One Day in May…

So. Remember last summer when Mayday drummer Guanyou got caught up in an illegal operation to buy and sell stolen cars? His story was that it was all an accident, as the famously frugal father tried to get a good deal and didn’t look too closely at the source.

Well, the good news is that the Taichung police believe him. They recently filed a lawsuit against the suspects operating the stolen car ring, including charges for forging documents to claim the cars were legitimate. Their interviews with Guanyou and his wife convinced them that the pair did not realize what was going on.

In response to the news, Guanyou expressed his thankfulness for getting an opportunity to learn from the mistake: when a bargain sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

If you think you were busy last weekend, imagine how a certain five bandmates must feel. Over the weekend, Mayday held four concerts in Hong Kong, the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh shows in that city since this tour began. And, one hopes, something to hold the people of that fair city over until the band decides to start touring again, which is gonna be a while. All of the concerts sold out, demonstrating once again that Taiwan fans have got nothing on Hong Kongers when it comes to Mayday enthusiasm.

To reward these fans, the band played around thirty songs, including fan favorites “Motor Rock,” “Jump,” and “Stubbornness.” As they played, the fans got more excited, which translated to the band… leading them to go overtime three nights in a row. On the last night, the crowd’s enthusiasm was infectious, and the band added the songs “Nobody Else in My Heart,” “Is That Alright?” and “Peter and Mary,” before finally ending up with “Fool.” On the last night, the show didn’t end until after midnight, so you know there are some serious fines in their future.

In one show, the inevitable chorus of “Love-ing” was performed with a twist; Ashin found a little five-year-old boy in the front rows, and brought him up on stage. Ashin asked the boy if he knew who they were, to which the boy replied that he did not. Ashin chided him not to mistake the band for (egregiously awful) boyband Lollipop. The little boy then sang “Love-ing” with the band, suggesting to me that he might have been a plant. (I’m sorry, a five-year-old in the front row of a rock concert? Plant.) Ashin then told him that he doesn’t care if the little boy doesn’t know their name, because being able to sing their songs is enough.

Now, for some randomness: in Hong Kong, Mayday played a bit of “You Give Love a Bad Name” by Bon Jovi. Oh, I would have loved to hear that – I spent part of the 80s and most of the 90s loving that band (I still love the music, I just haven’t been following the more recent albums). My mom and I can’t hear that song without miming Richie’s action in the video. Except that Ashin sounds a bit weird in English, and, of course, he flubbed the lyrics. But I love it anyway. LOVE it.

So, still to go for DNA: Malaysia, Xi’an, Nanjing, and Taichung.

In other news, the 3D movie was inspired at least in part by the ubiquitous presence of Korean entertainment on Taiwanese television; seeing Taiwan’s culture increasingly subverted by the Korean wave, Ashin decided that if South Korean boyband TVXQ can do 3D, then so can Mayday. And upon hearing that another South Korean boyband, Superjunior-M (which has Korean and Chinese members and records Korean-style pop hits in Mandarin) had been nominated for a Golden Melody Award, Ashin joked that the band is busy researching how to get considered for Korean music awards.

I look forward to Mayday: The Korean Album sometime soon.

Here we are, ladies and gentlemen, almost two weeks after the big Bejing concert, I’m finally reading reports about it. Yes, I suck. It’s okay, I’m cool with it. I like being employed.

Let’s start with some general DNA news, shall we? Starting last May, these “Concert Kings” have been pretty constantly on tour, almost hitting one show a week. (See? It’s too much to keep up with. That’s the official new excuse.) In fourteen months, they will have held 43 shows (which is not quite one a week, but is still pretty impressive), flown 160,000 miles (just don’t mention the words “carbon footprint”), used 260 airplane boarding passes (those will make quite the scrapbook), paid NT$2 million (US$63,442) in excess baggage fees for instruments and equipment, and performed for 600,000 people (except some of us get counted twice… or more…). It has entered into Asian concert tour history (whose job is it to record that, I wonder? It seems like something one falls into inadvertently, like Elizabeth Hawley with the Himalayan climbing records), along with setting records for consecutive concerts in Taipei’s arena, largest concert in Kaohsiung’s stadium, selling 80,000 tickets for two nights in Shanghai, holding Singapore’s first 15,000 person outdoor concert, having to add an extra concert in Hong Kong every year (one concert, two concerts, three concerts, four – each year, just a little bit more), and moving from a 10,000 person venue in Beijing to a 40,000 person outdoor venue in less than ten months. All in all, its the most concerts any Mandopop star has held in a year, though I’d be a little wary of such “records” as everyone always seems to be claiming new ones that are barely different. (I, meanwhile, was hoping to set a record for most parenthetical statements in a single paragraph. How am I doing?)

