Roses by Another Name

A year after forming his band Second Hand Roses in Harbin in 1999 Liang Long was on a night train to Beijing. It was a lonely ride south, through the Siberian-like landscapes of a northern Chinese winter. His band mates had stayed behind in Harbin, the largest Chinese city before the Russian border, but, suffocated by a dead-end busking scene and a tiny audience, the 29 year old knew he had to get out.

 

In Beijing he found an audience for his folk-infused rock and an often-changing line-up of musicians for the band he called Second Hand Roses in the impoverished early days. Today Liang's core group includes Yao Lan on guitar, Bei Bei on drums and Jiang Ningzhan on bass. The high pitch of Liang's voice echoes a brand of Chinese opera popular in his native Heilongjiang. That and his cheeky, self-deprecating lyrics define the group's reputation, but Yao Lan's trashing guitars and an overlay of traditional instrumentation from multi-instrumentalist Wu Zekun fleshes out the Second Hand Rose sound.

 

Honed now to patented popularity, it's a sound that has yielded a critically acclaimed debut album. "It's not hard to find good traditional music players, but, yeah, it's harder to find someone with whom you can have an understanding about the music you want to make," he explained as we sat in the green room of New Get Lucky. The band had played a Valentine's Day gig there the night before. As we talked Liang juggled calls from MTV China, seeking to confirm the band for appearances at the channel's Beijing studios, and one from an impresario in deep-south Guangzhou, who wanted the band to play at a festival there.

 

Two singles will be released in March from a new album due later this year, two years after the band's successful debut recording. Ten songs have been recorded, but Liang is still rowing with the band's Hong Kong-based record company over a name for the record. Stubbornness is a Liang Long trademark. Rock, after all, still serves as an outlet for an angry young man to "vent the spleen" of youth.

 

Performing in drag is part of the act. Liang began using feminine makeup in Harbin when his band was overlooked at a variety show in a cold Harbin concert hall. "We were on for only a few minutes at the end, and, at break time, we didn't even get food!" So upset was the group that before their set they got drunk and smudged their faces with a tube of lipstick that had been left in the changing rooms. "Then we were on, and the crowd went crazy. It was totally unexpected, these guys in drag. And I thought, 'Hmm, this is interesting!' and kept it in the act." Today, there's a more philosophical reason for Liang's drag act. "We're pretending to be women, but we're not. We're in between. It's like in the world; there are people in between good and bad. This obscures our identity."

 

So the rock star is also an intellectual? "As a student I read a lot of western fiction and philosophy. I felt lost and depressed at that time. I was on the edge." Worried friends even burned his books by German philosopher Nietzsche. They didn't, however, get to his records. The angst-ridden rock found in Seattle grunge prototype Nirvana and Appetite for Destruction-era Guns N' Roses accorded with his sense of rage. These were sounds he’d picked up off "broken CDs," cast offs from European and US record shop clearances that had ended up on the Chinese black market.

 

Very few classmates shared the high school kid's taste for Los Angeles glam rock and Seattle grunge. Nor did his parents, but they at least benevolently ignored the angry rock blasting from a bedroom stereo. Ignorance of the genre has made rock a niche noise in China's hinterlands, said Liang. "There was nothing in the mainstream media. People didn't have sources to access this kind of music." China's mass media doesn't promote rock, he complained. "Lately I've had a lot of interviews from cultural magazines and newspapers curious about the new album. But, in fact, they don't ask many questions about the music. It's more about our perceived controversial influence on Chinese culture." The Chinese personality could also be a barrier to rock's progress here. A prevailing taste for softer Mando pop and karaoke staples clouds out the diversity minorities add to China's cultural scene, agreed Liang, who prefers the ethnic guitars and folk songs of Tibet and Xinjiang.

 

Another Chinese minority sound proved an indelible influence on the Second Hand Roses front man. The seminal record Balls Under A Red Flag, a mélange of western rock rhythms and Chinese melodies pioneered by Cui Jian, China’s first and still-pre-eminent rock star (and an ethnic Korean), helped decide Liang's mind on a future career as the teen completed a major in computer science at a local technical college. He ended up teaching himself guitar after a tutor pulled the class when too few students showed up for it.

 

His fascination with philosophy and grunge rock hint at Liang's two sides, a stage personality and a quieter one off-stage. Off stage he's not much of a concertgoer, preferring to sit at home reading and watching art-house films. "Other times I call up a few friends from Heilongjiang for beer and food. Sometimes I just sit and think." Stranger, perhaps, for a rock front man and songwriter, he rarely listens to music, picking up ideas instead from off-beat films he watches. "I lead a very normal existence. I eat and sleep. Some times I need new ideas for a different period in my life. But, during other periods, I don’t want to do anything."

 

On stage Liang cuts a commanding, wisecracking presence, striding on in heavy make up and dark reds and blues, a rose in his long black hair. "I like being quiet; before concerts I get very excited, but it's a natural excitement. I'm not overacting." Audiences come in all guises. "Some come for the way I dress. Some are rock fans. Some are fellow Heilongjiang out-of-towners, but not many." Foreigners make up an average 10 percent of crowds. "To be honest I don't understand why they come. Our lyrics are one of the things that make us unique, but they can’t understand those." When a friend at China Central Television, who had brought some foreign friends to a Second Hand Roses gig, reported the laowais had bought a stack of the band's albums afterwards, "I was shocked!" he said.

 

Trips out of China have worked wonders for the band's confidence. "People can understand us here in China, but when you go abroad, you have to find yourself and what you are about." Trips have been lucky chances. An invitation to a Chinese cultural festival in Holland came only after a Dutch friend persuaded the organizers to add them to a line-up of Peking Opera and traditional musicians. "He said, 'Lets show the Dutch people there's rock in China!' " Three gigs on a 2002 tour of Switzerland funded by a culture exchange programme also happened by chance. Worried the Swiss wouldn't connect with the older Chinese music, an organiser who had heard a couple of Second Hand Roses songs figured the band would be a good bridge between East and West. The band still ranks their Holland show as the best one abroad. "The sound system was the best. There was good equipment and a great atmosphere."

 

Back home, three rehearsals a week and "three or four" gigs a month makes Second Hand Rose a busy operation. But even modest nationwide tours are a luxury—the costs are hard to bear on a Chinese rock band's earnings. "More than 80 percent of rock bands in China can't afford to keep going if they only play music. We're famous now so we can get by, but we're not rich." Second Hand Roses' original mix of traditional Chinese instruments and vocal stylings to a grunge-rock sound, Liang surmises, helps the band's finances. "China's scene is growing, but most bands sound the same. They just copy western ideas and music. By going for a British style you have something to compare to, but we want our own music."

 

He left Harbin when the city became too small for him, but Liang Long's band is now outgrowing Beijing. Bars and festivals in southeastern boomtowns like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen offer richer pickings. "There are more rock fans in Beijing, but those other cities are more developed and people can afford the tickets." Northeastern cities can't. "If a ticket costs more than 10 yuan, people can't or won't buy it." Even in Beijing there are no more than ten places that can accommodate the band's fan base. Among those, few have an adequate sound system. "Most of the rock fans in China are young and don’t have enough money."