David Fair, who co-founded the outré punk duo Half Japanese with his brother, Jad, has died. Jad Fair posted an uncaptioned photo of the pair together on Facebook yesterday (August 30), and confirmed in a statement to Rolling Stone that David died of cancer. He was 74 years old.
The origin story of Half Japanese is as chaotic as their unpindownable music: Formed in 1974 either in Michigan or Maryland, the duo evolved from scrappy twentysomethings messing around in a bedroom for an audience of each other, to scrappy twentysomethings releasing homemade cassettes recorded while messing around in a bedroom for an audience of anyone who’d listen. After signing to the plucky British indie label Armageddon for a string of singles, the duo released debut album 1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beasts in 1980, at which point demand began to outstrip supply. The project, a 3xLP box set of debased covers, thrilling punk skirmishes, minimalist sound art, and anarchic noise, became a cult classic.
David Fair later published How to Play Guitar, a mini-manifesto that railed against guitar-playing orthodoxy and helped define a particular punk purist ethos. “If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day,” he wrote.
The ethos bore out in his brother Jad’s compositions: sweet songs about love, freaky songs about fantastical creatures, and vice versa; absurd, intertextual daydreams about more popular artists; and freeform noise blowouts sometimes supported by free-jazz musicians. For 1984’s Our Solar System, the band, then signed to the Iridescence label, began an ambling and sometimes recursive journey towards vaguely more tuneful songwriting; mid-career singles including “Futuristic Lovers” would refine their early identification with proto-punks like the Velvet Underground and Jonathan Richman, but entropy was never far behind. Ad hoc players, as well as frequent contributors such as Ricky and John Dreyfuss, moved into the group’s orbit, and during the 1980s, David retreated from its core. Nevertheless, the Fair brothers became emblems of an incorruptible underground, celebrated by the likes of Kurt Cobain, who invited them to open dates on the In Utero tour.
Jeff Feuerzeig’s definitive documentary Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King, named after their 1989 album, further cemented the band’s mythos. Half Japanese signed to Alternative Tentacles for two albums—1997’s Bone Head and 2001’s Hello, neither featuring David Fair—before a hiatus that ended when Jeff Mangum invited them to reunite for All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in 2012. Both brothers returned in 2014 for the Half Japanese reunion album Overjoyed (produced by Deerhoof’s John Dieterich), followed by a string of deep-vault reissues and archival albums for Fire Records. In the past decade, David Fair released a handful of solo and collaborative albums via Thick Syrup.
That label’s founder, Travis McElroy, wrote on Instagram, “David was one of those people who showed you that music didn’t have to follow any rules. You could just make something because you needed to make it. He was a genuinely good, one-of-a-kind human being.”
