It's time to take stock of the cultural and artistic circles of Nanchang and even Jiangxi in the 1980s and 1990s!
For a period of time, some so-called "inner rolls", "lying flat" and "non-existence" filled our eyeballs and eardrums. The more this is the case, the more people recall the colorful times we had here thirty or forty years ago.
In fact, since its inception, the weekly magazine "Hongchengli" has successively done special topics such as the old factory and mine propaganda team, the old business circle, and the old factory. Today, we set our sights on the fields of literature and art, because in those days we were at one point in a position to dominate.
From a large number of young and passionate poets to writers who have made an impact throughout the country, from a group of amateur but tireless modernist painters to artists who have won awards in various competitions in China or in six provinces and one city in East China from time to time, from musicians and musicians tempered in the song hall culture that is far earlier and hotter than Changsha to the famous "Jiangxi Corps" of Chinese pop music. There are also film and television drama creation, dance and rock, which is really an era of fireworks and poetry, a precious era!
Youth and innocence gave that era, and openness and inclusiveness created that era.
Simple, ideal, pure, uplifting, nostalgic.
In this issue, let's first talk about the pop music in Nanchang at that time, talk about the song hall culture at that time, and those people and things! Please come with me and we are back in the 80s!
"Voice of hearts" song journal
●Narrator: Wu Songjin
The "Voice of the Heart" song magazine published by the Jiangxi Musicians Association was founded in 1981, and Wu Songjin, who was 35 years old at the time, served as the editor of the "Voice of the Heart".
In the inaugural issue of Voice of the Heart, "Country Road" was published on the back cover. Publishing popular songs from Taiwan in mainland music magazines was one of the first people to eat crabs in Jiangxi. In the year of the founding of "Voice of hearts", the number of subscriptions nationwide exceeded 20,000 copies, and until Wu Songjin left Jiangxi for Guangzhou in 1987, the circulation reached 120,000 copies. What is the concept of this number? It is the first circulation of music magazines in the country.
"Voice of hearts" song team
Because of the "Voice of the Heart" song journal, the editorial department and Sheng Fenglin, the leader of the Jiangxi Provincial Vocal Music Society, also organized and set up a heart song team at that time, so that young local singers and music lovers had the opportunity to sing the published songs, broadcast through radio stations, hold heart concerts, etc., turning the silent song score into sound dissemination, and thus cultivating a large number of local talents who sang popular songs. For example, Luo Hong, who was a student at Nanchang No. 7 Middle School at the time, later became an authoritative teacher of popular singing at Xinghai Conservatory of Music, and he trained students such as Zhou Bichang.
Lyrics are published in schools
The lyrics school is a correspondence study based on "Voice of the Heart", which recruited hundreds of students across the country that year, and was taught by Jiangxi lyricists such as Lin Xiangyi, Gan Liulin, Chen Deming, and Wang Shilan. Teaching is based on the method of correspondence, sending teaching materials to students once a month, and sending teaching materials 6 times a year. Once a month, the teacher helps the students to correct the homework, that is, the lyrics they write, and a teacher is responsible for 50 students, sending a letter every month to help them correct.
During the summer vacation, the school also held face-to-face classes in Lushan, inviting students to Lushan and taking classes in Lushan face to face. Among the students of the School of Heart Voice Lyrics Publication came out many well-known lyricists in the country, such as the car dealership that wrote "Often Go Home to See" and "Good Day", when he was an amateur author in Mudanjiang City. There is a famous lyricist and musician Fan Xiaobin, who wrote "Good People And Good Dreams" and "Borrowing Five Hundred Years from Heaven", when he was a Chinese teacher at Jingkou Middle School in Nanchang County. In addition, there are Luo Xiaohang, Chen Buchun, Yu Minglong and many other well-known songwriters in various provinces across the country, who have attended the Heart Lyrics Publishing School.
Loose-leaf song pieces
In 1984, the first Hong Kong and Taiwan singer Zhang Mingmin sang the song "My Chinese Heart" at the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, which immediately swept the country and became a major event affecting Chinese pop music. At that time, the editorial department of "Voice of heart" immediately launched a set of loose-leaf songs, including "My Chinese Heart", "Childhood", "If The Wine Is Sold Without" songs that became popular on the spring evening of CCTV.
Loose-leaf song pieces are made about the same size as the villain book, each set is folded into 48 small versions by a full open paper, there are 16 pages, one pulled open, which has more than a dozen or twenty of the most popular songs. Each sheet sells for 5 cents, and a set of 4 tickets is two cents.
