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Live at the Forbidden City from Blue Ear Books
 

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Reviews  Foreword by Stuart Dempster

Listen to Dennis Rea Live at the Forbidden City interview
on NPR affiliate KUOW.

The book recounts Rea’s experiences living, teaching, traveling, and performing music in China and Taiwan between 1989 and 1996, a time when the “two Chinas” were both in the throes of unprecedented social, cultural, and economic upheaval. Although Rea’s reason for moving to China was to reunite with his fiancée and join her in teaching English at a university, a chain of serendipitous events led to a rollercoaster musical adventure with many preposterous twists and turns.

During the period described in the book, Rea gave more than 100 concerts in venues ranging from nationwide television broadcasts, sports arenas, and concert halls to sleazy underground nightclubs, night markets, a textile factory, and even a venerable Taoist temple. Many of these gigs took place under ludicrously bizarre circumstances and the constant threat of harassment by machine-gun toting cops or Communist Party officials. Along the way Rea organized three of the earliest unofficial concert tours of China by Western bands, recorded an album for the China Record Company that sold tens of thousands of copies, performed for television and radio audiences numbering in the hundreds of millions, and collaborated with some of China’s most important contemporary musicians, including the founding fathers of Chinese rock, Cui Jian and Zhang Xing, and Chinese jazz kingpin Liu Yuan. Rea’s musical experiences encompassed both the renegade rock underground and the world of state-controlled tongsu, or mainstream popular music, and took place not only in the cultural crucible of Beijing, but also deep in China’s provincial hinterlands and on the other side of the political divide in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, where he helped build a grassroots music scene in a sleepy Taiwanese city.

But Live at the Forbidden City is much more than simply an account of Rea’s experiences playing music in the Far East. Spiced with reflections on Chinese history, culture, and geography, the narrative interweaves Rea’s musical exploits with absorbing tales of travels and misadventures in such fascinating places as the Tiger-Leaping Gorge, a Tibetan lamasery, the ancient Silk Road, and a giant panda reserve. The book also includes the only detailed eyewitness account to date of the bloody civil uprising that broke out in the city of Chengdu at the same time as the world-shaking events at Tiananmen Square.

Rea’s experiences playing music in China and Taiwan unlocked doors into Chinese culture that few travelers, diplomats, students, or businesspeople are fortunate enough to enter, giving him a singular perspective on a culture undergoing one of the most sweeping transformations in its long history. At times, as in Rea’s account of the deadly street battles in Chengdu in June 1989, the events related in Live at the Forbidden City are deeply sobering; in other instances, the sometimes-absurd cultural collisions that marked his sojourn in China are downright comical. But always, the experiences related here offer revealing insights into not only the rapidly evolving Chinese popular music scene, but also the greater Chinese nation at the brink of a new millennium in which it will assume an increasingly important role in global affairs.

Highlights of the book include:

• Fascinating and often comical anecdotes from the 100-plus concerts Rea gave throughout China and in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.
• Highlights and lowlights of three of the earliest unofficial concert tours of China undertaken by Western bands, in venues ranging from illicit underground clubs to sports arenas to a nationally televised broadcast.
• The only detailed eyewitness account to date of the massive civil disturbance in the city of Chengdu in June 1989, which some experts now claim rivaled the concurrent events in Tiananmen Square in scope and casualties.
• Vivid depictions of China’s rapid transformation into a globalized market economy, and the attendant clash of old and new.
• An illuminating comparison of the music, culture, and political climate of the divergent “Two Chinas”: the communist People’s Republic of China, and the democratic Republic of China on Taiwan.
• Richly descriptive accounts of travels in the ethnic minority regions of southwest China, Chinese Central Asia, and the Tibetan frontier, including an engrossing misadventure in which Rea trekked 75 kilometers in the Tibetan border region in a single day.
• An informative overview of the music of China and its ethnic minorities, and an examination of the impact of Western music and culture on these traditions.
• An inside look at China’s emergent rock music subculture and its function as a vehicle for political dissent and social criticism, and, conversely, an examination of the state-controlled popular music industry’s crucial role in reinforcing official dogma.
• Profiles of China’s first rock star, Zhang Xing, and its most important contemporary musician, Cui Jian, as well as descriptions of Rea’s experiences performing with both of them.
• An account of the events that led to Rea recording an album for the state-run China Record Company that sold an unexpected 40,000 copies.
• A look at the life of a typical Chinese musician during the post-Cultural Revolution era.
• A firsthand account of Chinese rock legend Cui Jian’s debut concert in the United States.

Both a fascinating adventure story and an illuminating travelogue, Live at the Forbidden City is destined to become an important addition to its genre, given the experiences Rea recounts in a narrative that is by turns gripping and hilarious, while always providing illuminating insights about life in a culture that remains largely inaccessible to most Western minds.

"Many a fortune cookie offers the mixed blessing 'May you live in interesting times.' During some of China's more recent 'interesting times' — specifically the student protests culminating in the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989 — Dennis Rea was living in the south-western province of Sichuan, his life as a university English teacher far surpassed by his reputation as a musically omnivorous guitarist, at a time when China's own musicians were starving for nourishment...Rea dramatically chronicles the good old days, when 'underground rock parties' could actually succeed in subverting authority...a vivid account of China's recent musical past."—Songlines magazine

"Not just a travelogue, but a highly informative, detailed, analytic, erudite piece of writing."—Eugene Marlow, Professor, Baruch College, The City University of New York, and author of the forthcoming book Jazz in China

"Long before he made his name in the Northwest music scene, [Rea] undertook an amazing musical odyssey into Communist China during the late 80s and early 90s, which this book chronicles ... He was quickly catapulted into the then underground Chinese rock scene and became somewhat of a local legend and source of inspiration to a multitude of budding guitarists and musicians for whom Western rock music was a vital outlet of expressing their frustration with Communist government policies. This placed Rea in an interesting position, both as mentor and musical celebrity, but also as a thorn in the sides of party officials who looked on rock music as a decadent and corrupting influence on China's youth ... This book leaves the reader with a much better appreciation and understanding of what rock musicians in China have had to endure, but also of the startling changes that have taken place in the past 15 years. Rea can take some pleasure in having had a hand in helping these changes to come about."—Peter Thelen, Expose magazine