I chose music as my lifelong carrier when I was a college student. The
first thing I got down to was to form a band. After I realized I
couldn’t find band members at nearby universities because students
played music just for fun, I expanded my search to the general public.
Until then, the whole world I had been familiar with was the small
hamlet where I was born and grew up and the schools I went to. I was
about to tread on to the unknown, new world.
It was early 80’s when
neither the Internet nor SNS had existed yet. The common way to find
band members back then was recruitment columns on dozens of pages in a
monthly music magazine. When you found someone appealing to you, you
would contact him or her by a double postcard to receive a reply. I
narrowed down to two postings for a candidate band. As I couldn’t figure
out which one was better, I asked my mother out of curiosity. She
glanced at each posting and without much attention picked one which
address indicated a good residential district. Neither she nor I ever
imagined that casual pick would have changed the course of life of mine,
my parents’ and of the one who posted the recruitment message. From
that point, inexplicable passion moved me in fast forward mode. I jumped
on my bike, rushed to the post office to get a double postcard on which
I scribbled enthusiastic self promotion on the spot, and mailed it.
A
few days later I received the reply card with the phone number on it.
We talked over the phone and set up the meeting in Osaka where he lived.
Osaka is the big city located next to Kyoto where I lived. It took me
about a 15-minute bike ride to the train station plus s 45-minute ride
on the express train, which was quite a travel for me who was a farmer’s
daughter in the small village of Kyoto. Adding to that going to the big
city alone was so nervous in itself, the one whom I was going to meet
was a boy. I had hardly talked to boys of my generation since I went to
girls’ school from junior high to college. That all felt like a start of
my adult life.
Before I set out for Osaka though, there was a
problem. I needed to make s demo tape of my songs for the meeting where
we were to exchange demos. When he talked over the phone about the
exchange of demo tapes, I said “Exchanging demos? Sure, it’s a matter of
course!,” which I found myself in a cold sweat to be honest. I had only
one song on a tape that I had made for an audition. All other songs of
mine were on paper as it was before the era of hard disc recording by a
computer. The gadgets for a demo I had were a radio cassette tape
recorder, the piano and the guitar. I didn’t have a microphone or a
mixer, which meant I had to record by singing to my own accompaniment in
front of the tape recorder. Although I had done that before and even
done a few gigs too, the demo I finished this time sounded so lame that I
thought he would turn me down as his band member at the meeting.
To
me, my demo tape sounded as if it made me a laughingstock since I had
confidently declared myself to become a professional musician over the
phone. He would either laugh at me or get angry for wasting his time
when he listened to it. Rather, I may have had excessive self-esteem to
think about becoming a musician with those poor songs in the first
place. It seemed more and more like the recurrence of my mistake in
which I failed the entrance examination of most universities after I had
declared to everyone around me that I would go to the most prestigious
university in Japan.
I felt hesitant to go to Osaka for the meeting.
On the other hand, my sudden loss of confidence showed how much I
committed this time. At that point of my life, joining a band was so
important. An audition or a gig as a high school student was nothing
compared to that. I didn’t have my purpose for living anywhere else. It
was the only way left for me to go on. I had no other choice but to be
heading for the meeting with my demo tape held in my hand.
Friday, October 15, 2021
No Other Choice hr647
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