"At that time, we clipped a promotional advertisement for a loose-leaf song in the "Voice of hearts" song journal, and it turned out to be crazy. Remittance slips for loose-leaf songs from all over the country flew like snowflakes, and at first they took a school bag, packed a lot of remittance slips to the post office to get money, and then used sacks to pack remittance slips. ”
Nanchang's first music café
●Narrator: Wu Songjin, Tan Yaojun
In 1983, the manager of Dongfang Hong, the largest state-run restaurant in Nanchang at that time, was worried that the catering industry would have no business every year during the Spring Festival. Therefore, Wu Songjin suggested that the music café that had just emerged in Guangzhou at that time, which was only open to foreigners in foreign-related hotels, should be moved to Nanchang. "We opened on the day of the Lantern Festival in 1983 and found a lot of local singers in Nanchang who sang pop songs, including members of the heart song team. The tickets are like 3 dimes, two pieces of peach crisps in a plate plus a cup of tea, you can sit there and listen to the pop song performance for more than two hours. ”
At that time, in the music café of nanchang Dongfanghong Restaurant, Tan Yaojun, a student from the music department of Jiangxi Normal University, was the most popular pillar. He can play and sing by himself, and the singing style is particularly popular, and he has a lot of fans. The band playing live included Dong Qilin, the captain of the Nanchai Propaganda Team who can play guitar, Fu Qiang, an electronic organist, and more than a dozen people who can play various instruments such as trumpets and saxophones, and set up a light music team called The Sound of Spring, and the performance unit is called the Spring Sound Light Music Troupe.
This is the earliest pop music performance in Nanchang. However, the music café was too advanced at that time, and it was forced to close in less than two months.
Light music played with the piano on the grass of Bayi Square
● Narrator: Wei Rong
At first, people didn't know much about electroacoustic instruments. So, at that time, there was a term called "light music". The Nanchang Song and Dance Troupe created a light music team earlier in the country that year, and Wei Rong was the guitarist of that year.
Their performances are very popular. At that time, once when they went to Guangzhou to perform, their Hawaiian guitar playing even the colleagues of the Guangzhou Military Region Soldiers' Song and Dance Troupe specially went to observe it.
In Nanchang, the bayi square lawn in the 1980s and 1990s is a lot of people's memories! Everyone sat on the floor and sat cool, chatting, sucking screws, and spending the night. There are also a large group of guitar lovers and pop music lovers like Wei Rong, Tan Yaojun, Dong Qilin and so on, who will also sit in a circle, and you play and sing, just like the "rolling piano" in the north that we have seen in movies and TV series. At that time, Nanchang had such an atmosphere and soil, and a group of musicians appeared, which provided a solid foundation for the vigorous song hall culture of that year.
The country's most profitable song hall host is in Nanchang
● Narrator: Camel chop
The prosperity of the Nanchang Song Hall predates Changsha. The cabaret at that time evolved entirely from a dance hall. From the original whole scene, everyone danced like a dumpling, and it became a song and dancing interspersed. The original accompaniment band plus several young male and female singers sang the popular songs of the year, and people could listen to the songs or dance while listening to the songs, and the forms were diversified. As for the skits going into the cabaret, it was already in the mid-1990s.
Camel platoon originally sang, but he found that male singers were not very popular in the dance hall, and he grew up as a head of the Jiangxi Provincial Drama Troupe, and he learned to speak with his uncles and aunts in the troupe, so he chose to transform into a host in the dance hall. Because at that time, everyone was no longer satisfied with the general performance curtain form, and it was necessary to have a role in the stage. Camel row was the best host in the Nanchang song and dance hall at that time, very rhythmic, can control the scene, which he was the host, that dance hall is almost the hottest business.
In the era of Nanchang or "ten thousand yuan households", the daily income of camels is already very good, and there are quite a few people in the Nanchang Song and Dance Hall who have become high-income people. They also brought the unique song features of the Nanchang Song and Dance Hall to Zhejiang, Guangdong, Fujian and other places, and the highest point song fee in Wenzhou reached more than 100,000 yuan. Later, some Nanchang people went to the Wenzhou Song and Dance Hall to find work, and people asked if they knew the camel row, as long as they said that they knew it, they were hired, which showed the fame of the camel row in Wenzhou at that time.
In other words, remember that before the song piece appeared, almost everyone would have a hand-copied songbook?
Spend money on songs
Camel Pai clearly remembers that the song hall in Nanchang began to appear around 1989, and he was also involved in the discussion of this matter. At that time, the song and dance hall in Fujian began to have a program to send flowers, but instead of ordering songs, the Nanchang people introduced it into a song to send flowers, allowing guests to write songs, amounts and wishes on the song list.
But in fact, guests often write down in the wish column to give to so-and-so very simply, and the rest depends on the host to observe the color and play on the spot. The language should be full of passion, mobilize the atmosphere of the whole audience, let the guests have a lot of face, and other guests who are infected will also follow the order. When encountering two different groups of guests "choking", the host must not only maintain the heat of the "fire" of both sides, but also grasp the fire just right, and cannot let the guests make a fight.
