Middle-aged mojo: The great sound of Hong Kong's 'dad bands'

Just because you wear a suit all day doesn’t mean you can’t rock out. Just ask Steve Bernstein. By day, he manages billions of dollars as the CEO of Oppenheimer Investments Asia. By night, he plays the mandolin in a new band called Out of the Box.

“It’s like being into golf, except you’re into music,” says the 49-year-old New Yorker, who moved to Hong Kong late last year. “I like to step away from work for awhile. Golf and tennis are banking sports, but when I’m playing golf I can still check my BlackBerry. When I’m on stage, there’s nothing else I think about.”

Three years ago, the New York Times heralded the arrival of a new outlet for the mid-life crisis: the dad band. Across the United States, it reported, suburban men were casting off their ties and spending their spare time jamming in garages and basements. Nostalgic for the music of their youth, it dawns on them that those swish guitars they couldn’t afford as a teenager are now just a drop in the financial bucket.

Now the trend has spread to Hong Kong, helped along by a influx of expats and a growing number of live music venues like Peel Fresco and the Wanch.

To be fair, Bernstein might be a dad and an amateur musician, but he’s no musical slouch. He first picked up the mandolin when he was 16 and began playing gigs 10 years ago when he lived in Tokyo. When he moved back to New York, he formed a band with a couple of other Wall Street guys and indulged his passion for the Grateful Dead, going so far as to buy Relix, a pioneering rock magazine that began as a Grateful Dead newsletter. Eventually, Bernstein quit his banking job and devoted himself full-time to music, running a record label and management company and co-founding Wear Your Music, a charity that turns musicians’ old guitar strings into bracelets -- Bernstein wears strings from Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton.

Last year, Bernstein sold the company and moved to Hong Kong, plunging back into finance. For months, his two mandolins sat inside his office, tempting him to play. “I love Hong Kong, but there's less of a music culture here than in New York,” he says. “The thing is, when there’s less to watch, I find myself playing more.” So Bernstein found himself a few other musicians and started a band.

Out of the Box’s first gig is on a Friday evening at a lounge in Kee Club, six stories above Wellington Street. Bernstein has changed out of his pinstripes and into a CBGB t-shirt, joining bandmates Simon Yoo and Jim Olsson -- both in finance -- and Calvin Wong, the founder of the Underground music series and the host of an indie music show on Radio Dada.

“We play Americana,” explains Bernstein. “Dylan, Grateful Dead, Little Feet, The Band, Phish. It’s good jam band music, improvisational rock.”

The band gathers on stage for the sound check. “How is it?” asks Bernstein.

“You need to crank up the mandolin. It ain’t loud enough,” says a man sitting nearby.

“I need a drink. Where’s my drink?”

As the lounge fills up with friends and friends-of-friends, Bernstein heads offstage to a private room. “If I was doing this full-time, I’d be more wound-up,” he says.

Jim Olsson joins him. Olsson, 43, plays guitar and also plays in Witch Doctor, a blues band. He was serious about music when he was young, entertaining thoughts of becoming a professional musician. “But my dad suggested I get a backup job, and that turned into my main job,” he says.

“Your dad was smart,” says Bernstein.

Simon Yoo enters the room. “Hey guys, how’d that first song go again?”

Two nights later, Olsson stands in Peel Fresco, tuning his guitar before another gig, this one for Witch Doctor. Olsson moved to Hong Kong from Japan in 2006 and it’s been two years since he started playing blues with Dave Porter, who works in PR, and Vic Pumicpic, a professional musician.

 

“We played to the bartenders a few times at the Wanch when we were just getting started,” says Olsson. “That’s pretty soul-destroying, especially when they start critiquing your performance.”

Olsson grew up in suburban New Jersey, where he first grew to love the electric guitar at the tender age of seven, when he heard Peter Frampton on "Something’s Happening". Then, as a teenager, he heard blues rock star Stevie Ray Vaughan. “That changed everything,” he says. “I’d never seen anything like it. It was the 1980s and a lot of people were playing hair metal. This was completely different.”

 

After a stint in the navy, Olsson got a job at Bloomberg, and he ended up in Japan, where he met his wife and had a daughter. He played regular gigs in Tokyo, but when he moved to Hong Kong his guitar grew lonely in the closet. Eventually, he found his way to one of the Wanch’s open mic sessions. “I brought this big gold Stratocaster and just sat there until somebody said, ‘Are you gonna play or what?’”

Olsson laughs when asked about the term “dad bands.” He’s seen comments online knocking dad bands as vanity projects, but he doesn’t pay them much heed. “To me, it’s about fulfilling a lifelong goal of playing at Madison Square Garden in front of huge crowds -- it’s not about recapturing my youth,” he says, chuckling.


It’s a World Cup night and the crowd at Peel Fresco is thin, but Witch Doctor plays anyway, launching into an inspired cover of Jimmy Reed’s Bright Lights, Big City. It’s all for fun, anyway.

“It’s much more fun for me now than when I was 25 and thinking this was going to take me somewhere,” says Dave Porter, who sings and plays bass. The music, not the lifestyle, is what’s important to him now. “Come after the gig and you’ll see a real dad band dilemma, walking out with big bags of guitars and pedals and effects boards, looking like a pack mule. There’s no glamor in that.”