Recording their youths

Updated:2011-09-28 18:13

(chinadaily.com.cn)

 

 

 

Temple Band, representative of China's underground rock’n’roll bands. Its vocalist and guitarist is Li Qun.

I'm going to talk about one of the saddest things I have ever encountered in my entire life. It is also something that I have never encountered before. The memory is really profound. It was a few years ago when our entire band ended up in the police station, then the detention center and then the drug rehabilitation center for smoking, smoking marijuana. Altogether, we stayed for nearly 200 days.

Originally we were just bored, and it was a friend who lit it. We were just kids on the road, smoking. We didn't smoke a lot. We just thought it was very hip, very rock’n’roll, something very crazy. So we smoked on the road. Then the police found out. We all went in.

When I first came to Beijing, I didn't know many people and one friend helped me a lot. He helped me find an apartment. He is the friend who introduced me to Teacher Lu Xun for classes. At the time I lived in a remote village in Fengtai. It was close to the Beijing World Park.

I had a dog as my companion. It was called "Dong Dong." I found it. Sometimes I wouldn't come home for a days, and it would go hungry too.

At the time I remember telling a lot of people, at the poorest, I had one yuan of steamed buns over three days. At the time, one yuan bought five steamed buns. It's cheaper in the village. The puppy and I shared one yuan of steamed buns. But it was not picky, and I was quite happy too. Later, I moved to the city. I moved to the city because I wanted to open a shop, a tattoo shop. But that shop was in a basement, and wasn't very good as a studio. I suppose I had a place to live and a studio. Not long after the store opened, I remember SARS happened. Business was supposed to be bad, but my business still did ok. But it certainly wasn't doing very well.

One morning, I took my hand drum and ran to the Anzhenqiao Bridge underpass. In China, it's hard to be that person, especially a drummer, who goes out and sings for a living. But I had no other choice. I had no money to eat. I had to pay rent. Fortunately, less than five minutes after I arrived there, a young person gave me five yuan. I thought, not bad. That day I met the guitarist of my band. The first thing he said to me was: "Hey! Dude, did you sing here originally?" Actually, he had been singing there all along, and that's how the two of us met. When we started talking, we discovered we had mutual friends. Still, we weren't very familiar, but we decided to be friends and from then on, we started our singing career as a duo. We have basically sung in all the underpasses in Beijing, the ones in Dongcheng district and also Beicheng. Dongsishitiao, Dongzhimen, Anzhenqiao Bridge. We've been to the north side, north fourth ring road, the Zoo, Xizhimen...

Later, inexplicably, I met the other band mates. Now all the band mates continue to make music.