Dinner With Half Japanese

CONTEXT

Linette: I was excited to go to the Gold Dollar to see Half Japanese.
Mark: I wasn’t, I was scared to death. It’s in a very bad part of Detroit, and there’s a great deal of potential for danger.
Linette: But, Mark, it used to be a drag club in the 1950s! It’s rich with history!
Mark: Ok, so that makes it ok to get shot to death there...
Linette: I wasn’t disappointed by the place either. They had Faygo on the menu, with each flavor listed as though it were a fine wine.
Mark: Yeah but Russ Forster (editor of 8 Track Mind) was there and you know how I feel about him.
Linette: You can’t hold that against the Gold Dollar! Anyhow, back to the night in question. I enjoyed eating dinner with Half Japanese at Union Street Station much more than the actual interview which followed.
Mark: I would have enjoyed eating with them too. But, as you know, we didn’t get to “eat” with them. I had to buy you dinner at Burger King because couldn’t wait a half an hour!
Linette: Mark, I was starving! All I had was a ton of coffee at work! And I didn’t want to eat at Burger King, I wanted to stop at that Middle Eastern restaurant in Dearborn for falafel. You kept saying that the Gold Dollar probably had food, and I didn’t think it would, and all I could picture was that ancient jar of pickled eggs behind the bar at the Bluebird Lounge.
Mark: First of all, pickled eggs are food. Second of all, it was nine o’clock, and we told Jad we’d be there at nine o’clock. And, third of all, it was getting dark, and we were in a very bad part of town in my old truck, which could have broken down at any minute. The last thing we should have been doing was stopping for dinner, especially at a Burger King where you had to place your order through two plates of bulletproof glass. Anyway, why should your stomach take precedence over you panic attack! You can live a hell of a lot longer without a Fillet O’ Fish than you can with a bullet in your head.
Linette: My starvation versus your panic attack? Something real versus something in your mind? You were making yourself, and me, nervous for nothing. The beer store in my backyard had bulletproof glass at the counter, big deal! You’re just overly concerned about everything.
Mark: You know how I am. If you don’t like it, find someone else to chauffeur you around! You know how important punctuality is to me and how I’m overly cautious. You used to find it attractive!
Linette: Whatever. Let’s move on and stop talking about “The Burger King Incident”.
Mark: OK everyone, here’s the set-up in a nutshell; we like Half Japanese, and we’ve been exchanging letters and artwork with Jad Fair for around a year now. We had tons of great questions for them, but we wasted them over dinner. By the time we got back to do the interview, there was nothing left to do but stare at each other. John and Gilles wandered in and out of the interview, while Jad stayed with us the entire time, patiently waiting for us to form coherent sentences.
Linette: It was like the tape recorder went on and suddenly this awkwardness, which was not there over dinner, took over. I couldn’t think of anything to say. They were really polite and nice though.
Mark: I would agree with that, except for the fact that Gilles, a native of Switzerland, made several disparaging remarks about our great country. He even had the nerve to say that our scenic routes weren’t “scenic”... Ok, he was a very nice guy too. They were all actually quite personable. The only really rude person there that night was Linette, who put her foot through the opening band’s bass drum.
Linette: Well, we were walking out and I wasn’t looking where I was going. I think I was imagining ghost drag queens cavorting about on the stage and I tripped over the drums. A simple pratfall that’s all. They shouldn’t have left it out in the middle of the floor anyway.

Here’s the interview:

Linette Lao: How was your dinner?
Jad Fair: It was a very good dinner, but too much. I was eating for fifteen minutes and I only got through four-fifths of it. (He was eating nachos.)
LL: Have you ever seen the show “Pete and Pete”?
JF: I’ve seen a little bit of it.
LL: If it were still being made, we’d start a write-in campaign to get you on.
JF: I only saw part of one episode, but it seems like a real enjoyable show.
LL: It’s all readly wonderful and surreal in a normal childhood kind of way.
Mark Maynard: I’m sure there would have been a good role for you. Marshall Crenshaw plays a guitar playing meter reader, Syd Straw is Ms. Fingerwood, the bass playing grade school math teacher, Iggy Pop is the father of the next door neighbor, Mike Stipe was an ice cream man, Gordon Gano was in it. It’s really neat, or it was before it was cancelled. I’m sure you were on their list.
JF: Yeah, yeah. I know what you mean.
MM: Why do you think that it is that you’re always like, ‘the next one on the list’? It’s like everyone out there likes your stuff, but you’re always just one step away from getting that major record deal or that TV guest spot.
JF: I don’t know, I don’t know. ‘Cause I think that I’m a hard worker. I do a lot of shows and a lot of recordings and stuff. But for some reason it just doesn’t translate.
