Korean folk-rock pioneer Hahn Dae-soo reflects on sorrow, loss and friendship at 76
Hahn Dae-soo sits in Manhattan’s Paley Park, Sept. 2. Courtesy of George Jung
From the evening in 1968 when he first performed his own folk songs in front of a Seoul audience up to the present, Hahn Dae-soo has been considered a key figure in the history of Korean popular music. In a career spanning 50 years, he has spent much of that time in New York City, but has periodically returned to Korea for long stretches to record and perform. Ahead of his first lengthy visit to Seoul in four years, he spoke with The Korea Times about his music, artistic expression and life’s inescapable sorrows, a topic particularly informed by the sudden passing of his wife earlier this year.
As he prepared for his trip across the Pacific, he said, “Korea is my home physically and mentally. I am a kimchi rocker. My mother gave birth to me there, I had my first taste of nicotine in high school in Busan, and I had my first kiss from a beautiful lady from Dongnae Girls’ High School. Most of my fan base is in Korea. I love the camaraderie of friends, the food and the drinks and the kindness of ajummas.”
As for the city that he calls home, “New York is everything: Love, hate, artistic, dirty, largest number of billionaires, largest number of homeless people. Most fashionable streets and biggest slums in the world. New York is a world contained in one city.”
Hahn Dae-soo transports his laundry in Queens, New York, Sept. 16. Courtesy of George Jung
Though he first visited the city in 1958, his family has ties to the northeast United States that go back much further.
“When I was 100 days old, my father went to New York to study at Cornell as a nuclear physicist. He never returned and disappeared," Hahn said. "My mom was 18 when she had me. She was a pianist from a rich family, but she could not wait any longer, so my mom’s family had the marriage annulled and I was sent to live with my paternal grandfather, who was the president of Yonsei University’s college of theology. He went to Princeton University and got a Ph.D., and was also a violinist, though I have no idea how he even got a hold of a violin in Korea in the 1930s. Although the family was rich and prestigious, I was always lonely, because my identity was not defined, without a mother or a father. That is why I began to write songs after I learnt a few chords from my best high school buddy, Kim Hyung-soo. Music released my pain and gave me an identity.”
In the summer of 1966, while working as a dishwasher at a resort in New Hampshire, he formed his first band, the Banana Boys. His bandmate, Dennis McCarthy, “was our guest of a prominent businessman family. When I saw his Fender Jaguar guitar, I said, ‘Wow, are you that rich? Let's play,’ and we jammed. When the owner, Mr. Parker Whitcombe, heard us, he said, ‘Why don't you guys get on stage tonight and sing for our teenage guests?’ So we did and the response was fantastic.”
The name derived from 1960s-era “rumors that dried banana peels will get you high,” which turned out not to be true. “Even Andy Warhol designed the iconic Velvet Underground cover with the illustration of a banana,” Hahn said.
One of the “many beautiful waitresses” said, “'Here come the banana boys,’ and that stuck with us.”
He later decided to move to New York City and studied photography, but a 1968 visit from his uncle to his “dump” of an apartment led to an invitation from his mother to return to Korea, where he performed songs like “Land of Happiness” at the club C’est Si Bon in Seoul’s Mugyo-dong.
The song, one of his best-known, was written “in 1967 while going to my home on the Long Island railroad.” While many listeners focus on lines like “The land is so vast, the skies are so blue. Let us all go to the land of happiness,” Hahn points to the opening line, “open up those curtains,” as being key to the song’s meaning.
“What I really meant to say was, ‘open up those iron curtains’ because it was Cold War times, especially on the Korean Peninsula. But if I mentioned ‘iron curtains,’ I knew I would be forever banned under Park Chung-hee’s military dictatorship, so I refined the lyrics to fit in. The funny thing is, I got banned for my music later on anyway.”
The song ended up inspiring the title of "Land of Happiness," a recently released movie set during the aftermath of Park Chung-hee's 1979 assassination, and the soundtrack includes a cover of the song by Kim Master.
Ultimately, Hahn said, “I pray and hope that Korea can become one again, just like Germany. It has been too long and we have suffered too long.”
Hahn performed a number of times in the late 1960s, but just as the folk scene he helped influence began to take off, he was inducted into the Navy where he “served three years and three months of harsh corporate punishment.”
During this time, “Kim Min-ki released his first album, which was all written by him, except ‘Wind and I,’ which was my song, because he loved it so much.”
In addition to this, Yang Hee-eun, who scored a No. 1 hit in 1972 singing Kim Min-ki’s song “Morning Dew,” recorded Hahn’s song “Land of Happiness,” which became an underground hit. As a result, “I became a writer of two hit songs while I was serving in the Navy, which led me to make my first album, 'Long, Long Road.'”
In this he was helped by Kim Jin-seong, who was “the producer of the most popular radio show at the time, CBS’s ‘Young 840.’”
As Hahn remembers it, “CBS radio was the premier station that promoted rock and folk music of the day and encouraged many young singer-songwriters to come out and make a difference in our society.”
Kim was a “very passionate, hard-working producer who helped launch the careers of Kim Min-ki, Yang Hee-eun, myself and many, many more.” He did this by “arranging the meetings of artists and record companies and producers.”
Kim unfortunately passed away in May 2023, at which time Hahn wrote, “He had great ears and he knew how to make hit songs. Not only was he a great radio and music producer, he was also a true gentleman.”
