“You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty limiting,” wrote David Fair in his mini-manifesto How to Play Guitar. “If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.” Listen to ½ Gentlemen / Not Beasts, the sprawling, primitive, raucous debut of Fair’s band Half Japanese, and you probably won’t be surprised that David and his brother Jad never learned to play guitar in any traditional way. But it would be wrong to assume that they couldn’t learn. Read David again: “If you ignore the chords…” Half Japanese made a choice. They weren’t clueless outsiders or deluded novices. Primitiveness was their calling, not their fate.
It was also their path to freedom. As David says, lack of knowledge can mean infinite options, and he and Jad explore a lot of them on ½ Gentleman / Not Beasts, often touted as the first (and only) triple-LP debut in rock history. That may or may not be true, but it certainly was the least likely. Before it came out, the Fair brothers had made just a few 7-inches and cassettes, recorded at home (where they lived with their parents) and released on their own label, 50 Skidillion Watts. (One of those early tapes was called ½ Gentlemen / ½ Beasts, but the Fairs changed it to Not Beasts for the box since, according to David, “we’re nice guys.”) British label Armageddon’s offer to put out a box set was so unusual that, when interviewed in the Half Japanese documentary The Band That Would Be King, the Fairs’ parents could only compare it to a then-new box set by Frank Sinatra.
Musically, though, giving Half Japanese six album sides to fill with their spilling ideas made a lot of sense. In no less than 50 songs (now 86 on Fire’s 4LP reissue), the Fair brothers injected their caveman racket-- usually crafted solely on cardboard-sounding drums and strangled guitar-- into loud punk blasts, shapeless rants, heartfelt confessions, minimal experiments, audio collages, and twisted covers of their heroes the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman, and Buddy Holly. Some songs sound like a suburban parallel to the concurrent, atonal no wave movement in New York (David’s chord-avoiding guitar is often a dead ringer for the dissonant shrieks of DNA’s Arto Lindsay). But Half Japanese replaced no wave’s burned-out nihilism with sleeve-worn, open-wound emotion.
Much of that emotion comes from Jad’s adolesecent voice and love-letter lyrics. On bracingly honest cuts like “Shy Around Girls”, “Dream Date”, and “School of Love”, he brings the sentimentality of a lovelorn teenager to the musical equivalent of primal scream therapy. (It’s telling that, according to later member Don Fleming, David claimed that Half Japanese had two kinds of songs: “Monster songs and love songs.”) With these proto-emo bombs, the Fairs predicted a lot of future lo-fi rock, especially the home-taped ballads of Daniel Johnston and the nursery-rhyme swing of Beat Happening.
But don’t mistake Half Japanese’s naked emotion for naïveté-- Jad and David knew exactly what they were doing. That’s especially clear in ½ Gentlemen’s audio experiments, which can be surprisingly formal. The bass cycling through “Du Du Du / Du Du Du” evokes Steve Reich-style minimalism; the repeated notes and found sounds on “T / T / T / T / T” would fit on a Faust LP; the slashing guitar and wordless babble of “Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” suggests Derek Bailey backing Yoko Ono; and “Jad Interview”, one of Fire’s bonus tracks, is a word-jazz-like vocal-collage. These aren’t random noodlings that hit on something by chance. There’s clear thought behind each construction, ironic considering how loose the more traditional “songs” are.
Another sign that Half Japanese were more clever than they looked is ½ Gentlemen’s sly sense of humor. You can hear Jad and David winking through the fake-protest chant “No More Beatle Mania” (“once was enough!” Jad screams), the drooling whine of “I Don’t Want to Have Mono No More”, and the rock-fantasy-camp scenario of “Battle of the Bands”, wherein “backup singers” Mick Jagger and Johnny Rotten are too busy watching David to actually sing. Even funnier are the prankster-ish cover versions, wherein the band rambles through classics as if blindfolded. Jad never alters his singing style throughout “Stooges Medley” (another Fire bonus track), the musical equivalent of Andy Kaufman doing impressions by merely reciting lines without changing his “Foreign Man” voice. If anyone thought Half Japanese was a hoax, David and Jad were clearly happy to feed that rumor. Yet their brazen refusal to conform to the originals captures the Stooges’ spirit more than any faithful cover could.
All this fearless amateurism can make ½ Gentlemen a brutal listen. As their career went on, Half Japanese gradually turned their monster love songs into more listenable tunes that influenced a generation of indie rockers (most famously, Kurt Cobain brought them along on Nirvana’s In Utero tour and was wearing their t-shirt when he died). But ½ Gentlemen, in its near-giddy willingness to push sound past the limits of amps and tape recorders, is more a precursor to noisy rock experiments like the kiddie nightmares of Happy Flowers, the trash-can blues of Pussy Galore, or the early splatter of Boredoms.
Still, even at its most grating, there’s always a loudly-beating heart inside 1/2 Gentlemen. It’s earnest, eager, and takes a wry view of the world that makes it endearing. And it’s so hard to predict what’s going to happen at any given point that the music never feels dated. Because it was based mostly on their own hermetic ideas, the Fair brothers’ primitivism blasts through the years, too hot for any time period to hold onto. Maybe that’s the best thing about ½ Gentlemen / Not Beasts: even today, over three decades later, you can picture Jad and David banging it out in their parents’ house, thrilled at what they’re discovering.
