From birth, we musician types are taught about timing. “Timing is everything,” our music teachers bark at us, as we try desperately to stomp our foot and play an instrument at the same time. Ever notice how the stage of an elementary school music assembly sounds more like a herd of pachyderms than a bunch of little kids trying to play Bach? Forget about the notes, just keep tapping your foot.
Fast forward twenty years.
One evening about eight years ago, I was strolling through the narrow streets of Peitou, listening to the strains of nakashi music flow out of the old Japanese-style brothels which give that city it’s nostalgic charm. Nakashi music is a kind of predecessor to Japanese enka, which to most of us is known only as “taxi music.” Now imagine a trio of “taxi music” musicians buzzing around Peitou in a mini-van loaded with mini-drums and mini-amps, running from hotel to hotel, performing a twangy mixture of surf music and Taiwanese oldies to a tatami room crowd filled with drunk septuagenarian bureaucrats and their party mistresses. This is nakashi.
It occurred to me, while I stood there tapping my foot, that this music was in many ways related to the blues. It was a heartfelt, sad, drinking man’s music. Saxophone sounds great with the blues, so why not do a nakashi saxophone album?
The next day I asked my record company if they would support a project like this. They said, “Um, why not?” so off I went to play my first nakashi gig. Six months later, I had put together a pretty cool combination of Taiwanese oldies entitled “Blue Nakashi.” My buddies from the Carlos Santana band helped with the final production, and I returned to Taiwan with the master, placing it on the desk of my record company boss. “I think you’ll like it,” I said proudly, “There’s blues, fusion, latin, jazz, hip-hop, and rock and roll on this album. And best of all it’s all Taiwanese oldies.”
The company took a listen, and a week later called me in for a production meeting. “Your album sounds great,” they said, “but we don’t know how to begin to promote it. The market associates the saxophone with romantic love melodies. It’s high class music. A bottle of wine, candlelight, Richard Clayderman. But Taiwanese oldies are for a different class of people. I don’t think your market will be able to accept this. We’re sorry, but we can’t release it.”
I told them I thought it was a great project and that Taiwanese songs could be a potentially huge market. People needed to hear these melodies, and here they were in a new light. And not candlelight. They didn’t agree with me, and I knew my future with Candlelight Records would be limited to cover versions and love songs, so we parted ways, and I took Blue Nakashi with me.
I then spent the next two years trying to get the album released. Always the same response. “Who wants to hear Taiwanese songs?” I played these songs on tours, at schools, all over the island, and they were always a big hit. Kids loved them, old folks loved them. Everyone could sing along. Why couldn’t the record company see this? Finally after speaking to every record company in town, I decided to give up. I would chalk it up to experience. My life’s savings towards a Taiwan music education. Who wants to hear Taiwanese songs?”
Then, strangely enough, in 1993 Jang Huei sold more than 400,000 copies of her Taiwanese hit, “The Truth After Drunkenness.” Suddenly Taiwanese songs began to pop up like dandelions on the charts. Every Mandarin singer was now rushing to release a Taiwanese album. This perked me up, and I confidently made the record company rounds again. This time I got a different response, “Sorry, it’s been done. Who want’s to hear more Taiwanese songs anyway?”
But what was happening around me was quite the contrary. In 1994 it was suddenly fashionable to be Taiwanese. DJs started speaking Taiwanese on the radio. Kids could speak Taiwanese at school again. People began getting more interested in Taiwanese culture. But more importantly, Wu Bai started singing Taiwanese oldies. And he began to sell a lot of albums. So I thought I would give Blue Nakashi one last push, and began knocking on doors again. This time I got a better response, “You should’ve talked to us earlier.”
That was the final straw. I decided once and for all to bury the album and all associated memories forever. It went into a mystery box under the bed, and I went on to make completely different kinds of music: drum ‘n’ bass, techno, electronica. I completely forgot about Blue Nakashi.
Then last year, while I was out promoting my new single, I ran into a young singer named David Tao who was also promoting his latest single, “Spring Wind,” a Taiwanese oldie sung in an All 4 One r&b style. Several months later, after David received his prize for producer of the year, and “Spring Wind” went on to become one of the biggest hits of 1997, I got a phone call from my record company. “Do you still have that Taiwanese album? We’d like to release it sometime next month.”
So if you see me on TV promoting my latest Taiwanese oldies album, and you happen to notice that I’m tapping my foot. You’ll know what that means. Timing is everything.
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