No Business Like Show Business:A History of Selling Song

Over the past year, the most salient pop concert trend was the number of stars from the 1970s and 1980s who held revival concerts, including Ouyang Fei-fei, Fei Yu-ching, Hsieh Lei, So Yui, Feng Fei-fei, Yu Tien, Tsai Chin, Chi Yu, and most recently Jenny Tseng. One after another the old stars have all had their turn, and their packed concerts have stirred up quite a lot of nostalgia among middle-aged fans. In comparison to flash-in-the-pan young singing idols, these old singing artists with careers spanning three decades have enjoyed much more loyalty, being greeted with impassioned fan welcomes.

With these senior singers having revivals, one can't help but recall the early glory days of singing establishments in Taiwan. At first patrons would just drink a cup of tea and listen to songs, but this evolved into a growing number of dinner clubs, nightclubs and "red envelope" singing establishments. At the peak there were 200-300 venues where singers performed, found in both large cities and small towns. The singers were busy running from one show to the next, and did quite well for themselves. With so many fans willing to see them, they never feared for a lack of work but only worried about not having enough energy or time to fit all the singing dates into their busy schedules. Live performance was how singers maintained their fame and made their fortunes.

The lights go on, the singing starts

Taiwan has a long history of live performance, from simple shows held in crude tents, to fancy choreographed acts with crystal stages and catwalks, and everything in between. Audiences have changed their preferences in step with the changing times. Different audiences have had unique preferences and enjoyed special interactions with certain stars. But from applause and shouts of "bravo" or even boos, the involvement of organized crime with these singing establishments brought the sound of gunfire, so that the general public looked on with confusion: How was it that something which had started as an innocent form of entertainment could become so complicated? What was going on?

Wang Fei, famous for such hits as Shandong Mambo and Sugar Cane and Sorghum, was one of Taiwan's first generation of stars. He explains that in 1949 when the ROC government decamped for Taiwan, amid the economic turmoil people had little income, and one of the few ways they sought entertainment was to go to Yingchiao neighborhood by the Tanshui River and listen to singing at the open-air teahouses. "The venues didn't have pleasant lighting, just simple tables and chairs, but sitting there with an evening breeze at twilight, listening to the gentle singing on stage-it offered something audiences couldn't find elsewhere."

These teahouses didn't charge admission, but instead relied on the money they made from selling tea at 50 cents a cup-quite a bargain. And so at twilight, every teahouse would fill with fans of song sipping tea. There were more than 20 teahouses, and every night some 4000-5000 people would come to listen to tunes that had formerly been popular in Shanghai.

Moving their base, spreading out

Wang Fei explains that many soldiers and officials had left their homes in the mainland to come with the Nationalists to Taiwan, and they missed home and had no other way to quell the melancholy in their hearts. The sweet sounds of Mandarin songs did the trick of easing their homesickness.

Unfortunately, the music along the river banks night after night disturbed local residents, who protested the practice and complained to the police. Their protests attracted the Water Resource Bureau's attention, and eventually the order was given to prohibit people from setting up their tents here and holding live singing performances. With the tea tents taken down, the singing stars also scattered. Yet the sounds of their singing wouldn't cease. In 1955 Lienyuan, Taiwan's first indoor singing hall, opened on Taipei's Chunghua Rd. Relying on word of mouth, its business steadily improved.

Not long after, on nearby Chengdu Road, Hengyang Road, and Hsining South Road, there appeared such singing halls as Kangle, Sounds of Freedom, and Capital. The halls were small, with seating capacities of about 200 or 300. The price of admission, which included tea, ran to about NT$3-4. New stars included Kao Mei-ying, Kao Man-li, Chao Li-li and the Taiwanese Aboriginal singer Pai Na-na, who would carry the torch of live vocal performance in Taipei through a new era.

During this period, there was great turnover of venues, with halls opening up and quickly going out of business. At the peak, Taipei alone had some dozen halls, but most of them went under due to poor management. By 1958-59, only Morning Sun on Hankou Street remained.

To attract members of the public to come in and listen, Hong Kong stars were invited to perform in Taiwan. Tsui Ping, the queen of love songs, would come over for two or three months of shows at a time. Songs of hers such as Lovesick Dream, My Heart, A Face as Sweet as Honey, and Night Bells in Nanping never failed to charm audiences.

From 1960 to 1972, singing halls experienced a resurgence. Mei Tai, a singer who last year reached her 40th year in the business, relates that when the number of nightclubs exploded there weren't enough singers, so that singers with even the slightest renown might run between three to five different venues in one night, giving performances in each. This is when performers began the practice of "running to shows." Previously, performers would be based at one hall to which their fans would regularly come, and there was nothing irregular in the relationship between the performer and the music hall. But now the culture of live singing performances began to change.

Passionate fans

On October 10 (ROC National Day) in 1962, TTV commenced broadcasting and aired "A Group of Stars" produced by Shen Chih and Kuan Hua-shih. For Mandarin pop singers this marked the beginning of a new era. The ubiquity of television made audiences much more interested in singing stars and listening to music, and it made them eager to see the singers in the flesh, thus creating huge consumer demand for singing shows.

