Beijing Boyce

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Traci Smith has been into the local music scene for more than a decade. I asked her to name the best live music spots in town. She went one better: She named the places she considers most important for developing the indie music scene (see below) as well as a list of other key spots (to be posted next week). Here they are…

These three clubs were crucial to the development of the indie music scene.

1. Waijiao Renyuan (Xinyuan Li), late 1980s to 1992-1993

This building is still standing in Xinyuanli and is now the Best Soup restaurant. The bottom had a bar split into two areas, one with a few tables, round seventies-style chairs, and a bar in the middle. Most people didn’t get the pricey drinks here but would sneak in bottles of Yanjing under their coats.

The other area consisted of a stage and dance floor. People would crowd up to the front to watch the band or sit around the dance floor, drinking Yanjing and talking to friends.

The crowd was mostly art students who couldn’t afford tickets, so huge groups of people would mill around out front waiting for their band friends to show up and get them in for free. The venue most likely did not make much, and the bands didn’t either, maybe enough for a big meal afterward with taxi fare left over.

Usually Tangchao, Heibao, Zang Tianshuo, Ziwo Jiaoyu (Self Education, headed by Huazi, who now has a band called Chai-na), Miankong (The Face) and Cui Jian played. In Beijing, this was one of the first venues to regularly hold rock / alt music shows.

2. Scream (Wudaokou, across from the movie theater), 1994-1995 to late 1990s

Scream was the second bar in that area of hutongs across from the movie theater that had already been established as a hangout. Scream was truly the home of punk music in China and most of the shows featured punk bands. The punk scene was very different from the classic metal / rock scene. The band members and audience were intimately linked with the Wudaokou area.

The club was tiny and there was a fridge at the end of the bar. I remember people just going in and shouting, “hey, three beers”, or however many they took, and then paying for it. It was very much like a big extended family. If the show was popular, it would be so crowded you would literally have sweat pouring off you, and lots of folks would go outside to cool off. But the intimacy of the space and the punk music were a powerful combination.

The place was run by Lv Bo and its success led to the start of Scream Records, which is still going. This was also when animation and drawing began to be put together with music, with interesting flyers, the Scream logo, and lots of creative visual art, something that became standard for bands like New Pants.

3. River Bar, Old South Sanlitun, 2000-2004

When the boys from Yehaizi, China’s seminal folk rock band, took over what had previously been a live music bar called 17, they redecorated using only the downstairs part of the space to create China’s first folk rock club. They made the bar very comfortable, with wood tables and benches, and lots of minorities-style cloth and decorations, giving it a relaxed feel, like sitting in the courtyard of a siheyuan.

Up to this point there had been quite a few places for rock, punk, metal, and grunge bands to play, but the quieter or more experimental musicians had nowhere. But they did have lots of fans largely due to the popularity of Yehaizi. This bar was to folk rock what Scream was to punk. The shows were almost all acoustic, and they sometimes featured video art to go along with the shows. River was really the means by which folk rock music, an eclectic and now very broad genre–and one of the biggest genres in terms of fans today–started to gain the strong following it has now in China.

Note: Next week, I’ll have Traci Smith’s list of other influential live music venues in Beijing.

Photo: yacol.com