Fu Lao, named Fu Ke, a free musician, has his own style, and his representative works include "Happy Hometown", "For You", "Spring Blossoms", "Happiness Forever" and so on. He lived a simple and low-key life, studying Zhou Yi, Buddhism and Chinese medicine in his spare time. When we talk about the high mountains of his musical attainments and the depth and remoteness of his realm of life, we call him floating old; when we talk about the untidy, passing and outdated nature of his daily life, we call him old and old.
We all graduated from the Department of Physics of Zhengzhou University, and we are both musicians from science and engineering. After years and years, creation and making people, ghosts make God send us all choose to put down the soldering iron and pick up the guitar.
There is a phenomenon in the department of physics at Zheng University that is difficult to explain with the theory of physics, that is, every four to five years there will be a musician. We musicians dressed in the cloak of science and engineering men live in the science boys' dormitory building all day long, go to the science district canteen to eat, and go to the ladder classroom to "Analog Circuits", "Ordinary Differential Equations" and "Assembly Language", but there is another universe hidden in the mind. We are like aliens disguised as earthlings in science fiction movies, with three heads and six arms under human skin, colorful; we are like winter melons mixed in the watermelon field, the vines are secretly connected, and there is a mysterious code that is passed down through the air.
The teacher who recruited me into the Zhengda Electroacoustic Band at that time was also from the Physics Department, and was a student of the floating old man, and on the basis of generations, I should call the floating old man a master.
Floating old people do not like to go out, all metabolism is completed in their own twenty square meters of studio, including work, chatting, counting, chanting, consultation, daze, smoking, drinking and so on. His workbench is surrounded on three sides, in a C-shaped distribution, densely packed with various machines, which have various screens, various switches, and various knobs. Floating old like a dumpling filling coiled in the "C" card slot, eyes blank, expressionless, hands between switches and knobs, as if driving a complex and sophisticated spaceship through the door of time and space. At this time, the floating old man was only a straight uniform between the captain of the spaceship.
However, Lao Fu never had a straight uniform. His costumes are dominated by fleece, sweaters, jeans, and T-shirts with factory advertisements. The distribution of the color system is basically black, light gray, earth yellow, indigo and dark brown. Lao Fu used this animal-like protective color dressing technique to successfully hide himself in the sea of crowds and the enemy was difficult to distinguish.
Lao Fu does not like to attend strangers' parties. On such occasions, he would be slow-witted and helpless, and he would always be on the defensive side watching the fire between the others. In all the party photos, the old-fashioned look is always at the very edge of the photo, and the look is about to leave immediately after taking this photo.
Although we were in the same school, a department, but during the school period, I did not see fu lao, because I was seven years later than him, when I entered the school, he was long gone from school, I could only get some sporadic legends about him from the 86 and 87 seniors.
The first time I saw Fu Lao was in Beijing in the summer of 2000.
At that time, I was a rock and roll youth who didn't look good, carrying two guitars and dragging a box to Beijing, and inside the box was a stack of CDs with more than a dozen original works that were about to rewrite the history of Chinese rock music. I shared a two-bedroom apartment with two IT boys in Zizhuqiao, and then I took out the address books of major record companies in Beijing prepared at home and delivered my music seeds to them one by one. I lay on the floor of the rental house, fantasizing about the record company boss signing a contract with me and hugging me warmly, fantasizing about my album being snapped up in the video store, fantasizing about my fans fainting from overexcitement offstage, being carried out of the scene by the security guards...
But half a month passed, and not a single 010 caller on my pager called me.
At that time, I had gone from vowing to being suspicious, muttering in my heart: Is the pager number on my resume left wrong...
Finally a 010 called me, I grabbed a steel hammer and rushed to the public phone downstairs on the side of the road.
"Hey, I'm XXXX Records, are you Hou Jian?"
"Hey, Wocao, how come the boss of this record company has a Shandong accent?"