This seemingly endless tour really does have an end, however, and that will be in Taichung on July 24. Of course, that venue allows for only 30,000 tickets, which is not looking to be enough. And it’s not just local fans snatching them up; one mainland fan explained that, “Going to Taiwan to see a mayday concert is the dream of a lifetime, especially an outdoor mayday concert, that’s even more unforgettable!” True, though if experience is to be any guide, watch out for typhoons and other forms of torrential downpours. (Not that I would know, of course – I’ve never seen the boys in Taiwan either. Someday, I hope.) There were some attempts by overseas tourism agencies to get tickets, but given concerns over scalpers and fairness, they only sold through the website. The limited tickets also mean the members of Mayday themselves only get 20 tickets themselves, and roadie extraordinaire Shijie (who is from Taichung) only managed to come up with 10 for his family and friends.

Now, that’s the general concert picture; let’s talk Beijing specifics. (Actually, one of my excuses for taking so long to write about the Beijing concert is that the week after the concert, I was actually in Beijing, trekking on the Great Wall. I did not bring my computer, go figure.) So, on May 2, Mayday held their first concert at the Beijing Worker’s Stadium, joined by their giant “bumblebee” friend, the transformer lookalike. For as excited as they were about the roofless venue, you know already that they expressed their dream of one day playing in the Bird’s Nest. There’s always at least one more stadium to conquer, is there not? The concert started around 7:40 and ended around 10:30, barely saving the band from once again running over and getting hit with fines.

The song lineup was – as promised – was a different line up from the others, though not so different. Songs included “Spring Scream,” “Motor Rock,” “Viva Love,” and “Interview with a Vampire,” before transitioning into “Crazy World,” “Time Machine,” “Masquerade,” “Jump,” “More than Surviving, Less than Living,” “Like Smoke,” and “Angel,” among others.

Ashin was suitably moved by the enthusiasm of the audience, commenting before singing “Tenderness” in the encore that, “Tonight the sky over Beijing has no stars, but I don’t care about the sky overhead, because you all are Mayday’s sky. Everyone hold up your cell phones, be Mayday’s stars!” The cell phone plan is certainly better for the environment than the glow sticks, though there was also a suitable “sea of blue” in the audience. (Side note: I’ve only seen stars in China once, and that was about 85 kilometers north of Beijing on a very clear night.) Ashin also moved the fans – and himself – to tears on the song “Life Has a Kind of Certainty.”
　　
The band sang seven songs in the encore in all, thereby running the risk of running long. Of course, Mayday’s members are no strangers to fines for such things, but they still resolved to talk little and sing more in Beijing. After the last song, “Fool,” the local police started trying to clear the stadium, but faced the stubbornness of fans determined not to leave.　A little video from Beijing is here.

Coming up on May 22, the boys will be in Wuhan with the “sixth member of the band.” I thought at first that Cowboy Jay had joined up (my new theory is that he really wants to be part of Mayday; previews off his new album include a song about how Superman can’t do everything and a Gothic, Vampire-inspired video. Clearly he is uninspired, out of ideas, and making a bid to be taken into Mayday as a keyboardist or something), but they’re referring to the transformer dude. Xi’an is also coming up this month, so never fear: there’s still plenty of concert news ahead before the big grand finale.

For everyone out there who thought (hoped?) that the Ashin-designed jeans with “StayReal” across the ass would fail to sell (and therefore disappear quickly), I offer this as evidence to the contrary:

Spotted at Gulangyu, Xiamen, on Saturday, April 24. Are such things excusable if there’s actually a Mayday concert in that town a few hours later?

