Zhi Hu Zhe Ye
Our first record was a joint effort by Wu Chu Chu, Michelle Pan, and Lily Lee called Three Person Show that sold moderately well, but didn't earn much of anything. Then, in 1982, we released Luo Ta-you's Zhi Hu Zhe Ye, a mix of rock music and social commentary that earned great reviews and had excellent sales.
To tell the truth, at the outset, we had no idea what Rock would become because we didn't yet have any real understanding of the music business. We were just fooling around doing something we enjoyed. I still had a job, and at one point was feeling so worn out that I wanted to give up the business. Wu and Peng left Rock in August 1982, and established their own label: UFO Records.
Michelle Pan's Forever Blue Sky album, which also came out around this time, sold so well that we couldn't keep up with orders. We would spend all night packaging up records, practically living at the office, then rush out at dawn to deliver them. Sam and I finally quit our jobs in 1983 to focus entirely on Rock. Taiwan's economy was just beginning to take off, and it was a great time to start a business. We grabbed our chance.
But cassette tapes were the real key. The Japanese introduced the personal cassette player in 1979. Without the Walk-man, the world's music industry would never have made the money it did. The technology changed the way people listened to music. The hardware drove the software, spurring people to buy cassettes. As long as companies took their record-making seriously, every-thing they put out sold.
Q: You went from advertising and Western pop music to Mandopop. What were the key early records for you?
A: The first several albums Rock put out made the strongest impression on me and to me were most important. One album almost nobody nowadays has heard was David Tao Sr. and Sun Yueh's Friend's Songs. In those days, Tao and Sun were doing the very popular Little Guys on TTV. Then director Yu Kan-ping brought it to the big screen and asked Wu Chu Chu whether he was interested in doing the soundtrack. We'd been planning on talking to Tao and Sun, so having Yu approach us felt like divine intervention.
We took the tape to an ice-cream shop near the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and put it on to see how the customers would respond. The shop ended up playing it for just one day. The employees told us that customers had complained that the tape was noisy and unpleasant to listen to. We brought it back with us to investigate and discovered that there was a problem: the tape hadn't been recorded to industry standards and the sound quality was poor. We rerecorded the material, incorporated some of the music from Pac-man, which was popular then, and even reshot the cover. When we released it, it sold 300,000 copies, and we were hearing Sun Yueh's line about "everybody together" all over town. CTV even used the music to open an educational program.
Our third key album was Luo Ta-you's Zhi Hu Zhe Ye. In those days, Luo was still practicing medicine. On hearing his raspy voice and angry delivery, a pop-music journalist predicted in the papers that the album would sell 2,000 copies at most. We weren't surprised by that, but told Luo that his music was the kind we wanted to make, no matter how many records it sold. In the end, Zhi Hu Zhe Ye blew away everyone in the industry by selling 700,000 copies.
Honestly, we really did have great confidence in Luo. I remember the media later describing the record as "a history-changing nuclear bomb thrown into Taiwan's Mandarin pop music scene."