L.A. Band Takes a Slow Beat to China

It might be a stretch but you could call Steve Bloch and Ed Bazel the Marco Polos of modern music. Well, minor-key Polos, but deserving of a footnote in history for their current venture into China.

They helped make some cultural news of a sort on July 4 in Beijing, big enough for the Sheraton Great Wall Hotel to advertise that it alone was offering its nightclub guests Pegasus as the apparently ground-breaking, gate-opening “first American house band in Beijing.” And from where else but . . . “Hollywood, U.S.A.”?

While the four-member Pegasus is pioneering new territories in Asia, it also is symbolic in one way of a flip-side problem in the United States: Business is so bad for many dance musicians that even a job halfway around the world looks good. For the members of Pegasus, however, the job turned out to have its definite upsides.

Here at home there are few upsides for dance bands, especially hotel, restaurant and cabaret bands. Cabarets, supper clubs and lounges as well as hotels generally report few customer sightings as people stay home more, dance less and save more. Five nights of work have become two-nighters. Quintets are downsized to trios. Quartets are duos. Karaoke music machines and canned music are played where humans once stood. Only one Los Angeles hotel continues to program live entertainment in the great and ancient show room traditions of the Cocoanut Grove, Biltmore Bowl and Westside Room. That’s the Hollywood Roosevelt’s Cinegrill which relies on a diet of eclectic bookings--from country singer Kinky Friedman to Nat King Cole’s sound-alike brother, Sammy, next month to four weeks of a one-women show this month to seven upcoming Sundays of gospel music. Sampling different entertainers and going after different audiences have kept the Cinegrill alive and thriving but it is a rare species in Los Angeles.

Musicians Union Local 74 President Max Herman calls the job situation elsewhere in the city a “depression.” Herman retired eight years ago as local president with a membership of 16,000. Recently he was drafted back to the job and found the membership had shrunk to 11,000. “The bread-and-butter, subsistence jobs are gone,” he says. And it’s the same nationally, where 10 years ago there were 300,000 union members. Now there are 200,000.

But in the Lankershim Boulevard offices of Entertainment Associates hope is far from shrinking. This is one of Hollywood’s niche talent booking agencies, sort of a Valley version of the William Morris office, one that specializes in live entertainment--its files contain names of 3,000 bands and entertainers ready for work, especially with hotels, corporate and celebrity party givers, and any special occasion. Especially weddings, because for bands and for people in general, there will always be weddings and musicians.

Bazel, a musician who turned booker 10 years ago, knows the music business from both sides. “I’ve played more hotels in my time than the Gideon Bible,” he says.

When the Great Wall Sheraton decided to change its live entertainment policy in March, its transpacific plea for an American band to pioneer new territories was answered quickly by the North Hollywood agency.

In Beijing, Mike Winslow, the hotel’s food and beverage manager, was looking for something to boost business in his Cosmos Club. A native of North Hollywood and a former assistant catering manager at the downtown Hyatt Regency and a 21-year veteran of Asian hotel management, Winslow felt local bands in Beijing, usually from the Philippines, weren’t getting hotel guests, locals and visiting businessmen dancing. In addition, there was some new disco competition in the Chinese capital.

He asked for a band that could do what available talent wasn’t doing: to play several musical styles--’50s rock, country, jazz, Top 40.

Bloch and Bazel pieced together Pegasus from two Los Angeles trios, shepherded its members through reams of government regulations on opposite sides of the Pacific Rim, made sure they packed their bags with sheet music (a scarce item in Beijing), spare parts for their instruments (also scarce), plenty of skin lotion and toothpaste and sent them off into the great unknown of dance bands with this advice:

If all else fails, play the Carpenters.

Stephen Hanuman, the band’s leader, keyboardist and horn player, first tried current songs popular in the United States. The response was polite and underwhelming. The band attempted a Casey Kasem-style countdown. That was sure to get them in and dancing. Beijing didn’t exactly get up and tap. The songs were unknown.

Then Pegasus remembered.

Play the Carpenters.

They did and a couple got up, someone else followed, then the multidues came, all dancing to tunes they knew.

The band ventured forth with Lionel Richie’s “See You, Say Me” and that was followed with rounds of applause because the Western music cognoscenti of Beijing, the Richie song was almost equivalent to a pop national anthem.

Since then Hanuman, drummer Ed Betancourt, guitarist Tom Fernandes and vocalist Vanesa Tawaran have become equivalent, authentic pop stars.

With this kind of acceptance, the band and the hotel have seen all sorts of turnarounds in their careers.

Business at the 1,000-room, 22-story hotel’s night club has tripled since the band played the Carpenters.

Pegasus has made its first appearances on Beijing television and last week its members recorded their first album, a collection of Phil Collins songs. “We’re already on the charts here,” Hanuman said. “The hotel ordered 1,700 copies to give to the employees.”

The band, originally scheduled for a two-month stay, is now into its fourth month and may be there until January.

Two members of the band are working on a joint venture with two Chinese musicians in producing an English-Chinese album exclusively for the Asian market.

Sheraton officials, apparently pleased with the success of the American group, are talking about a hotel circuit for American bands and lounge acts, moving from Beijing to Tianjin and to Shanghai.

Members of Pegasus have found work conditions in China generally similar to those in the United States. They work six nights a week, starting at 9 and stay until 1 most nights, 2 on the weekends. Salaries are equivalent to U.S. scales and they are paid in dollars.

The hotel provides the band members with rooms (the booking contract prohibits room guests without written permission of management), meals and gym facilities.

Plus one other item not provided by their American employees back home: lessons in Chinese.

“I’ve learned a few words, but it’s hard to grasp it quickly,” says Hanuman. “I can say some words to flirt and some to swear. Our drummer, Ed, is confident enough to tell our guests to ‘Please come out and dance’ in Chinese. But it sounds more soulful than Chinese. But it works.”

And in the music business these days what always works is work.