[Korea Encounters] Hahn Dae-soo's 18-day rollercoaster ride of fame in 1968

Hahn Dae-soo at a young age / Korea Times archive

By Matt VanVolkenburg

In August 1968, Hahn Dae-soo, then 20, returned to Korea after an absence of four years. Incredibly, though he had only ever played music at open-mic nights, eight days later he found himself performing his own songs on national television.

A complicated family situation had led to Hahn growing up on both sides of the Pacific, and in his late teens he attended the University of New Hampshire briefly before dropping out and studying at the New York Institute of Photography. During that time he lived in Alphabet City, which he described to The Korea Times as "the slum of the slum" of New York City. "At that time, in the '60s, that's where all the drug- not only addicts, but where the dealers hung out. Hookers, Che Guevara wannabes, people making bombs, it was crazy!"

While living there, Hahn performed at open mic nights in the West Village, where the wealthy hippies lived. He received cheers for an encore, a hat was passed around to collect money, "and I got used to that club scene of performing in front of people and getting a response."

But after his maternal uncle visited his rat-infested "dump" of an apartment, he told Hahn's mother in Korea of his circumstances. Soon a tear-stained aerogram from his mother arrived, inviting him to return and live with her in Seoul.

On Aug. 28, 1968, Hahn stepped off a plane at Gimpo Airport and moved in with his mother north of Hyehwa Rotary. He stayed in a separate building, where he could play his guitar and do as he pleased, but he soon grew bored.

Hahn Dae-soo in his Myeongnyun-dong home in 1969 / Korea Times archive

While wandering around, he discovered Queen Dabang, a nearby tea house. The DJ was playing the Beatles and Rolling Stones, and the presence of students from Sungkyunkwan and Seoul National universities made for a "very intellectual, very hip" scene.

When he offered to perform there for free, however, he was told regulations forbade live performances in dabangs. Instead, he was directed to a music hall in Mugyo-dong, and, on Sept. 4, Hahn visited C'est Si Bon for the first time. As he remembers it, the owner, Lee Heung-won, was a "big guy, even taller than me, and I was tall for that time." After realizing Hahn wanted to perform, Lee, a man well remembered by university students at the time as a father-like figure, asked him if he was hungry and sat him down for some jajangmyeon.

He soon discovered that for young women, C'est Si Bon was a place of liberation. It was one of the few places "they could come in, have coffee, and smoke cigarettes publicly. It was a big deal for women," who could not smoke outside. "They did that, they had a boyfriend, coffee, music… That's why they called it C'est Si Bon!"

While audiences at C'est Si Bon were already familiar with the folk duo Twin Folio and their covers of American folk music, that night Hahn gave them something entirely new.

"I had my own songs already, written in New York and New Hampshire." Drawing on the Beatles and the American and Canadian folk singers he loved, "I put in my own identity, and sang my own songs, like 'Let's go to the Land of Happiness,' 'Put aside your differences, open up those windows, widen your thoughts,' so people were going crazy. On top of that, I was playing the harmonica with the long hair, and people thought, 'Wow! What is this?!'"

The MC that night was Lee Baek-cheon, a well-known producer for TBC (a TV station that was later merged with KBS). After Hahn's performance, Lee invited him to perform the next evening on his prime-time variety show, "Myeongnyang Baekhwajeom" (Bright Department Store). Hahn still marvels at his luck: "Getting on national television like that in one shot is impossible." His performance on TBS the next night, complete with his guitar and harmonica, was a hit. When he left the house the next day, he realized that people recognized him.

One reason for this was that there were only two TV channels at the time, KBS and TBC, so his performance was guaranteed to draw a large portion of the audience. While comparatively few households had TVs, people would gather in groups in places like dry-cleaners in smaller towns, or comic book rooms in the cities, to watch the television programs that were only broadcast in the evenings.

Appearing on the show brought what seemed to be more good fortune. TBC was connected with the JoongAng Ilbo, and after the show, a journalist approached him and asked him if he could come to the newspaper's office the next day for an interview.

Unfortunately for Hahn, the JoongAng Ilbo was the first newspaper to try to break into the weekly magazine market that had been dominated by the Weekly Hankook for the previous four years, so the reporter wanted sensationalist content for the new magazine.

By that point, the Korean news media had been covering Western hippie culture and highlighting the drugs, nudity and "free sex" associated with it for over a year. Just three months earlier, artist Jeong Gang-ja had heralded the arrival of this culture in Korea when she performed Korea's first nude happening, "Transparent balloons and nude," at C'est Si Bon. With his long hair and direct experience of the counterculture in the U.S., Hahn's arrival in Korea provided an opportunity to write about the most outrageous aspects of American hippie culture.

To get this material, the reporter, as Hahn put it, "tricked" him by asking questions like, "Are there hookers there? Is there LSD there? Is there 'free sex' there?" Hahn said in reply to the final question, "Sure," while wondering, "Isn't all sex free?"

In this 2003 photo, Hahn Dae-soo poses next to a picture of himself in the U.S. / Korea Times archive

The resulting article, titled "Korean HIPPIE returns from the US," began with the sentence, "Proudly strutting down Seoul streets with long hair and strange clothes, a real, not pseudo, hippie has landed in Korea." Though the article gave Hahn a forum to discuss hippie attitudes toward society and religion, and to earnestly describe how marijuana made familiar music seem "like something completely new," it undercut this with sensationalist details of nudity, sex and drugs gleaned from U.S. news reports. Though Hahn laughed at the idea that he was a hippie, the reporter ignored this and wrote, "Can the hippie who left hippie society really abandon hippie ideas?"

"That was a controversial interview," Hahn said. Some people considered him to be "demented" and wanted him expelled from the country. It left his mother in tears. He was eventually kicked out of her house, so he moved into a nearby shanty town and made money by performing and teaching English and guitar. He also practiced his photography, and a photo he entered in the National Art Exhibition won an honor that year.

The interview taught him to be wary of the press. As a result, he rarely appeared in the magazines of the 1960s and 1970s. One exception was a profile in Sunday Seoul from late August 1969 discussing his upcoming show at Namsan Drama Center, billed as "the most experimental music in Korea." In it, he was asked, "What do you think of being called a 'hippie singer'?"

"I really hate it," he answered. "Is everyone with long hair a hippie?"

Recently, he looked back on that response and said with a laugh, "If 'hippie' means sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, then no, I am not one. But if it means peace and love, then yes, I am, with some rock 'n' roll added in!"

Matt VanVolkenburg has a master's degree in Korean studies from the University of Washington. He is the blogger behind populargusts.blogspot.kr.