MM: I just don’t understand that. It’s like everyone in the business knows that. They all know you, and yet no one acts on it. They know that you could do it, but they don’t give you the shot.
LL: It could be better the way it is, you could be escaping a lot of junky stuff that you don’t want.
JF: Sometimes I think that if I just put out one album every two years that a lot of people might buy it. As it is now, it doesn’t look like as many people like my stuff because I have so many releases out. As a result, no single CD sells that many.
MM: Well, what happened after all the exposure you got from doing that Nirvana tour, and now with the attention that the Half Japanese Greatest Hits CD is getting? Doesn’t that translate either?
JF: No... no... no.
MM: It’s hard to understand because everyone we know loves your stuff and has at least a few of your records. Moe Tucker for instance, is always talking about the fact that the girls go crazy whenever you’re on stage. She says, “if they would just go to one show and see how the girls go crazy, they would know that they could sell his records.”
JF: Yeah.
MM: Now as far as all the people you’ve played with over the years, you’ve played with so many people, is there anyone who you haven’t been able to play with? Has anyone turned you down, or is there anyone that you’d still like to play with?
JF: Pretty much everyone I’ve asked has done it.
MM: So, were there any disappointments?
JF: Well, there are people that I’d still like to do stuff with like Jim Dickinson. He’s a producer who's work I like quite well. He worked with Big Star and (can’t make out the name of the other). I think he has a very good ear. Also, Iris Dement. I think she is a very excellent song writer. It seems like it would be kind of an odd pairing, but she’s someone whom I admire quite a bit.
MM: What else are you doing these days? Are you devoting more time to your painting and your cutting?
JF: I do everything. I’ve been doing a lot of painting, a lot of cutting.
MM: Is that what you call it, “cutting”? I wasn’t sure what to refer to it as.
JF: That’s what I would call it. It’s scissors and paper and you slice through it. Yeah, cutting.
LL: Are you good at it, or do you cut yourself?
JF: Sometimes I will nick myself, but usually not.
MM: I’ve always liked your pictures a lot, as much as your songs, or maybe even more.
JF: Thank you.
MM: What’s the status of your painting career? Do you have a gallery?
JF: I’ve had a few different exhibitions. I’ve had a showing in Hamburg, one in Nott and one in Bordeauaux. And next November I’m going to have an exhibition in Brighton, England.
MM: I’m just wondering if it’s as serious a pursuit as your recording career.
JF: Well, this last year I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with it because of the exhibitions and because I had to come up with a catalog for the Hamburg show. So, I had to compile quiet a few drawings for that. And now for the show in Brighton they’re putting together a book of drawings.
MM: Is there anything that’s available to people here in America, like the people reading Crimewave in their homes right now?
JF: The catalog from Hamburg, I think they made a 150 copies, so that should still be available I think. There’s a person down in Austin Texas who has a page on the internet. If you look under “Half Japanese” you’ll be able to find his page and I know that he’s selling it. The person that put out the book is over in Hamburg and his name is Carsten Grant and I’d imagine that you could reach him through the computer too.
LL: I like the medium of folding and cutting stuff. You don’t exactly know what you have until you unfold. There’s an element of the unknown there.
JF: I started doing it because I wanted something to keep me busy while I was in the van. For a while I would read, but I always got headaches after a very short time. A half hour of reading in the car would give me a headache, so started drawing, but my hand just isn’t steady with the movement of the van.
MM: It seems dangerous with the scissors and the movement of the car. Do you use rounded tipped scissors?
JF: No, they’re pretty sharp, but I’m careful.
MM: It just seems to me that if you can’t hold the pencil straight to draw in the van, then it would be hard to hold the scissors straight.
JF: For some reason it’s not. I don’t know the reasons for that, but I can have a steady hand when I’m cutting.
MM: I guess it’s like when stutterers stop stuttering during sex.
JF: I would imagine so.
MM: Can we talk about monsters for a second?
JF: Yeah.
MM: What’s your fascination with monsters? Where does that come from do you think?
JF: From a very early age, growing up watching Frankenstein and Dracula and Godzilla and all those good monster films on television. I would stay up every Friday and Saturday night and they would have the “Creature Feature”. It’s just something that I enjoy.
MM: Who’s your favorite monster?
JF: I think Dracula.
MM: Who’s the scariest monster?
JF: Maybe the Blob.
MM: I don’t think of the Blob as being frightening at all. It’s so damned slow.
JF: (laughs) OK, let me think of a different one.... It’s definitely not the Blob. I would think maybe Dracula. He seems pretty scary, or maybe Wolfman.
