Rock’s home of the brave

"The sound technician at our first show was a junkie, and apparently was too high to manage the sound levels. But even that show wasn't our worst experience," said Helen Feng of her first show in Austin, Texas, last week.

She and her electro band, Nova Heart, joined six other acts from Beijing's underground scene in touring the US this month, most heading to South By Southwest (SXSW), the Texan capital's week-long mega music festival.

The event is best described as a musical Occupy movement, with thousands of hungry bands vying for the attention of the music industry's top 1 percent. In the festival's scramble, every vacant space is crammed with a band.

"This whole city is rock'n'roll," said Lucifer, lead singer for party rock band Rustic, who just returned from checking out legendary rock group The Jesus And Mary Chain.

"Everyone's a musician and everything is a performance of some kind," he said of the festival. "We played this outdoor show and when we got onstage, everybody was playing tennis around us. It turned out we were playing on a tennis court, and it was a lot of fun."

Rockin' rite of passage

The first approved Chinese rock mission to the US was headed by Cui Jian in 1995, and though the novelty of a Chinese rocker's five-date tour garnered wide coverage in the American press, the majority of his audience remained overseas Chinese and Chinese-Americans, ecstatic at the chance to see him beyond Beijing.

Nearly 20 years later, a squad of Chinese bands are scattered across the country, showing how the times and tunes have changed. Bands hitting the road include US tour veterans Re-Tros and Carsick Cars, as well as first timers Shanren and Deadly Cradle Death.

However, unlike Cui Jian's landmark visit, there is no entourage, no fanfare and no interviews on CNN. Over the past decade, a steady trickle of Beijing bands has toured the US, and the idea of a Chinese band rocking on guitars is no longer a draw at a festival with bands from all over the world.

"We are an unsigned band from China with no previous experience in the US, so it can be pretty humbling," said Feng. "Maybe that worked a few years ago when people did it for the first time, but the people who were interested in China are now either moving on or already have established resources in China, so they're not fishing."

With SXSW wrapping up on Sunday, some of the Middle Kingdom's army of musicians have already taken to the open road and scattered across the country. Many interviewed by the Global Times likened the experience of touring the US as a "sacred pilgrimage."

Surviving 'band boot camp'

"We get pumped on rock'n'roll in our rented car, play guitar on the side of the road, talk about girls, drink beer and check out other bands that we like," Lucifer explained.

"On one of our days off, we went to Strawberry Fields [in New York's Central Park] to pay our respects to John Lennon," said Qu Zihan, frontman of ethnic folk rock quintet Shanren (literally "Mountain Men"). His band skipped SXSW, instead opting to tour the eastern US. "Being a Chinese band on an American tour, driving through the South, sleeping in motels - it's almost like being a movie."

But not all tours are Hollywood fairy tales.

Most Chinese bands find touring very different from home. They lug around their own equipment, deal with indifferent promoters, travel on shoestring budgets and try to win over jaded audiences at sink-or-swim concerts.

"It's band boot camp," described Feng. "We knew it would be hard, and it is. We didn't have any prior delusions of grandeur. Now, things are even harder cause there's more bands and less money to go around."

Stars and gripes

Even if the tours haven't delivered stardom, they have proved a valuable litmus test showing how China's domestic music scene stacks up against the US. "We've found that our live music scene isn't bad at all. China has a lot of good bands. We should have more confidence in our own local musical culture," said Qu.

"There's better public transportation between the cities and cabs are cheaper," Feng said of touring in China. "A lot of Chinese venues are better than more than half of the places we've played in the US."

Above all, the antics and character-building experiences attached to US tours make the pilgrimage worthwhile. They also serve as the breeding ground for countless memorable stories.

"The worst [show] we played was for this student co-op association," recalled Feng. "The place stank of beer and puke because they hadn't cleaned it from a party the night before. College students wanted a punk band, and some guy actually shouted: 'they don't have live drums, I don't care for this s***,' and walked out before we had even started our sound check."

The few revelers who hung around, Feng added, walked out halfway into the band's opening song. "They applauded then walked out. Despite my personal feelings about that show, the other band members actually liked it," she said. Lucifer was less revealing, keeping the "what happens on tour, stays on tour" code of honor.

"The biggest difference between touring China and the US? The US is way more fun!" he raved.