Friday night May 22 will undoubtedly be one of my most memorable evenings of the year in Beijing. After work, myself, Carol, and Alana met up at the roast fish restaurant (I had the chicken.) before heading over to the Mao Live House music venue for an evening of punk rock. (I really wanted to eat at the Philly Pizza Company, but at least we did have hot tea!)
You and Me Punk Rock Girls!
The show was opened by Chinese band SKO and Japanese band Secret 7 Line. Both did a good job of getting the rather sparse crowd (about 200 folks) warmed up for the main attraction.
It was really cool to see MxPx perform in this small setting. I have previously seen them perform on Cornerstone's Main Stage where they perform for around 10,000 people and have seen them in 2 rather large venues in Nashville and Memphis. At all of those shows, they had crews of people who set up and took down their gear. Here with the help of one guy, MxPx did it all themselves. They played a good mix of songs from all of their major albums except for Pokinatcha (their first), and included a couple covers from their latest album "On The Cover 2", an album of 80s songs that influenced the band. MxPx live never disappoints.
A few shots of MxPx prepping for the show.
After the show I was fortunate to be able to sit down with bassist and singer Mike Herrera for an interview. Here it is:
What are some of the challenges of touring in a foreign country?
Well this is our first time in China. It’s kind of a poor man’s Japan. It’s obviously an Asian country, but it’s a little more relaxed actually, not quite as like crazy detailed. In Japan everybody’s very much on schedule and here it’s a little bit more like "Ahh you know we’ll get there" which is fine for us, no big deal. I thought it was gonna be a lot more crowded. There’s a lot of people here obviously, but in my experience most big cities are much more crowded.
Are there any interesting or funny experiences from the tour so far?
Let’s see, of course we’ve only been here like two days. Tonight's show was really fun, we had a good time. We love bargaining anywhere we go whether it's South America or that kind of culture where you can negotiate prices, that’s what we really enjoy doing. We always walk away and come back, you know do that whole thing. So that was probably the coolest thing we’ve done here in China. We just kind of bargain and shop and get stuff for really cheap. I know its pretty inexpensive here anyway but that is not even necessarily the point, the point is whatever the price is, get it lower!
Did you pick up any interesting deals today?
Our tour manager got some, what does he call them? Fauxkleys, five pairs of sunglasses for 200.
How was the show in Shanghai?
Shanghai, yeah, it was less people, but we had heard it's not as good for punk music there.
When you do these shows in foreign countries, is it mostly locals or the foreigners who come?
In Japan its mostly locals, in most countries its mostly locals, except for when we’re in Korea. I guess if you had to count each person there would still be more locals but there were a lot of Americans from the army base there. Here a lot of white people, not necessarily from America, I wasn’t expecting that actually. In South America it's all locals, very few white people or westerners there.
On the Cover 2 just came out, great album by the way. What has the response been so far?
I think they like it and it’s a fun record. All the reviews we’ve seen have been really good. Its funny because doing a cover album, you can’t really play all the songs, so we’ve really had to force ourselves to learn Linda Linda and some of the others.
Can you tell us a little about the process you went through of choosing the songs?
Well we started off with a bunch of songs and then narrowed it down to some that sounded a little bit better. We had a few more punk songs that people wouldn’t necessarily know as much. We wanted there to be a theme to the record and we ended up with a lot of songs from the 80s and started gearing our choices towards that once we had a bulk of songs that were from the 80s. We were like okay let’s not do a few of these that we were gonna do and just do 80s songs. That way we kind of had a story to tell and it was a little more cohesive. Even within that there is punk songs, pop songs, new wave songs, rock, you know hair metal, but a good mix.
Has the reunion with Tooth and Nail been a good so far?
Yeah yeah, most definitely.
Are there any other bands on that label that might be possible tour mates in the future?
Yeah, there is always that possbiliity. We end up playing with Underoath a lot. We don’t fit with that music at all but we will end up in some weird country with them. We played a show with them in Mexico city and in Belgium. We have played with Anberlin and of course we’ve played with The Classic Crime.
Are there any plans to tour with your other band, Tumbledown?
Yeah, we just finished up a tour, we did SXSW in Austin, TX. The full length record just came out and it’s also available in Japan on an indie label, then we can start coming to Asia which will be great.
What does the future hold for MxPx?
MxPx is actually going to go into the studio soon. I am not sure if we’re gonna do an EP; it's hard to say with music changing a lot and the industry changing, it doesn’t seem like you necessarily have to do a full album, people just want songs and download individual songs so it's hard to justify the time and expense of a full album, so we may go in and do half records more often. That will be easier on me too songwriting wise. We are gonna make sure the next thing we do gets out quicker.
For my personal curiousty, do you think we will see you at Cornerstone in the future?
You know I would love to, our booking agent now isn’t as tuned into that scene. It's not that hard for them because we’ve played there a lot. We are doing Joshua Fest, which is cool. Cornerstone would definitely have us but it hasn’t worked out scheduling wise. I would love to do it again and it’ll happen when the planets align!
Well thanks Mike for sitting down with us.
Thanks Tim, of course. Cool.
