Cool Cats

"When you get a roomful of Chinese real estate agents dancing to your version of an Allman Brothers song, it's a big deal."

Jon Campbell and his blues band Black Cat Bone have flown all over China to move bums off seats at weddings and real estate launch parties; they've played shopping malls in Beijing. Part-timers, but skilled, Black Cat Bone has made plenty of noise and won many fans since harmonica player Royce Derbyshire and vocalist Desmond McGarry hatched a grand plan for a blues band after wee-hours meeting on Sanlitun South Bar Street during the Christmas holidays in 2004.

It all came together when Black Cat drummer Jon Campbell was invited to play conga in "one of those gigs that needed a foreign face," at a Beijing mall. Now, more than half of the audiences at the band's packed club gigs are expatriates.

At lucrative corporate gigs, usually all-local affairs, Chinese audiences like to hear country and soft rock classics, but there are other attractions to draw crowds to the launch of a fancy new apartment complex. "They come to these events to see us; they come to eat free food," Campbell said.

For better or worse the group's most memorable shows are played on the buffet circuit. "They are the most memorable not because we necessarily play well or people appreciate what we do. It's because they are the ones in which control of what goes on is so beyond us. Many promises are broken and lies told so that we are left in a constant state of frustration, anger, annoyance and more."

Being hired solely for their foreign looks has also left the band feeling cheapened. But the perks sometimes compensate. "It's not that it sucks to get flown to 'exotic' places to play music: That is really all that any musician can dream of, getting paid to play."

But a year and three guitarists after forming, the band is ready to play original material, more testing perhaps for the local pallet. The band was surprised with how much new music they came up with during a feverish creative period over Christmas recently. "It was a real team effort putting together new songs, so what you have is a band right now in the process of figuring out our sound and coming out with a really cool mix of our different backgrounds. Our original material is more representative, I think, of the band in general, since it really shows each of our backgrounds."

Visually as well as aurally, Black Cat Bone is a colourful mix of nationality and age. The band's genesis goes back to December 2004, when Campbell's congas sounded square in the barely together jazz band he was asked to join for a once-off gig in a Beijing mall. It was a bizarre sound in a bizarre venue, but within a week he had the nucleus of what would eventually become Black Cat Bone. Some of the musicians had known each other for six years, others met only a few days before. "Everyone in the original group had played in bands here or back home, and we all wanted to keep playing. That's really the most important thing. We'd never played in any kind of official way before, though there had been many jam sessions of various descriptions and to various levels of success."

It started as a laowai (foreigner) face for a Chinese mall but Black Cat Bone got its Chinese face in Jeremy Li, the band's bass player. Campbell moved from conga to the drum kit. They needed a name. "We started off calling ourselves The Believers but then found out that there was already a punk band by that name, so we became The New Believers. It didn’t feel right for long. Then the name Black Cat Bone came to Desmond in the midst of some kind of voodoo haze, and it stuck."

The band's sound was always a foregone conclusion. "We knew we wanted to be a blues band from the get-go. We all knew that this band would be a blues band and would primarily be a cover band." Filling out the group wasn't difficult. "None of us had really had a blues band in Beijing before, and we saw that there weren't really any around town." But the blues doesn't all sound the same: "Thus far we've been picking songs that we all like, and that's what's been deciding the material we play and defining our sound."

Though still playing mostly covers, the band has expanded its set list, Campbell said, "Not just in the quantity of songs, but in the range of songs we do. We've lately added some really traditional blues stuff, and also some really hard and dirty rock tunes, and a bit of 'RnB' and funk too. I think the more we play together, the more we realise that we can, as a band, do, and the more, we're realising, you can, as a 'blues band,' play."

The name has stuck to plenty of posters around the Chinese capital too. Malls and real estate openings aside, the group's favourite gigs are the monthly slots they play at Yugong Yishan, a rock club in Beijing's Sanlitun bar district. "Our gigs at Yugong Yishan are the ones where the audience actually gives a crap about who or what is on the stage." Currently being kitted with a new sound-system, the roomy Yugong Yishan is the best place to see Black Cat Bone, says Campbell.

"They are asked to host more events than they can handle but they have been making sure that one Saturday night a month is ours." The band plays regularly at other live venues including 2 Kolegas, formerly a drive-in cinema, and the Icehouse, an upscale jazz bar off Beijing's main shopping thoroughfare, Wangfujing.

Out on the corporate buffet circuit, Campbell and band mates have gotten used to rising at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning and driving in a minibus to set up their gear at a new shopping mall or real estate development. "You are driven to a venue when you know you're not going to actually play at until 3 p.m., despite assurances that you will be playing at 8 a.m. And a few times you are led to the stage only to be turned back around, and then you'll play ten minutes in between techno dance groups, mimes and guys that can smack out classical music tunes on their face." All for a crowd more interested in what's on the buffet tables. "But at the end of the day, we're being asked to play music, and, in fact, people here are like people everywhere: They appreciate good music, but it's not easy to get them to pay enough attention to get into it."

Beijing's own burgeoning rock music scene owes an awful lot to the expat journeymen musicians like Campbell who start bands here and leave their marks. Others move on: guitarist Jaime Welton moved into the Black Cat lead guitar slot in June after the original two guitarists left Beijing. "Jaime had seen us play and actually had played most of the same material in bands back in the States, so it was easy to get him in and with it."

The right personnel matter to bands seeking a living on China's shopping mall scene: "The number two question we are asked by agents after 'Are you all foreigners?' is 'Do you have a female singer?' All we'd need to do is get a female singer and a Kenny-G style sax player. Then we’d add a few songs to our repertoire and find an agent to get us gigs in the never-ending supply of variety shows that are constantly occurring around the country."

Black Cat Bone is proof that there's a living to be made as a group of western musicians in China. But the band has limits on how much it's willing to compromise good taste for cash. "We cannot live on Black Cat Bone alone, because we want to play the music that we want, and not what some agent representing a real estate company thinks would be best for us to play." So nobody is quitting their day jobs yet. "It's going to sound cheesy, but this is really a labour of love. We want to be able to play music for people who want to hear music. Getting paid for that is kind of beside the point, and the stuff that we make big money off of is something different altogether."

 

Black Cat Bone playing at 2 Kolegas (in the drive-in theatre) on February 11 and at Yugong Yishan on February 18.