I like live music. Back home, I have friends in that field. One of the things that I haven’t liked about my current work schedule was that it was hard to get to any live music bars when you work until 10 p.m. and the buses stop at midnight. Living in Bundang (about 20 km outside of Seoul) made it hard to get out and see bands on the few open mic nights offered. Eventually, Dublin, the Irish bar in our neighbourhood started offering an open mic night and the bar was usually packed.
Now I live in Busan, at one end of the city, and still the trains stop at midnight. Still I work until ten, and still the live music places are many, many kilometers away.
So on this side of the Pacific, the best nights that I’ve had with live music have been in Beijing and Hong Kong.
Beijing first. I knew from my guide book that there was a popular bar area only a couple of kilometers from my hotel (on almost the exact opposite side of the forbidden city. My hotel was southeast and this area is just northwest of that famous landmark). It took a long time to get there, even though I’d walked part of the way before I flagged a taxi. Somehow he didn’t know where this area was (I’d had the hotel concierge write the name in Chinese, and according to him it was famous). My taxi had to stop twice for directions, but basically, the directions turned out to be “drive straight and turn left at the end of the road.”
So we get there. It’s a bunch of bars and restaurants stacked together along the shore of a small lake, and I’m walking around looking for a bar. Some guy starts walking beside me. He wants to sell me a companion. He starts at pretty lady, works his way down to young girl, then switches to boy when I still won’t buy. He finally goes away. There are no other foreigners here, but there are a lot of university students, and they like to practice their English, so language isn’t a real barrier.
In one of the bars, there’s a band playing pretty well. I know that song! It’s L.A. Woman by the Doors. But the singer is having a real hard time with the “r” sound (I’ve been told by teachers in China that the “r” sound isn’t usually a problem for the Chinese – it is for Koreans). So this guy is singing, in a good Jim Morrison-esque voice “Mojo Lisin’ – Lisin’ Lisin’ Keep on Lisin’” I had to go there. I had a great night. I ended up joining a group of university students who tried to explain some drinking-dice game. The band took a break and talked to some in our group. I tried talking to the singer, but he literally couldn’t speak any English. He must have been phoneticizing his lyrics. Even still, L.A. Woman will always remind me of Beijing.
And Vertigo, the U2 song, will always remind me of Hong Kong. My first trip there was incredibly eventful. My wallet disappeared somewhere between the taxi and the hotel front door. I don’t know what exactly happened, but that event has added a lot of stress to my life. Even now, a year later it has repercussions.
So my first night in Hong Kong. I have almost no money and I’m walking everywhere. It wasn’t difficult to figure out where the nightlife was. It's called Lan Kwai Fong and it was a high energy neighbourhood with so much going on, both in Chinese and English.
Walking around with just enough money for dinner, I heard a band blasting out cover tunes – relatively mainstream songs, but odd choices, like Let the Good Times Roll by the Cars. This was big when I was in high school. I went in and watched them for an hour or so. They were a very tight five man band. They only did covers, but on a break, I talked to the bassist and he said that they were shopping a CD to labels but had nothing to sell at the club. Apparently the club would only allow them to do covers and the club scene was too small to chance pissing them off.
They had closed their first set with a really well planned cover of Bohemian Rhapsody – not an easy task. They opened their second set with Vertigo by U2 (the song starts “hello hello, ola!”). In U2’s version, the “ola” (Spanish for ‘hello’) is very quiet, but these guys all shouted it, and made the song rock. Every time they got to “hello, hello” the audience shouted back “ola!” It was a great moment, and now that song is Hong Kong to me.