MM: Yeah, the Wolfman was scary. I like this one that would suck your bones out.
JF: That would hurt.
MM: It multiplied every half hour and turned people into these big, quivering piles of jelly buy sucking the bones out.
JF: I haven’t seen that one.
LL: It just turns you into the Blob... which isn’t scary. (everyone laughs)
MM: How about Daniel Johnston, not as a monster - I’m changing topics...
JF: Daniel’s such a terrific song writer.
MM: How was it working with him?
JF: I enjoyed the opportunity to work with him. It was a rather difficult time period for Daniel though. He was going through quite a lot. Daniel at times would be a bit difficult to work with.
MM: How long of a period did you work with him for?
JF: About nine or ten days. Six days of recording and three days for mix down.
MM: Moe told us a great story about you selling Jad Fair dolls in Europe. How did that go and why did you stop, or did you stop? Are you going to sell any tonight?
JF: No, we don’t have any with us tonight... I saw these dolls for sale at a dollar store and I thought, “Well, if I can just draw some little glasses on them, and put them in plastic bags, I can market them as Jad Fair Action Figures”. They did sell quite well.
(Gilles jokes and grumbles about not having a doll of his own, but it’s not picked up on the tape recorder)
MM: I know that you just did a record with DQE (Dairy Queen Empire) in Atlanta, but what else are you doing?
JF: Well, I did some recording with the Sphereoromoa. I released a record with them last year on John Zorn’s label, Avant. And we’ve recorded a new album. And I’ve finished one with Yo La Tengo. And I’ve got hours and hours of recordings with Jason Willet. And Gilles and I did a soundtrack..
Gilles V. Rieder: We also did a recording called Monster Party.
MM: What’s the deal with Monster Party? There’s a 26 Monster Paty and then a 45 Monster Party, and now a 300 Monster Party album.
JF: The 26 one is with my brother, David. We went through the alphabet and had a different monster for each letter of the alphabet.
LL: Were some letters hard, like the last ones?
JF: Y was Yetti and Z was zombie.
MM: What was the hardest letter?
LL: Q?
JF: For Q we had Queen Kong. X was kind of a hard one. We ended up using the Man witht the X-ray Eyes, but we were trying to think of something that actually began with an X.
MM: And what’s the 45 Monster one that’s coming out on Gilles’ label, Kitty Kitty?
JF: Some live recordings seven years ago.
GR: We also have a one hour song we did on the radio with Jad coming out on Kitty Kitty. And then we have a tribute to Half Japanese, with bands from Japan, Europe, and the United States. The Boredoms and lots of other bands are on it.
MM: Have you ever recorded with the Boredoms?
JF: I did some recordings with Yamatsuka Eye. Thurston Moore, Eye and myself went into the studio, but nothing ever came of that. It was a very rushed recording session. I should also say that a couple members of the Boredoms also play with Spherorama.
MM: What else have you recorded that’s never been released?
JF: I’ve done some recordings with Steve Fisk. That turned out quite well and they haven’t come out yet. There are also some recordings with Gilles and Craig and Sharon from God is My CoPilot and Mark Gikland. And I’ve done some recordings with Jelrine Blake from Teenage Fanclub which I’m hoping to get out soon.
MM: How are you going to go about getting all this material out?
JF: I have to think about which ones different labels would release. With some of the stuff I think, “This is a little too wild for this label,” or I think, “No, this is too straight for this other label.”
MM: What label is putting out the 26 Monster with you and David?
JF: I’m just now sending cassette tapes out to labels. I’ve sent tapes to K Records and Vesuvius, and a number of labels over in Japan.
MM: Gilles, how long have you been with Jad and Half Japanese?
GR: Since 1990.
MM: And how long has John been with you guys?
GR: he started in ‘88 and it’s ‘97
John Sluggett: (from across the room) It’s 17 years, do the math...
MM: That’s 9... ‘88 to ‘97 would be 9 years. (everyone laughs)
JS: I didn’t guarantee it. I just said, “Do the math”. (everyone laughs again)
JF: 9’s kind of like 17, they’re pretty close when you think of all the numbers out there.
JS: When we got together Kurt Cobain was nine or something. He was definitely a little boy. And the rest is history. (editors note: if Kurt Cobain was 9 when John joined Half Japanese, he would have been about 17 when he committed suicide)
MM: What did you all listen to when you were nine? Jad, I’ve read that you were a big Stooges fan.
JF: Yeah, yeah. I also listened to a lot of Captain Beefhart and T Rex. I was a very big fan of the Rolling Stones early on. Their later stuff I don’t care much for. The Flaming Groovies I liked quite a bit too.