This July also saw the passing of Kim Min-ki, whose career as a folk performer was cut short when his album was banned, leading him to pivot to writing plays and opening a theater in 1991.
As Hahn remembered, Kim “invited me to perform at his theater, ‘Hakjeon,’ on its 20th anniversary.” It was a “very small theater, with about 50 seats. There was no space for my band, so I performed with my guitar only. That created an even more rousing fan response. Min-ki and I were very happy as a result and we got drunk.”
Hahn's fondest memory of Kim was their meeting after Hahn's successful concerts in Tokyo and Fukuoka in 1997: “I had no time to meet anyone, not even my mother, because the press and TV and the media were all over me, every day. Min-ki wanted to meet me desperately, but I had no time because I had to leave for New York the next morning. So he suggested, ‘How about we ride in the car to the airport together — then we can talk.’ Perfect. We had one hour of passionate discussion about the Korean music scene, our love to create a world of peaceful harmony and his new passion for drama and playwriting. He was a great man and great friend.”
Hahn Dae-soo walks in a street in Brooklyn, Sept. 10. Courtesy of George Jung
Throughout his career, Hahn has expressed himself as a musician, photographer and writer. Asked which medium he preferred, he replied, “I am a musician first of all. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, ‘The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.’”
As for what compels him to make music, he said, “The pain, my friend. I don’t write my songs — the pain of my existence forces me to write.”
He elaborated further: “All art comes from tragic events and sorrow. If an artist is happy all the time, there is no need to express his state of mind. Pain and suffering is what drives a person to express it, to relieve himself from the chains of suffering and thus allow the viewers and listeners to also find relief and peace of mind.”
Hahn Dae-soo visits St. Thomas Church in Manhattan. Courtesy of George Jung
A lonely childhood, the abrupt end of his music career under Park Chung-hee and the dissolution of his first marriage have all caused sorrow in Hahn’s life, but none compare to the sudden loss of his wife, Oxana, in May.
“If you live long as I have, 76, you experience life and suffering much more than before," Hahn said. "All of us lose our grandparents and parents, experience the early deaths of close friends and rock stars that we love (in my case, John Lennon — I cried all night listening to his songs). But losing your spouse, which has to happen sooner or later, is intense. You feel empty to the core and painful with no relief when you lose the rudder of your life. That is what I am going through. I am an empty shell. I feel nothing and the sound of loneliness is so loud. I can only live now, knowing that I am responsible for my only daughter who is surviving but with intense grief. Time does heal wounds, but not all wounds. My attitude now after all these nights and days of despair is, ‘Suffering never goes away. We have to learn to live with suffering as our partner. Hopefully as a controllable partner.’”
Throughout it all, Hahn has always been consoled by music. “I’ve never cried at a funeral, not even my wife’s, although I am forever sad," he said. "The only time I cry is when I listen to music.”
Particularly moving are the classical musicians his grandfather introduced him to, such as Bach, Wagner and particularly Beethoven, whose symphonies and concertos cause an “incredible flood of tears in my little room.”
Raising a daughter has helped him to reflect on his own youth. “When she was 4, she was stubborn and I was always careful that she didn’t hurt herself. Now she is a teenager, 17, and she is even more stubborn and bossy. So I wondered, is she the copy of me when I was a teenager? Yes, I was just as stubborn and pushed for my own way. I am sorry, Grandpa and Grandma and teachers and friends. Now, I am getting my own medicine.”
He added that luckily, “she is very smart — enough to graduate from high school one year early.”
Commenting on the challenges faced by the younger generation, he said, “Vietnam was our biggest tragedy during the 1960s, just a ridiculous waste of lives.” Amid the conflicts of today, however, “We are so used to these senseless deaths on our TV screens that we are becoming numb to it.”
Compared to the large anti-war demonstrations of his youth, today he says “we are just watching and saying, ‘how sad.’ The present generation of youth have become not only numb but very egocentric. ‘What do I need,’ ‘What profit does this bring to me?’ I am not blaming them, but rather my generation of aging hippies. We created this system of computers and social media that forces the youths to barricade themselves psychologically.”
As people communicate with each other via screens, “We no longer congregate physically to discuss and argue and exchange ideas and also to entertain each other. Nothing can replace a real person-to-person meeting.” In summary, he says, “The greater the technology, the lesser the humanity.”
Amid the internal and external turmoil of the present, Hahn was recently able to reach back to his youth and his earliest forays into musical expression when he visited his Banana Boys bandmate, Dennis McCarthy, so they could catch up and record music. “We wanted to get together so bad that we stayed at the same resort where I met Dennis in 1966,” Hahn said.
Hahn Dae-soo meets with his former Banana Boys bandmate Dennis McCarthy at The Inn at East Hill Farm in New Hampshire, September. Hahn is holding the “Hahn Dae Soo signature guitar“ manufactured by Toronto’s Carparelli Guitars. Courtesy of Hahn Yang-ho
Despite assuring The Korea Times four years ago that he had released his final album, the Banana Boys “recorded eight oldies that we used to perform at the inn and one never-released song,” a process he described as “three beautiful days of music and jovial friendship.”
As to when this music might be released, he wasn’t sure. “Dennis is hard at work with post-production as we speak," he said. "He is all so excited. Hey Dennis, my man, keep us informed! Peace and love, brothers and sisters!”
Matt VanVolkenburg has a master's degree in Korean studies from the University of Washington. He is the blogger behind populargusts.blogspot.kr, and co-author of "Called by Another Name: A Memoir of the Gwangju Uprising."