David Fair, who co-founded the influential art rock group Half Japanese with his brother, Jad, died Saturday, Aug. 29. Jad confirmed David’s death in an email to Rolling Stone, adding that the cause was cancer. Fair’s daughter also released a statement on her father’s Facebook page.
He lived a beautiful life of love, kindness, and creativity,” she wrote. You could just make something because you needed to make it,” Fair’s label head and friend, Travis McElroy of Thick Syrup Records, wrote on Instagram. I’m thankful our paths crossed and that I got to know him beyond the music.
I have a lot of memories that mean even more to me now. It’s hard knowing someone you’ve known and cared about is suddenly just gone. I don’t have anything profound to say.
I’m just really fucking sad, and I’m going to miss my friend.” Jad and David Fair formed Half Japanese in their childhood bedroom and released their first set of home recordings, an EP called Calling All Girls, on their own label, 50 Skidillion Watts, in 1977. As a biography on Allmusic notes, the tapes gained traction in underground circles and the duo eventually signed to a British indie label, which released Half Japanese’s debut album, 1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beasts, in 1980. The sprawling debut featured a mix of home recordings, noise and sound art experiments, wacked-out covers of popular songs, and live recordings that comprised lengthy medleys of additional, barely recognizable covers.
While Jad was always the driving creative force behind Half Japanese, David captured the band’s DIY, free-of-all-constraints ethos in a short but widely-circulated essay, “How to Play Guitar.” It opened: “I taught myself to play guitar. It’s incredibly easy when you understand the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings play the low sounds.
If you put your finger on the string [farther] out by the tuning end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That’s all there is to it.
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