By Marty Friedman, with Jon Wiederhorn

Permuted Press (Dec 3, 2024)

Opus in Metal

Review by Stephen Mansfield

It’s a wonder I’m not seriously brain damaged, or at the very least, hearing impaired. As I recall, I spent a good deal of my teens with my head stuck inside giant speaker cabinets at rock gigs in the London area. A number of years later, standing in front of a 100watt bass amplifier, playing with a badly rehearsed punk band, I would attempt to inflict the same auditory pain on audiences. Volume, however, as any professional in the business will tell you, has very little to do with good music, a view guitarist Marty Friedman, author of the memoir, Dreaming Japanese, would no doubt endorse.

Can autobiographies of this kind be co-written and retain their authenticity? Keith Richards’s Life, a fine example of how an experienced writer—author James Fox—can help find a subject’s voice, rekindle memories, prioritize experience, and create unity and coherence in the writing, put that question to bed. Friedman is assisted in his endeavor by seasoned music critic and author, Jon Wiederhorn. It would be difficult to imagine a better collaborator. Anyone who has listened to Friedman in interviews will recognize the voice in the writing.

You would be hard pressed, in fact, to find a rock artist as articulate as Friedman, whose account joins a slim body of work, that includes Sting’s Broken Music, Pattie Smith’s Just Kids, Dylan’s magisterial Chronicles, and the extraordinary Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, a memoir by Elvis Costello, an artist once described by Jools Holland, as “one of the most brilliant men in Britain.”

Friedman, we read, was fortunate in having a stable upbringing. His parents weren’t crack heads; they weren’t at each other throats night and day. A supportive, accessible father was complemented by a mother, who, the writer has the highest regard for, noting, “whatever emotion and sensitivity I communicate through my music comes from her genetic code and unconditional love.”

Cutting his teeth with various bands during his teens, the writer observes, “We became seasoned performers and sharp improvisers before we were accomplished musicians.” Musicians can often seem one-dimensional performers and people, an impression that is quickly dispelled in the early pages of Dreaming Japanese. Here, Friedman writes unsparingly about his early, decidedly unglamorous music experiences, rehearsing in one instance, in a confined, mildewed Honolulu room, reeking of dead rats and fetid carpets, the players creating “an odor as repugnant as a slaughter house.”

A subsequent U.S. tour, while under contract to a small independent label, aside from being a liberating performance experience, was, in Friedman’s words, “my first taste of full-tilt rock and roll debauchery.” Friedman has few qualms about being politically incorrect, asserting in one instance that his main interests in life have always been about “having a blast every night and getting laid”. A later entry reads, “Before my first marriage, I exploited my rock-star status to be in a position to have sex all the time.” Ouch! But herein, lies an unguarded integrity that is rare among public figures: a refusal to be anything less than honest. What could be mistaken for opportunist chauvinism is moderated by several assertions, expressing a genuine respect, tantamount at times to adoration, for women. And, if we are to believe Friedman, most of his non-binding sexual encounters with fans were entirely consensual.

Friedman first visited Japan in 1989, while on tour with then band, Cacophony. Suitably smitten, he returned to live and work in the country. Despite the best efforts of fellow musicians and crew members, though, Friedman confesses, “I usually felt out of my element, far from my comfort zone, which left me melancholy and alone.” The writer finds himself with a hard-earned mastery of Japanese, but a poor handle on cultural literacy. With issues of self-identity in an alien culture on his mind, Friedman describes first-hand what many stars and celebrities have experienced: the treacherous vulnerabilities, the “crippling loneliness and social maladjustment” that no amount of fan adulation can assuage.

With no illusions of ever being treated in the same way as a Japanese, Friedman resigns himself to the thought that, “belonging is overrated.” The American writer Donald Richie, arguably the foremost post-war author on Japan, spent six decades here. There is a wonderful line in one of his essays, entitled “Intimacy and Distance: On Being a Foreigner in Japan,” in which, prefiguring Friedman’s sentiment, he asserts, “I have learned to regard freedom as more important than belonging—this is what my years of expatriation have taught me.”

Friedman, as an insider-outsider, provides invaluable insights into the Japanese music business, which operates in a very different way to its Western counterpart. The music industry in Japan, we learn, places a good deal of importance on public respectability and the correct comportment of its stars. According to Friedman, after-concert celebrations are considerably more wholesome and fun-oriented than their Western equivalents. In other words, lots of noisy drinking and bravura, but no coke snorting.

