1/2 JAPANESE - 1/2 GENTLEMEN/NOT BEASTS - 2 CD BOX [T.E.C. TONES, 1994, USA]

Rock'n'roll started as a medium in which the three-chord song reigned supreme — until, of course, some wise guys got the idea that four chords, then five (and so on) would make it even better. It took years of such high-falutin' thought before a pair of Maryland-via- Michigan brothers emerged with just the opposite notion, paring rock'n'roll down to no chords — and promptly announcing their excitement over this development by issuing a three-record box set as their debut album. Jad Fair, America's preeminent and enormously influential idiot savant of revealingly primitivist rock, built a professionally amateurish career on a uniquely honest and unselfconscious approach to music making, originally with his brother David. (What must mom and dad Fair have thought?)

In the decades since Half Japanese took shape, it's still not entirely clear that "real" chords have ever really entered the picture. In fact, David Fair, who contributed sporadically to the band for many years, has been quoted as advising would-be guitarists not to feel encumbered by any rules at all, insisting, "It's your guitar, after all."

Half Japanese was indisputably at its most unsettling when the Fairs had no outside input. The 7-inch Calling All Girls EP crammed together nine id-bursts (like "Dream Date" and "Shy Around Girls") that rank among rock's most uninhibited expressions of sex as cause for terror, topped off with a title track that does pretty much what it promises — an extended salutation to Kate Smith, Ronee Blakely and Paloma Picasso (among dozens of others).

But even the unfiltered nature of that fusillade was no preparation for 1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beasts, a 50-song portrait of the artist as a young man clawing to get back into the womb. As he rolls around on the rickety post-Shaggs bed of guitar and drums that comprises "Hurt So Bad" and "No Direct Line From My Brain to My Heart," Jad inflicts as much self-abuse as Iggy did with broken glass a decade before. Not that these are nihilistic manifestos. Quite the contrary: on songs like "I Love Oriental Girls" and "Ann Arbor, MI.," Jad comes across as the archetypal man who loves too much, a trait he parlays into stalker-like obsession on the tenaciously bent "Patti Smith." Although dotted with a goodly number of virtually unrecognizable covers (Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue," Springsteen's "10th Avenue Freeze Out"), 1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beasts sounds absolutely like nothing that came before it — and little that's come since.

- Trouser Press

Disc: 1

01. No Direct Line from My Brain to My Heart
02. 10th Avenue Freeze Out
03. Ta Sheri Ta Ta
04. My Girlfriend Lives Like a Beatnik
05. Her Parents Came Home 06. Shhh/Shhh/Shhh
07. Girls Like That
08. RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
09. No More Beatle Mania
10. Tangled Up in Blue
11. Patti Smith
12. School of Love
13. Jodie Foster
14. Shy Around Girls
15. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
16. Bogue Millionaires/Cool Millionaires
17. TN TN TN TN Ki
18. I Can't Stand It Anymore
19. I Love Oriental Girls
20. Dream Date
21. Du du Du/ Du du Du
22. Ain't Too Proud to Beg
23. Ann Arbor, Mi
24. I'm Going to the Zoo
25. Shi Yi Yi
26. Rave On
27. I Ta Na Si Na Mi Eee
28. Till Victory
29. Rip My Shirt to Shreds
30. I Don't Want to Have Mono No More
31. She Cracked
32. BBBBBBBB/BBBBBBBBB

Disc: 2

01. Funky Broadway Melody
02. I'm Sorry
03. T/T/T/T/T/T
04. Worst I'd Ever Do
05. Live in Baltimore MD.
06. Live in Washington DC
07. Battle of the Bands
08. Worst I'd Ever Do
09. Ann Arbor, Mi
10. School of Love
11. Her Parents Came Home
12. Shy Around Girls
13. Dream Date
14. Bogue Millionaires/Cool Millionaires
15. Knock on Wood
16. Top Secret
17. Guitar Solo
18. Calling All Girls

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