Hello Titty

  Gories drummer Peggy O’Neill once told me, “You don’t really need to know what you’re doing to have a band.” While this may seem to suggest that one need not have technical training or a history with an instrument to play good music, O’Neill’s wisdom runs deeper than that. Sure, a strong traditional music background isn’t necessary to start a band, but, really, neither is a concrete plan of action. If the circumstances and people are just right, a great band can spring out of nowhere.  

Brooklyn’s Hard Nips, a hard-rocking and hard-partying quartet of Japanese girls, is a perfect example of how a great band can sometimes just happen.

Hard Nips began with what most would shrug off as a simple, fleeting idea from a mutual friend. Bassist Yu “Gooch” Yamaguchi says that the members all met in Brooklyn after moving from their respective locales (three directly from Japan and one by way of Boston) approximately 10 years ago and immediately became friends. “We found each other and we got really excited because, I dunno, we’re Japanese!” says lead vocalist Yoko Sawai of the girls’ meeting. After the girls became close, a friend suggested that they make music. As Yamaguchi recounts, “Someone told us, ‘Hey, you guys spend so much time drinking together, you should try to spend your time being more productive.’” The four took the idea to heart and got together to practice at drummer Emi Kariya’s apartment. (“Practice” may be a bit of a misnomer—guitarist Mariko Tamegai was the only one of the group who had actually played an instrument before their meeting.)

After getting their act together and learning how to play, the members of Hard Nips booked a show at Death By Audio a little over a year ago. However, the band’s first steps were fraught with difficulties that would prompt most groups to say screw it—the first of which being an absence of any written material. The second and more serious impediment was a biking accident that left Kariya’s hi-hat leg almost completely obliterated. But despite the horrible timing and placement of the injury, the girls soldiered on, visiting Kariya constantly and nagging her doctors about when she would be able to drum again. Kariya took the whole incident with a tough attitude, and when asked about how the ordeal affected her drumming abilities, she laughs and answers, “Well, I didn’t have much drumming ability before the accident.”

While in the hospital, Kariya received a visit that would accelerate any musician’s convalescence exponentially—none other than Neil Diamond showed up to cheer her up. While out to dinner with her husband and sister-in-law, who worked with Diamond, Tamegai mentioned the bandmate’s accident and hospital stay. The information made its way to the singer, who took it upon himself to drop in to pay a visit. “This guy walks in and says, ‘Hey, I’m Neil Diamond,’ and I thought, Cool! What the fuck are you doing here?’ Suddenly I was the famous one on the floor,” Kariya says of the surprise. “I’m sure it helped me soothe.”

Following Kariya’s recovery, Hard Nips took the stage at Death By Audio (with Emi on crutches) for its first show, and has been going ever since. That summer, the band embarked on a Midwestern tour after being together for only six months. During this time, Hard Nips developed a gritty, driving post-punk sound fraught with elements of bands like AC/DC and anchored by catchy guitar riffs and Sawai’s poppy, staccato vocals. Though the first thought that comes to mind when hearing of a band comprised entirely of young Japanese women may be of cutesy twee-pop, Hard Nips effortlessly shakes the stereotype in favor of sweaty, distorted hard rock jams that sound like what the band describes as “sex, sushi and rock ‘n’ roll shat out your butt,” and toss mental images of kitty cats and bright sweaters out back in the trash with the empty beer cans. The band’s camaraderie and partying attitude bleeds through into its live performances, making for a show punctuated by laughter, drinking, dancing, yelling and tossing hard candies (Nips, to be exact) out into the crowd.

This year, Hard Nips made an appearance at SXSW and completed yet another Midwestern tour, from which it has just returned. The band plans on releasing a 10-inch record in the coming months, and has tentative plans for a Japanese tour, on which the girls would like to bring along a few American bands.

Though it seems that serendipity has taken over the course of Hard Nips’ development, the spontaneity that first brought the band together hasn’t faded one bit. As Kariya put it after the close of the first Hard Nips show, “Wow, this is really a band!”

-- Hard Nips Sept. 28, The Knitting Factory, 361 Metropolitan Ave. (at Havemeyer St.), Brooklyn, 347-529-6696; 7, $12.