So, Xiamen. Let me begin by saying that I really loved this city. Beyond the mountain views, there were the fantastic (and historical!) car/motorcycle/bicycle-free alleys of Gulangyu Island and the marvelous street-side oyster-filled snacks. I even enjoyed a tourist ferry ride out to Jinmen, where the Mainland Chinese crowd lined up to pose for photos in front of the ROC flag and crowded around the guides selling “ROC leader Ma Ying-jeou’s absolute favorite fruit candy!”

I also benefited from something that I like to call “the corollary relationship between distance from Beijing and the level to which compliments of my Chinese are inflated.” Basically, in Beijing (pre-Olympics, anyway) I would always get a “hmm, I can sort of understand you, but you should really study in Beijing.” As you go south, however, the compliments grow increasingly exaggerated. By the time you’re in the vicinity of Shanghai-Nanjing, you get a “Not bad” or even a “Pretty good.” In Xi’an, it’s “Hey, your Chinese is great.” By Chengdu, you might get a “Wow, you speak Mandarin amazingly well!” Get all the way down to Guangzhou, and it’s an over-the-top, “You speak Mandarin better than I do!” So arriving in Xiamen, as expected, I had two separate cab drivers ask me if I grew up in China, because my Mandarin is marvelous, stupendous really. Of course, in Taiwan whenever I went to get coffee, the friendly people behind the counter would not only exclaim over the phenomenal quality of my outstanding Chinese (which, I sometimes forget, is not remotely impressive), but tell me I’m pretty, too.

Sometimes when I’m home in the United States going to Caribou Coffee and the girl behind the counter just hands me my drink, I just stand there dumbly for a minute, waiting. Aren’t I pretty?

Anyway, the upshot of this is: Xiamen is a gorgeous vacation destination, and a great place for stoking up the old Chinese-speaking ego, if you are a non-native speaker in need of a little boost. The only thing about Xiamen that did not impress me was the set-up for the stadium.

Basically, either your seat was great, or it sucked. Soccer stadiums are really not set up for this, but why not put seats in on the ground on the big empty space behind the VIP sections and charge “看台” (lower) prices? If you were at the back of this arena, the Mayday men were little ants off in the distance, and the screens weren’t helping much. I had made a pretty last-minute decision to go (I talked about it for a long time before I actually got my act together and booked flights and bought a ticket), but I went for the good seats and was very glad I did.

The stands were a long, empty field away from the stage.

There was a warm-up act when I got there, which reminded me a bit of Fusion (not Fusion, but it made me wonder if there would ever be a second album…). I need to do some research to figure out who it was. After that, they raised the big white screen in front of the stage, planning to follow the standard DNA format of showing the video on the screen and letting it fall to the sound of Mayday singing the first song. Nature had other ideas, however, and the heavy wind ripped the white screen off almost as soon as it had been raised. Seriously, who thought that was going to work without reinforcement? They quickly improvised and showed the opening movie on the big screen at the back of the stage, though the broken-down police car prop was visible through the whole thing, and the boys had to settle for a far less exciting entrance.

Speaking of the DNA video, if you really watch it, it’s so violent – and a couple of police officers are inevitably killed in the first car chase scene. So much for peace, love, and understanding. This version was the “new” one, and I liked the message of this one a lot more than the old one; this time, the police “enemies” were revealed to be the boys themselves, because of course, your greatest enemy in achieving your goals is yourself. Plus, as a child of the 80s, I confess to loving the transformers shout-out.

As the concert started, the song list was also shuffled up a bit from the DNA set list in Nanjing. They were still starting with all fast songs (“Spring Scream” kicked us off, followed by “Liver-busting” and “God of Gambling”), which I maintain is really necessary because it takes them at least ten minutes to get on key. I’m saying “them” here because it actually didn’t sound like Ashin who was slipping out of tune for a change; when he sang alone, he sounded fine, but when the backup (the backup dudes, of course, plus Masa and Guanyou) chimed in, it sounded a bit off. He also sounded about a half a bar ahead of the music a few times. It was a slightly awkward beginning, but fortunately, by the time we hit “Interview with the Vampire,” they had worked out all the kinks and just sounded fantastic. (We know it was Ashin and not a body double, though, because he flubbed a lyric in “Masquerade.” So much for those teleprompters, huh?)
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