. When she did, both he and I nodded swift acknowledgment and got set to replay it from the beginning. There's something precious about feeling locked in with other musicians to that degree. It's as if you can all hear something that has not yet been played. You are all struck by the same wakeful dream and then, through the power of suggestion, work to make it audible. A similar thing happens when you write an essay and you reach the point where the essay starts to convey to you what words to write next, or what words to remove; but in a band the experience can be shared. No modern technology will ever provide or substitute for that kind of human dynamic, and that's why, I think, despite all the technical exuberance now at the disposal of musicians of modest means, playing in a band and playing live will forever be appealing..