The nonchalance over drug taking, gleefully outlined in the early chapters of the book, will likely shock Japanese readers in a country where even soft substance use has been demonized to the point where the authorities and media conspire to make sure that even the possession of a speck of weed will defame a user and ruin their career.

Where punk largely eschewed drugs, which they equated with hippy era bands like the Grateful Dead, metal bands embraced a toxic cocktail of cocaine, opioids, ketamine and crystal meth. His band Megadeth, despite its puissant, muscular name, was a metal band with a wobbly base, some of the key players in the group, periodic heroin addicts and alcohol abusers. Friedman’s experiences illustrate how drug abuse can ruin a band, take it to the edge of extinction. Reflecting on the conflicted character of the band’s founder, the charismatic, hugely gifted, but behaviorally polar, Dave Mustaine, Friedman describes the ironic complexities of working with a musician whose, “self-destructive complex,” causes him to “alienate people integral to his success.” Friedman, unlike a long line of musically gifted users, stretching from Syd Barrett to Amy Winehouse, decided at an early stage, after a liberal period of experimentation, to forego hard drugs and binge levels of alcohol consumption. A horrendous trip on LSD convinced him that drugs were not the best elixir of creativity.

Best known as the former lead guitarist for Megadeth, the appellation, while increasing his stature as a musician, also, in failing to acknowledge his full technical and emotional range, diminishes it. The book is an object lesson, in fact, in how a very good player can become a virtuoso performer with a magnum size opus of work. If you have listened to Friedman’s more recent work, such as his ‘Japan Heritage Official Theme Song’ and other music projects and videos, you will have a grasp on his versatility. The polyglot playing derives partly from his eclectic exposure as a very young person to musical forms as diverse as traditional Middle Eastern motifs, ethnic music, and Chinese opera. He mentions Igor Stravinsky at one point. For those who pay attention to the playing, there are patterns of almost Byzantine complexity and beauty. Aside from his years of hands-on musical scholarship, part of Friedman’s success is attributable to a tireless work ethic established long before he came to Japan.

For anyone who thought J-Pop was mass-produced bubblegum, the equivalent of an audio foam bath, Friedman sets the record straight, pointing out its chordal complexity and fusing of Eastern music with jazz theory and contemporary influences. Friedman’s diligence in studying the form would pay off, subsequent years seeing him play with major names in the Japanese music world, like Aikawa Nanase, whose band he joined as lead guitarist.

A further commitment to living in Japan, to finding purpose and stability, if not social parity, was his marriage to Hiyori Okuda, a cellist with the Tokyo Philharmonic. That bond with Japan was put to the test when a 9.1 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck the Fukushima area of Japan on March 11, 2011. Where many gaijin (foreigners), or “flyjins” in the parlance of the times, dashed for the airports, or hunkered down in their homes, Friedman responded in the best way he could, by auctioning off his Megadeth gear and donating the proceeds to Fukushima-related charities. He would play many benefit concerts to raise money for the cause.

Looking at shots of a younger Friedman featured in the book, we see little substantial change today in a man who has sidestepped most of the crueler ravages of time. There is little alteration to the open, youthful grin, or that great head of hair that resembles a Restoration era wig. Friedman writes in the past tense, but continues to live vibrantly in the present, the wellspring of his youthfulness with? a voracious interest in everything. Again, one might quote Donald Richie, who speaking of why he stayed in Japan for so long, once told me, “When I wake up in the morning, I think—What am I going to learn today?”

Like many people of my generation, I still listen to older bands, but without a strong yearning or nostalgia, having instead, an abiding conviction that the best music, even if it is not always to your taste, is now, because this is when it’s happening. It’s a sentiment Friedman might very well share. In an epilogue to the book that is not an ending, he writes of his eternal quest in music, pledging to “continue with my head down, running hard toward the future,”

He would no doubt concur with a remark made by the great American photographer, Imogen Cunningham, who, when asked by a journalist to name her best image, replied “The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”

“Tearful Confession” showcases Friedman’s versatile guitar playing, from tender to tough.

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Stephen Mansfield is a British, Japan-based writer and photo-journalist, whose work has appeared in over sixty publications. He is the author of twenty books. His new title is The Modern Japanese Garden.