I muttered to myself in my heart, and my mouth quickly agreed:
"Yes, yes, yes, it's me, I'm Hou Jian."
"I see that your resume says that you graduated from the physics department of Zheng University, do you know Fuke?"
"I know, but I don't know, because he's my teacher's teacher...
"I know Fuk, he's in Beijing...
The dude, who speaks Shandong Mandarin, is not the boss of a record company, his name is Zhang Lianchun, and he is the only employee of the record company. My original works that are about to rewrite the history of Chinese rock music have not been adopted by their company, because Zhang Lianchun's original works that are about to rewrite the history of Chinese rock music are more than mine. His hometown of Linqing, Shandong, drifted south to Guangzhou to meet The Floating Elder, and then drifted north to Beijing with the Floating Elder on his front and back feet. Because we have not been able to successfully rewrite the history of Chinese rock music, we often get together to drink and scold the mother later, sighing that we have not met, bad luck, good cabbage has let the pig arch, and good songs have let the pig sing.
Scolding the mother is tired, always have to do something serious, Lian Chun said: I will introduce you to the floating old man. I said: Then I will let you write a letter to the floating old man first.
The letter begins with this:
Teacher Fu, hello, I am also a graduate of the Department of Physics of Zheng University, I am a student of your students...
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The first time I saw Fu Lao, I talked to him all night. In the first half of the night I told him about my original work about to rewrite the history of Chinese rock music, and he listened to a few songs, then withdrew the CD from the optical drive and said, "I really can't listen to it, listen to me"; in the second half of the night, he listened to his original works that he had never published, one after another until the sky was getting dark. In the morning, bidding farewell to the floating old, I walked along the West Third Ring Road from Suzhou Bridge back to the rental house of Zizhu Bridge. In the summer heat of 2000 in Beijing, I completely dispelled the idea of rewriting the history of Chinese rock music in the early morning heat wave in Beijing, planning to go back to sleep first, and after waking up, I began to practice well.
Since then, I've stopped being a rock 'n' roll youth who doesn't look good at anything. I quietly learned to look like an old man, a craftsman who made a living by writing notes, and a hard-working music migrant worker.
Lao Fu was born in the countryside of northern Henan in the 1960s, during the most turbulent and barren period in China, when he was hungry as a child. As a city kid born in the 1970s, I can't imagine the feeling of starvation, Lao Fu said: The taste he hates most is starvation. Perhaps for this reason, until now, Lao Fu still lives a very simple life, smoking ten yuan a pack of cigarettes, drinking dozens of yuan a bottle of wine, and going to the most ordinary dumpling restaurant, Sichuan restaurant to eat. According to his words, eating expensive things is too much of a waste of money.
Life in The North Drift is turbulent and confused. I didn't insist on going home for long, because there were buddies in Zhengzhou who called me back to open a company; Fu Lao came to Beijing from Guangzhou and never left again, perhaps since he left home to go to school in Zhengzhou as a teenager, he had long been accustomed to the life of drifting south and north, where there was work to do, where there was song to write, where to go, just like the nomads on the grassland dragging the accounting room, taking their wives and children, driving cattle and sheep, chasing the abundant grass all the way to migrate. In the process, he grew older little by little, gained weight a little, and went from dry and lean to greasy little by little. I don't know whether the happy hometown in his heart that can be reached through the troubled river is these huge cities with abundant grass, or the northern Henan countryside that made him hungry when he was a child.
I remember the summer heat in Beijing in 2000, the air conditioner of the old floating Suzhou Bridge rental house was always leaking, I took a washbasin underneath, but always forgot to pour, so, the CDs on his bookshelf, as well as his awards, certificates will suffer from floods from time to time.
I asked Lao Fu:
"Why don't we find a worker to repair it?"
The old man stared out the window through the thick velvet curtains, and groaned for a long time and said:
"Summer is almost over."
From left to right: Zhang Lianchun, Fuke, Hou Jian