Through the eyes of Merry (メリーの目)
Playback Part 6 - "If you hold your head up, you seem noble"
written by Gara / published in Fool's Mate Vol.261 July 2003 / translation by eurydike
It had been half a year since I met Yuu. We had the aim to meet up with Ken who we were eager to have as our guitarist. Ken himself had been looking for people to form a band for a long time as well. We had heard of him quite a lot, but didn’t have the chance to meet him till then.
However, when I think back on this, I had an intuition about the timing for the meeting. If we had met earlier, would we have achieved the same...?
The first meeting with someone is the most important, you deeply remember a keen feeling. (By the way, on New Year’s Day [2003] we went to see a fortune teller in Harajuku, Celine, and she told us that "The time you all met was fateful, because everyone’s’ stars were good.")
This way, your band was completed. We had chosen a good time to decide upon the members, distributed our first MD in the last third of October 2001 and had our first live in November 2001...
Considering the fact that we had formed in October 2001, it’s clear that we didn’t have much time. The MD didn’t even have a name, the people who got it were rare (and from then on it has been called rarerare). And because in the future this MD became the rarest Merry-item, it’s the one that made my expectations reality. As for the live, we hadn’t thought about a special appearance, so we decided to make the concert a secret one. It took place in Meguro Rock May Kan, but I don’t remember much of it now. Only...when the curtain opened, I spit out ink, and all the people in the audience stepped back a little – that’s what remember clearly. And Ken’s face which showed so much tension – I didn’t forget that until now. Oh, and how we somehow shook everybody’s hands after the gig was over. Instantly, all the tension was gone. Rock May Kan’s manager, Yamaguchi-san, praised (?) us with the words "You gave a great impact!". And later we all watched a video of the concert and said to each other "This is Merry...?". Until we had seen this, we didn’t really know what kind of band we wanted to become. But we realised that all we wanted was to be a band which totally enjoyed itself.
On the next day, the five of us drove to Nagoya in our equipment car to play a second secret live. And despite the light drizzle, we drove along Tomei highway without stopping...