Nanchang's song started from the initial song of 5 yuan, and later the highest tens of thousands of yuan to order a song, stirring up the entire market. And dance halls in other parts of the country do not have such a form of song. It's a bit like today's live tipping. However, in addition to the sweet mouth of the female singer who sings, she must have two brushes in the singing art. And after the men who are in the audience give so much real money every night, at most they may dance a song with their favorite singer in public, and if they can go out for a supper together, it is already a big face.
Deng Chongjiu
●Narrator: Camel Row, Wei Rong
When it comes to nanchang song hall culture, Deng Chongjiu is a figure that cannot be avoided no matter what.
Camel Pai said that the first time he watched Deng Chongjiu perform was in the Workers' Cultural Palace, and Deng Chongjiu played and sang everything, which was very popular with the audience.
Camel Pai commented that Deng Chongjiu was a "strange master" who dared to perform, he seemed to be a person born for the stage, this self-taught man from the original Jiangtuo propaganda team stood on the stage and dared to do anything. For example, when singing "Tears in the Iron Window", he puts himself in a cage to perform, the audience throws something into the cage, throws a banana and eats it; in the gym, Chaplin, he throws his shoes between the audience, and when the shoes are thrown, he takes off his socks and throws them; the audience drinks beer in the dance hall, and he walks over and pours the wine on his head. Deng Chongjiu's gag-style performance was very popular with the audience when there was no Zhao Benshan and the two turned at that time. Although Deng Chongjiu liked to talk about passages, he never talked about yellow paragraphs.
Deng Chongjiu led his performance team to perform in various dance halls in Nanchang, and almost all the singers who later became famous in Nanchang had followed Deng Chongjiu, such as Luo Qi, Yang Yuying, Zhou Liang and so on. When Deng Zhongjiu took Yang Yuying to perform in the Poyang Lake Hotel, he would let a band guy ride a bicycle every day to be responsible for pick-up, and once accidentally threw Yang Yuying into a puddle on a heavy rainy day, Deng Zhongjiu knew and blamed the guy fiercely. Deng Chongjiu loves the singer very much, and in order to persuade the singer to perform, he can squat in front of the other party's door every day.
In 2005, Deng Chongjiu was killed in a car accident, and hundreds of Nanchang showbiz people spontaneously organized a memorial service to mourn him. People say that Deng Chongjiu has experienced three eras from dance halls, song halls to nanchang song and dance halls of performing arts style, nanchang's dance hall culture, Deng Chongjiu is both a founder and a supporter of this jianghu, he does not keep old, keeps pace with the times, and creates a lot of things on the stage.
Pickpocket
Wei Rong, who works as a musician in the Nanchang Dance Hall, has another specialty, that is, picking tape. The so-called pickpocket is to decompose the melody and accompaniment of those popular music through the simple brick recorder commonly known as the "box cannon" and record it into a simple score or musical score.
"I can listen to music and write down the score, not only the main theme of the music, but also what the synthesizer is playing, what the drums are playing, what the guitar is playing, and all the instruments are written down." At that time, in the song and dance hall in Nanchang, many of the scores were written down through Wei Rong and then used by the musicians of the band. The score written by the tape method and then let the band accompany it, it is very similar to the original version, which is much better.
Wei Rong did his best job of picking tapes in Nanchang, listening to a tape with a tape recorder, and he had to listen to it countless times back and forth, and it took almost a few hours to complete the score of a song. In that era of reform and opening up, weak copyright awareness and even completely poor communication, the pickpocket allowed the band to successfully play popular songs, which greatly strengthened the performance level of Nanchang musicians and cultivated a group of good musicians in Jiangxi. Even in the whole country, to find a few people with skills like Wei Rong, you have to wear lanterns.
Liu Wenzheng in the mainland
●Narrator: Tan Yaojun
Liu Wenzheng, the superstar of the Heavenly King at that time, was once the idol of two generations, and there was no one.
Talking about the "Jiangxi Corps" in the Guangdong music scene at that time, the first thing that came to mind was Yang Yuying. But the first to gain a foothold in Guangdong and be known as the first generation of pop singers in the mainland was Tan Yaojun of Nanchang.
He is actually from the bel canto class of the Music Department of Jiangxi Normal University, and is a rare bass in China. However, the ghost made God send, and when he was still studying, he was invited by Wu Songjin to guangzhou to record several songs, and was favored by the Guangzhou White Swan Audio and Video Company, which was in the sky at that time, and became a pop singer.
From 1984 to 1989, it is said that Tan Yaojun recorded hundreds of cassettes and personal albums with twenty or thirty discs. At that time, Guangzhou dominated the inland pop music, and Tan Yaojun was the first group of singers in the country to go to Guangzhou to develop. The original Guangzhou White Swan Audio-Visual Company was supported by tan Yaojun and Li Lingyu, two singers, and the first album released by the White Swan Audio-Visual Company was Tan Yaojun. Later, Na Ying, Li Chunbo, Mao Ning, this group of singers have gone south one after another, and many people were on the scene when they tried to sing.
