Superchunk in Tokyo

O-West. Shibuya, Tokyo. February 21, 2011.

I didn’t expect my first blog post from this month-long journey in Japan and Pacific WWII islands to be about an indie rock band from home.  But Chapel Hill-Durham’s Superchunk was playing at the O-West club in Shibuya last night and I couldn’t resist.

I first saw Superchunk sometime in 1993 after moving back to Raleigh from Washington, D.C.  They were taking the place by storm.  The show that sticks in my mind is one at the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, N.C. on a cold January night in 1995.  I was struggling in graduate school at the time, about to abort efforts to get an MA in Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, after aborting efforts to get an MA in Economics the year before (the rigors of those programs aborted me more than anything).  My Cultural Studies professor Larry Grossberg was talking about Superchunk in a graduate seminar the day of the show (he had tickets), putting them in sentences with names like Stuart Hall and Delueze and Guattari.  I figured that Larry might be the only professor in America talking about Superchunk in a graduate seminar and I admired him for it.  Later that night the band came out with a controlled post-punk abandon and I’m not sure I’ve even seen the Cradle more electrified, and that’s saying a lot.

I was twenty-eight years old at the time and working full-time at Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books (QRB) and struggling to figure out a trajectory for a so-called career.  I wanted to be a writer but wasn’t really sure how to pull it off.  Limbo City.  I had a couple of serendipitous inspirations from, among others, Doris Betts, who was reading at QRB one night when I was working, and Jim Lewis, a local preacher who read Shakespeare and Freud and Zora Neale Hurston.  Things started happening.  I was led to the Center for Documentary Studies and the doomed, asteroid-like DoubleTake magazine which was founded there.  I married a woman from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania later that year.  Then, in January 1997 I stumbled upon a reference to W. Eugene Smith’s unfinished Pittsburgh project in a camera store in Raleigh.

This is a long story and I can’t keep writing like this or else I’ll be sitting here in my room on Kojimachi for the next three days, peering out the window in between stints at my laptop and trips to the convenience store for fresh and inexpensive seafood salads.  My editor at FSG recently gave me the green light to open up my Smith biography and tell a story only I can tell concerning my 14-plus years interweaving this guy’s life and work into mine. There will be new and intense, conventional biographical elements about Smith in this book, and I plan to go very deep on his techniques, but this book may become more of a non-fiction novel, with Jazz Loft characters at the center and many elements of Smith’s interest in Japan.

Whatever I do after my Smith work is done (which isn’t too far in the future) I would like for it to be as bold and ambitious as the work Superchunk continues to do.  You could always see that this band might age dynamically, their post-punk qualities growing depth rather than freezing.  Last night they were called out for at least three encores in the sold out club, playing mostly tunes from their newest record.  The Japanese audience seemed ten to twenty years younger than the band (who are in their early 40’s, like many of us) and they hung on every note, recognizing most tunes within the first two chords.  Superchunk’s associated record label, the independent Merge Records, run by two band members Mac MacCaughan and Laura Ballance, continues to support new and obscure bands.   One of their bands, Arcade Fire, won a Grammy last week for overall Album of the Year.  A focus group or business school seminar would have determined twenty years ago, or especially five or ten years ago, that Merge Records in Durham, North Carolina had no chance in the current climate for recorded music.  They would have been wrong.  (To see another side of the brilliance of the members of this band, check out the immortal clip “Music Scholar” from WFMU radio – Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster is the caller on this show).

On a Smith note, yesterday, working with my traveling assistant and interpreter, Momoko Gill (a young jazz drummer), we looked for the house where Smith lived next to the Haiyuza Theater in Roppongi in 1961-62.  Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” is one of the shows playing at the theater currently.  We have no address for the Smith residence (nobody remembers it precisely) so we’ll need some firsthand verification from photographs to confirm which place was his.  I stood there and imagined him sauntering down the street for Suntory liquor a half century ago.

Later in the day we had a long, vigorous coffee shop meeting with the Japanese-American writer Roland Kelts.  Then Superchunk.

It was a good start.  I’m excited to see where it goes from here.

-Sam Stephenson

p.s. Many thanks to Lane and Jon.  Here’s a (brutal) photo from my iPhone last night.

Superchunk on stage. O-West. Shibuya, Tokyo. February 21, 2011.