Chang Chi, who started singing professionally in 1963 and was a regular on "Group of Stars," notes that men originally made up most of the audience of singing shows, but then after television broadcasts greatly added to the name recognition of singers, the phrase "singing star" began to come into parlance, and singing halls began to advertise their "television stars." As a result they began to attract a new audience of housewives and unmarried women. Now men and women were enjoying these shows together. This represented something new.

With singing stars enjoying higher social status, their compensation also rose. Of course, this meant that audiences would have to dig deeper into their pockets. At first the basic price of a ticket to a singing hall was NT$20, which climbed to NT$50 by 1966-1967. Yet the shortage of singers still hadn't been eliminated, which meant that performers, who were running between shows, were frequently exhausted. If they didn't run themselves into the ground, then they would cancel at the spur of the moment, so that fans who had already purchased tickets would complain bitterly.

At this time, with more and more singing halls opening, the number of singing stars gradually increased. Yet simultaneously there seemed to be fewer and fewer new songs. Everyone seemed to be singing the same few songs, which made fans joke that "it seems as if every night they are holding a singing competition." Fortunately, locally grown songwriters such as Luo Ming-tao, Tzuo Hung-yuan and Liu Chia-chang, as well as lyricists such as Chuang Nu and Shen Chih arrived on the scene, so that Taiwan's Mandarin singing world, which had long relied on Hong Kong, began to stand on its own two feet. In particular, such hits as "Not Going Home Tonight" and "The Past Is Only for Reminiscing" not only established a fresh new style of homegrown Mandarin singing for Taiwan, but became popular throughout the Chinese-speaking world.

Near the knuckle

In 1971 the government mounted an austerity campaign, under which public servants were suddenly not allowed to visit singing halls. Then, with the protests of legislators and members of the old National Assembly who were themselves fans and who held that attending these shows was just another form of recreation, the ban was quickly lifted and live singing shows became even more popular than they had been before. They became one of the people's favorite means of entertainment.

"That was the golden age for singing halls," recalls Ching Shan, a singer from that era who still gives shows and frequently goes abroad to perform. All 365 days of the year, he had engagements-and not only all over Taiwan, in Southeast Asia and in Hong Kong. He even went several times to America for shows, where a Taiwanese singing star represented a box office guarantee.

With changing times, the nature of attending concerts also changed greatly. Previously, fans would buy tickets because they purely liked to listen to singing or were taken with the singing style of a particular singer, but as society grew more affluent, these simple pleasures no longer fully satisfied consumers. Producers began to jazz up these shows, matching singers with musical theater and comedy routines, and with wisecracking hosts who would interview them, making off-color jokes and doing anything for a laugh. Over the long haul, there was a tendency to go a little overboard, and singing halls became the place to go to hear bawdy jokes.

Apart from the tendency among artists to make off-color jokes, the fan base was also undergoing something of a change: there were more and more middle-aged Taiwanese fans, whose taste in songs reflected their background. Under intense competition, there appeared groups of superfans with their own favorite singers. During singing shows they would place themselves in a certain corner of the singing halls, shouting encouragement and applauding wildly when their favorite singer was on stage. Moreover, they would follow the singer to his or her next performance venue and continue to provide support there.

Under the circumstances, with different groups of partisan superfans shouting and making disturbances, most fans started to stay away.

The arrival of Taiwanese singers

Along with the growing rowdiness at singing shows, the arrival of dinner clubs had a tremendous impact on singing halls. In fact, back when the singing hall business was at its peak, Taipei's Western-style restaurants had already begun to sneak in some small-scale live performances. Usually, these featured unknown singers performing mostly Western and Taiwanese songs to simple instrumental accompaniment. At first, these performances didn't attract much notice from the singing hall proprietors, but then as the scale of these restaurant performances grew, and they began to open past their permitted hours, some undesirable types started to turn them into sex shows. This was especially the case among Western restaurants in central and southern Taiwan. These restaurants posed a great threat to singing halls, whose proprietors began complaining en masse to the authorities.

In 1975, the Taiwan Provincial Government and the Taipei City Government in rapid succession announced that they were prohibiting itinerant musical troupes from performing in restaurants, but the effect of the ban was limited. By 1977 this prohibition was widely flouted, and various Taipei singing clubs and nightclubs invited the relevant government authorities to meet and discuss this issue, making calls for them to enforce the law. Which they did-for about a month. Thereafter it seemed that on any street or alley in Taipei you could find restaurants offering live singing. But in the face of this onslaught, the singing clubs lost out.

The main point in the restaurants' favor was that they were cheaper. This was singing halls' fatal flaw. For instance, Taipei's singing hall tax took 30% off the top of ticket sales. With tickets going for NT$80, after subtracting the 30% tax and paying the performers, the singing clubs could scrape by when ticket sales were good, but once they hit a slow spell they quickly started losing money. At the time Liu Wen-cheng demanded NT$120,000 to perform three shows in a day, Feng Fei-fei and Tsui Tai-ching NT$15,000, and Ouyang Fei-fei not only demanded NT$18,000 for herself but also had her own band with their own additional charges. With all of these expenses eventually being passed on to consumers, no wonder tickets were so expensive.