Many of tan Yaojun's tapes recorded in Guangzhou are cover songs of Liu Wenzheng, such as "The Station of Life" and "Little Secrets", but all the songs that Liu Wen just listened to, Tan Yaojun sang, and has the title of "Liu Wenzheng in the mainland" in the Guangzhou recording studio.
The tapes recorded by Tan Yaojun sold well throughout the country at that time, and basically sold more than one million copies. Front-line singers like him were paid between $200 and $300 to record a song (there was no concept of royalties at the time). At that time, he was also invited to commercial performances, and the appearance fee of a few hundred yuan was also very high in the 1980s.
Once, the Jiangxi Provincial Music Association held a concert at the Jiangxi Film Theater on Supu Road at that time, and the last to appear was a famous singer who sang "Our Tomorrow is Sweeter than Honey" and "The Dawn is Ahead". Tan Yaojun, who sang in the penultimate stage, was too popular with the audience and sang 9 songs in one breath while playing the guitar. Looking back on the past, Tan Yaojun said that at that time, he was young and did not understand the rules, the theater was crowded with people, and the atmosphere was extremely warm, but the singer teacher was anxious enough to choke, and kept walking back and forth on the side of the stage.
Unfortunately, for some reason, Tan Yaojun was unable to go down the road of pop music. So that famous musicians like Bi Xiaoshi, Chen Xiaoqi, Li Haiying, Wu Songjin, and Laozai still have some regrets to this day, thinking that with his natural magnetic voice and singing skills, it will be another Han Lei.
"Jiangxi Corps"
The first generation of singers of the "Jiangxi Legion" is Tan Yaojun and Wang Hongbo, followed by Wang Yan, the little lark of Lushan, and sister flowers such as Huang Lian, Huang Tian, Yan Hong, and Yan Jun. Zhang Yanjun (later renamed Zhang Beining) and Yang Yuying were classmates, singing well, looking very beautiful, and playing the electronic keyboard, and later married the Olympic gymnastics champion Li Xiaoshuang.
In 1990, Yang Yuying was taken to Guangzhou by Wu Songjin, just in time for the beginning of the Chinese music scene. Wu Songjin said that in 1990, there were only two singers who were re-promoted in the country, Yang Yuying in Guangzhou and Ai Jing in Beijing. Yang Yuying's first album was a cover of Han Baoyi's song called "90 Han Baoyi", and in 1991, she launched the original song album "Blessing for Love". Ai Jing launched "My 1997" in Beijing. "In terms of popularity, Ai Jing is not as good as Yang Yuying, and now Ai Jing has long disappeared, but Yang Yuying is still active and still so beautiful."
Zhou Liang, with Wu Songjin's "Is It SnowIng There" and "Girl's Mind You Don't Guess", appeared on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, and his popularity soared. But she is a very personality of the clear stream singer, when many rich bosses pursued her, there was a Fujian toy factory owner to build her a bright doll house, she did not want, nor agreed to the other party's pursuit. Zhou Liang refused all kinds of temptations around her, and the husband who finally married was the first love boyfriend who picked her up every night when she sang in the Nanchang Dance Hall.
Wu Songjin said that at that time, compared with other provinces in the country, jiangxi singers like Tan Fangbing, Jin Ling, zhu Hanfang, and the number of Jiangxi singers who developed in Guangzhou were among the best. The singing strength of the "Jiangxi Legion" is definitely not inferior to that of singers in other provinces, even if it is not worse than that of Guangzhou. The first song of "Baqiao Liu" was Wang Hongbo from Jiangxi, and Zhang Mi learned this song after listening to Wang Hongbo's small samples. Wu Songjin laughed at himself at that time, he was like a "human trafficker", sending all the good singers in Jiangxi to Guangzhou and the whole country, "Why I pushed Jiangxi singers so vigorously is also because the singers who were launched were all very good and very competitive." I pushed them to the whole country, and I also pushed my own work to the audience across the country. Of course, Wu Songjin also has regrets, his "Jiangxi Legion" could have had more singers developed well, but many people sacrificed their careers for love and chose to quit the music scene halfway.
Some of you know this turbulent history, some of you know it, and some of you know more than we know. We didn't want to be too nagging, so plain and blunt, so plain that we didn't even want to put an old photo.
Because, that day, is Nanchang, is the day when Jiangxi has a pivotal position in the domestic music circle. No need to elevate the trim!
In the next issue, we will talk about literature, poetry and painting, and the bars on Bayi Avenue. Stay tuned!
Shining days, farewell years!