JS: I think my earliest record was the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy. And I bought Only Love Can Break a Hart, a Neil Young single, and a Doors single. And then I think I bought Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew when I was ten. I would just sit in my room and listen to it and fall asleep because the songs are all like half an hour long. And Beefhart and early Mothers of Invention.
GR: The first album was the Beetles. The second album was the Who, and after that Led Zepplin, Captain Beefhart, the Stooges and Frank Zappa.
MM: How was the tour with Nirvana?
JF: All the Nirvana shows were excellent shows. They were such a great live band. Going into it I can’t say that I’d really heard too much of their recorded work, but as a live band they were just so strong.
MM: Those are the biggest crowds I assume you ever played for.
JS: Yeah, five of six thousand.
MM: So how was that, was it difficult?
JF: Well, the first evening we had some fast songs and some slow songs and every fast song went over fine, every slow song just bombed.
JS: It was terrible.
GR: We’d get shoes and t-shirts and pennies and glasses thrown at us.
MM: Who would throw their glasses - don’t they realize they’re not going to be able to see the the band they came to see?
JF: (laughs) When I saw money coming up I thought, “Great, they like me”.
MM: What’s the worst reaction you ever got from a crowd?
JS: When we played Toledo about a year and a half ago, there was a full crowd for the opening band, a band called Stain. Stain had a singer who would take his mic and fart into it.
MM: Like a second rate GG Allin?
JS: Yeah, he’d talk about how he was going to do terrible things to Ricki Lake and stuff. The crowd loved it though and when they were done, everyone left. There were maybe four people left at one table for us.
MM: Did you try to make any Ricki Lake jokes or fart into a microphone to keep them?
JF: No, we left that to Stain.
MM: So, were you affected by GG Allin’s death?
JF: No, I was never a fan. It didn’t interest me and it was something that I’d rather not be around.
MM: I would have liked to have seen a “GG and Jad” record. (everyone laughs) That would have been great.
JF: Yeah.
MM: Do you miss having your brother, David, in the band?
JF: I do, because he’s such a good friend of mine. I can understand why it’s too difficult for him to tour though. He has a family and he has a good job at the library.
MM: It must have been hard for him to have given this up. I’m sure he enjoyed it as much as you did.
JF: I think so, but David really doesn’t like to travel. That’s quite a bit of it I think.
MM: Does it wear on you, doing all the touring? Does it start to take its toll?
JF: Physically it does after a while. When I’m not touring I’m used to getting seven or eight hours of sleep a night and on tour it’s more like three or four. That’s fine for a couple weeks, but a tour’s usually seven or eight.
MM: How do you deal with that?
JF: The way I deal with it is to walk around tired.
MM: (laughs) I’ve never thought of that approach. I’ve heard a lot of bands talk about amphetimines, but you’re the first that I’ve heard talking about walking around tired. It just seems so obvious.
JF: That’s the natural way.
MM: Is it as fun now as it used to be, or was it more fun when you were playing in your parents’ basement with your brother?
JF: It’s real fun now and it was real fun then. I am a big fan of music and I enjoy it.
MM: What’s the most frightened you’ve ever been?
JF: When I was very young, I think I was like four years old, I was playing hide-and-go-seek and my mother had this thing that you put clothes into and hang it up, it’s for like dresses. Well, I climbed in there and zipped it up and the zipper stuck. It’s a plastic bag. I’m a kid in a plastic bag! I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t get this zipper down. People were looking for me but they couldn’t find me. I was finally able to rip the thing apart, but it took some doing.
MM: What do you think accounts for your music being the way that it is?
JF: I try to be as natural as I can. I don’t try to fall into a formula.
MM: Well, I think there’s a certain similarity between your music and your artwork. I don’t want to use the term “naive”, but there’s a certain innocence about them.
JF: I think a lot of it is not being afraid to make mistakes. I truly don’t care if I’m making mistakes. Most performers are not that way. It really does bother them if something messes up. It’s not like I’m trying to mess up, but if I do mess up, so what. The main thing is to try to do something.
MM: But your music is somewhat timid and fearful at the same time. Your lyrics are often very shy, and yet there’s this lack of fear in performing them, like you say.
JF: There have been some criticisms that I take offense to... that I’m an idiot savant, and that kind of thing, and I read something once that said I was “mildly retarded”. (everyone laughs) What is that? If I were to lop my head off and scoop my brains out on the table they would see what a smart guy I really am. (more laughs) n

Half Japanese’s new record, BoneHead, is now available on Alternative Tentacles.
If you have a computer, check out John Slugget’s Half Japanese web page at http://www.concentric.net/~slug/Half Japanese.htm

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