Shin Joong Hyun: South Korea's psychedelic mimic turned master
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/sep/15/shin-joong-hyun-korean-psychedelic
He learned American pop via a hand-built radio, became a psychedelic pop star
in his own right, then was tortured by South Korea's dictatorship. Meet the
remarkable Shin Joong Hyun
• Stevie Chick
• September 2011
It was in 1957, at the spring variety show at the Eighth US Army base in Seoul,
that Shin Joong Hyun gave his first public performance. The 19-year-old had
lived through Japanese rule, the subsequent division of Korea into two warring
states, and the US "police action" that followed. The Harmony guitar he
strummed had been paid for by many hours' toil at a relative's pharmaceutical
factory. At the variety show, as girl dancers gyrated for the entertainment of
American GIs, Shin played standards and showtunes: tame material for a boy who
worshiped Elvis and Charlie Parker.
He'd developed his passion for western music via American Forces Korea Network.
"I ended up building my own radio to listen to American music," he says. "It
had poor reception and terrible static, but I was just happy that I was able to
listen to music. I thought jazz was simply amazing. But, honestly, I enjoyed
any music that was played on AFKN.
"During my first performance, the GIs were shouting, 'Hey shorty! Play guitar
solo!'" remembers Shin, who duly asked his bandleader for permission. "He gave
me this sheet music book and told me to practise … I played my first guitar
solo during my next performance: the crowd went wild, and the bandleader raised
my wage by 50%."
The following year, Shin cut his first records, covers of Korean pop. His own
tastes remained attuned to the west, however. "I remember the first time I
heard the Beatles. I was mesmerised by their sound: it was blissful. I tried to
mimic them with my four-piece, ADD4 ."
Shin's pseudo-Merseybeat quartet failed to find success in the Korean market.
His embrace of psychedelia would prove a turning point a couple of years later,
however, when his new group, Club Date, performed Jefferson Airplane's Somebody
to Love live on Korean television, to instant acclaim.
AFKN had clued Shin into the psychedelic sounds then emanating from the US. "I
mimicked their music, visuals and sounds without fully understanding what it
was," he admits. "Later, I was playing a 'psychedelic' song and some American
hippies – antiwar protesters – came to listen. I became friends with them, and
they taught me what psychedelic music really was. They also gave me LSD."
After hearing Somebody to Love, local singing duo the Pearl Sisters approached
him for creative guidance. Their single Nimah subsequently topped the charts in
Korea, and Shin recast himself as a successful performer, producer, songwriter
and svengali.
This career is essayed by an excellent new compilation, Beautiful Rivers and
Mountains: The Psychedelic Rock Sound of Shin Joong Hyun 1958-1974. It collects
choice nuggets of Motown-styled pop (I Don't Like), deep soul (Spring Rain),
melancholic folk-pop (The Sun) and Hendrixian acid-rock (J Blues 72).
"It was the most beautiful time of my life," says Shin. But it wasn't to last.
In 1972, at the height of his career, the South Korean government requested
Shin pen an ode to President Park Chung-Hee and his ruling Republican Party.
Shin refused the dictatorship's request; soon, he was blacklisted within South
Korea 's music industry and his songs banned. Arrested for possession of
marijuana in 1975, he was tortured in prison and incarcerated in a psychiatric
hospital. "I was miserable. I had no motivation for anything," he says now, of
those years of silence.
With Park's assassination in 1979, Shin's gloom began to lift. His music
enjoyed a renaissance in South Korea in the 1990s, and in 2008, five decades
after Shin first switched on to American pop via his home-built wireless, he
finally performed in the US, at the Korean Music festival at the Hollywood Bowl
.
"Words can't describe how I feel," he says with a smile, of the acclaim the new
compilation has already enjoyed. "I still can't believe people listen to my
music across the world."
.
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