Half Japanese’s David Fair Has Died

David Fair, co-founder of the influential long-running experimental rock band Half Japanese, has died. David co-founded Half Japanese with his brother Jad Fair in the mid-'70s. On Sunday morning, David's late-'00s label Thick Syrup Records and his longtime friend Jeff Feuerzeig, director of the 1993 documentary Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King, announced his passing on social media. Jad posted a childhood photo of the brothers on Facebook, and friends are sharing condolences in the comments. No cause of death has been reported.

Brothers Jad and David Fair started Half Japanese as a bedroom project after they moved from Michigan to Uniontown, Maryland. Jad eventually emerged as the frontman of Half Japanese, but the two brothers traded instruments and vocal duties early on. They came up with an idiosyncratic, glowingly naïve sound that felt childlike and amateurish, and they wrote a ton of noisy but oddly catchy lo-fi rock 'n' roll songs.

Half Japanese released their debut EP Calling All Girls in 1977, and they followed it with the 1980 triple LP 1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beasts. Later on, more members joined the band, including underground rock figures like Don Fleming and Kramer. They went on to release a string of records, with the magician Penn Jillette, a fan of the band, sometimes helping to put them out. David Fair left Half Japanese in 1987, but he returned throughout the band's existence, and he and Jad also released a number of records together outside the Half Japanese discography.

David Fair wasn't in Half Japanese when the band reached its greatest level of visibility in 1993, when Kurt Cobain invited them to open for Nirvana on tour. But he returned to the band when they recorded their 2014 comeback album Overjoyed, their first in more than a decade.