JAPAN THREE
I walk alone onto the stage, seriously wondering if, this time, I have gone completely too far. I am about to read unaccompanied poetry to a audience whose first language is Japanese. Also the show is running late and the drag queens who have the club for the midnight matinee are already reshaping their eyeliner and showing signs of the totally international (and maybe even interplanetary) Miss Thing-style "Oh p-LEASE!" The room is very crowded with what has to be neo-Furry Freak Tokyo, but the silence is complete. Small but elegant, purple covered booklets of Yukiko’s translation have been distributed through the crowd, but that hardly guarantees that everyone will follow the metaphoric bouncing ball. The first move in this piece of theatre is that my left hand, the one holding the blue binder of words to be spoken, has started to shake, and I must will it still. I have to fill the room with my voice and bend it to my pleasure. Or I disembowel myself with my sword, right?. Accordingly I put my voice on the tightest leash and lower it a deliberate half octave, letting gears grind to the max. This will be the last time and, if I can’t speak in the morning, it don’t mean fucking nothing.
"All his life he walked with the demon, from the Radium Room to the Palace of Mirrors, From the Place of Skulls to the Canadian Border..."
I growl and stagger the tempo. After four stanzas, I stop, because the first piece is short, and I drop a very non-Japanese, Three-Musketeers, bow-with-a-flourish, announcing that the first "song" is over. It’s an interesting silence by a room full of people who didn’t know what to do. They probably would have be-bop finger-popped if they had been so-instructed up front. Then someone (maybe one of my own crew) applauds. The room follows suit. I thank them and go into the second piece with all the method I can muster. At the end, I again lower my book and bow. This time the applause is instant and quite enthusiastic. Ha! I can get through this. I can. I can. The room has collectively twigged. Later, when we rocker poets have departed, there may well be a drag queen lipsyncing to Marlene Dietrich singing in German. Who knows? Who cares? This is performance art and my only responsibility is to perform and damn the consequences. I know exactly where I am. Off to the races. Didn’t Eddie Izzard assure me it was all about presentation. After the show a young man tells me my voice is "like electric guitar." He means it as a compliment. "Well thank you kindly and bless you, me old china*-san." (*For those who translate – Cockney rhyming slang; china=china plate = mate=pal.)

It could be that this is only working because it’s Blue Velvet Night in the Blue Chamber, which is unusual in any language. BVN is a weird performance homage to a culture thread that stretches from the Warhol Factory to Twin Peaks. It is run by Gaku Torii, the most forceful individual I have met in all of Japan and something the local – but far better organized and mortally adept – Lester Bangs. The Blue Room itself is owned by Madam Togawa, a famous and venerable Tokyo chanteuse and mystery writer. She is a grande dame in the grand manner, and her club has an old-school, gay-bar, cocktail-decor ambiance, and the dressing room is a sitting room with brocades, silk flowers, and huge pictures of Edith Piaf – instead of the usual cupboard under the stairs with some broken furniture and endless band graffiti. Madame holds court in surgical mask and Raybans. Her young assistant informs me Madame has a cold. She is thus drinking vodka today. I order a Jack and we toast, exchanging books and pleasantries. Then she leaves us musicians to our nerves and preparations, but returns at showtime in some flowing Lauren Bacall number. Exiting we embrace. This could be happening anywhere from Tokyo to Buenos Aires and is just so damned cool.

By a miracle of left brane-string Zen synchronization, I walk into the super-psychedelic UFO Club at precisely the moment I am required for sound check. It’s a little chilly out. The wind is off Godzilla’s famous Tokyo Bay, and I am wearing my ankle-length, Matrix-Welldressed, high showing-off coat with all the buttons. (See pic 09 in the Funtopia report.) Some wag on the soundboard inexplicably calls, "Good morning, captain." I step nimbly to the stage and Beefheart the vocal mike. (Straight stand, please.) "Good morning to you son. Do you need another mule skinner, on your mumble mumble." (So what is the fourth fucking line of Mule Skinner Blues on the spur of the moment?) Laughs in the room. Thus is international rock humor conducted.

I have whined about how I miss hotdogs, and the Japanese equivalent of a Tom Parker foot-long has showed up with the latest round of Kirin draft. Holy heck. Japan is turning me into some stoner Charlie Chaplin, and, in silent-movie mode, I slice the singularly phallic object into bite sized slices and offer it round as is the custom. The comrades find this cracking-up droll, including the fact that I seem to be addressing the sausage as Colonel Parker even if I’m not fully communicating the obscure historical connection. We seem to spend a lot of time in cafes across the street from clubs, drinking beer and sharing snacks in the abyss of hours between sound check and show. We also spend a hell of a lot of the time laughing. I eat everything that’s put in front of me, but shamelessly demand a fork. The Japanese spend much time eating, but small amounts and slowly, and I see no fat people. What I do see is a lot of musicians. Tokyo and Osaka cats, refugees from punk and glam and glitter and every past fad you care to name, but now tough or crazy and seeming checking out my apparently minor-legend condition. They show up at shows, but they also show up at the interim café. Some are earnest and respectful and others are slapstick drunk like Crazy Motherfucker in Nagoya, a lunatic with Afro and goatee who was seemingly once in some famous bands, but now seems to be huffing cleaning fluid and drinking beer like a more survival-orientated Steve Took, but, of course, his girlfriend may be a t-shirt mogul. Who knows?

Another piece of rock humor. Ken and Nabeji have taken to breaking into Heartbreak Hotel at sound checks. At first it’s a goof and then we find that we really like playing it. It becomes an encore. Even though I’m singing it more like a monotone Howling Wolf than Elvis Presley, the tune has a real bulldozer of an impact. You can hear the first two lines as they the strike the audience’s conditioned and universal, rock & roll instincts. A new place to dwell. Musical mortar fire and damn but it’s fun. Plus it don’t need no stinking language.

I have to here thank Kanzawa, who was assigned to lift my bags and tote my bales and without whom I might have been wholly screwed in some of the more physically stressful, Dexter Gordon, getting-on-and-off-trains moments. Good looking out, bro. Thank you.

(A somewhat less subject account and loads of pics of my recent Japanese adventure are posted on Funtopia. Hit the link up on the right, and then go to the news page.)

The secret word is Breakfast

AND...
Check out this measure of madness.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041208-122555-6114r.htm