What's more, Western-style restaurants were more comfortable than singing clubs and better suited the whole family. They provided food, allowing you to eat and watch at the same time, as opposed to singing clubs which only provided beverages. In 1981, there was a major turn in government policy, and the ban on restaurant performances was completely lifted. A sudden whirlwind of "restaurant shows" swept Taiwan, popping up everywhere in an incredible burst. As for the singing clubs, many of which had been in business for quite some time, a few struggled on, but the vast majority were ushered off history's stage.

Fancy sound and light shows

According to statistics provided by people in the business, at the peak there were 200-300 "restaurant show" establishments in Taiwan. Some of the largest spent huge sums on their interior design. Apart from typical sound systems and lights, they might add catwalks, rising stages, laser lights, and dry ice, as well as pianos that could run to hundreds of thousands of NT dollars. They were truly luxurious.

Before the ban on live performances in Western restaurants, most of these establishments employed folk singers who had yet to make it big. The performance costs were low. After the prohibition was lifted, the restaurants began to spend large sums to book stars, and even famous actors and actresses began to appear on their bills. Most of these were stars of popular television serials, who then struck while the iron was hot and extended their fame with these restaurant shows. The fact was, however, that quite a few of them were poor singers, and they had to rely on their fancy costumes and choreographed dancing in order to satisfy audiences' desires to "see the stars."

Apart from television actors, movie stars were also the target of those assembling the personnel for these shows. For instance, Lin Ching-hsia, Cherie Chung, Wang Tzu-hsien, Chao Ya-chih, and Fong Pao-pao found the payments alluring enough to appear in such shows. Among them, Chung Chu-hung commanded the highest fees. In 1989, she once made NT$4 million for a week of these shows, the same amount she would get for starring in a film. As the performance budgets for these shows rose, so did the price of admission, even surpassing those of the singing clubs from the previous era.

Gunfire and song

Unfortunately, the prosperity of the restaurant shows didn't last long. In 1986, Taipei's Eastern Emperor Western Restaurant, which was widely acknowledged to have the best facilities in Taiwan and to be the largest in Taipei of any of these restaurant-show establishments, couldn't turn a profit and had to close. Two months later it reopened in the area behind the Taipei Train Station, but after two shows it once again closed down, this time not to reopen. What should have been a warning sign didn't seem to frighten off others, however, for an even larger establishment of the same type opened in Taipei not long after. But it too found the business tough going, and by 1991 that this era of restaurant shows had conclusively ended.

Some critics argue that apart from their high ticket prices, these shows went the way of the dinosaurs because of the limited appeal of the performers who would perform the same tired offerings night after night. The hosts were the worst offenders, repeating the same old jokes ad nauseam. It completely lacked freshness: after seeing one of these shows, you had seem them all. And in fact, beginning in 1985 videos of these shows were widely available. With these high-priced shows available on videos that you could rent cheaply and watch in the comfort of your own home, and with the over-exposure of the performers, these shows soon lost their appeal.

What's more, criminal gangs began to control many of the venues, and related incidents were the subject of frequent unflattering press reports. Because of an underworld disagreement, gang leader Yang Shuang-wu shot and injured singer Kao Ling-feng at one such establishment in Kaohsiung. The incident shocked Taiwan, and many started to view these places as dens of iniquity. Attendance fell markedly.

Awaiting a revival

As the air of luxury associated with restaurant shows faded, "red envelope halls," which specialized in serving the fans of old singing stars, began to appear. These venues specialized in assuaging old folks' loneliness. Old tunes such as "Hating Him for Those Years of Neglect," "My Thoughts of Missing You Go Out to the Far-Off Moon," and "Foolishly Waiting," among others, stirred these senior citizens' nostalgia for years gone by. Their customers were mostly retired elected officials, high-level police officers, military officers and public servants-a diverse collection of talent but mostly mainlanders who fled to Taiwan with the Nationalist government.

What really attracted audiences to these "red envelope halls" was that the singers would frequently come down off the stage to engage in small talk with the audience and receive tips in red envelopes from the customers. Every flattering comment and every red envelope represented a conveyance of affection. Whether or not these affections were sincere is another matter altogether, but they were an important part of the subjective culture of these music halls. According to newspaper reports, during the mid-1980s, red envelope halls across the island were packing in more than 300,000 customers a day, and the number of such establishments rose to nearly 20.

Unfortunately, the happy days didn't last long. When the government allowed people to visit families on the mainland, many of these halls' customers took their savings to spend on their families in mainland China. The mainland's gain was these halls' loss, as their customers had less money to spread around. Moreover, the number of retired civil servants who loved these old songs gradually declined as well, and as they did these halls faded into history.

Whether listening to songs in the open air under a bridge, or to performances in singing halls, restaurants or "red envelope halls," the era of live singing performances in Taiwan appears to be over. Yet in the past year a large number of senior singing stars have reappeared to sing in fancy stage shows, attracting many old fans to come out and root them on. Does this suggest that live singing performances are making a comeback in Taiwan? Only time will tell.