Is Japan the New Scandinavia Or What?

For an unreconstructed music geek like me, there’s nothing better than discovering new-to-me music that rips. Since stumbling upon the rawk of Orstralia (through an assignment to interview Deniz Tek for a fanzine) and Scandinavia (via a post by New Christs guitarist Al Creed on the Divine Rites e-mail list) a decade or so ago, it’s been clear to me that Yanks ‘n’ Brits hold no monopoly on music that rocks. However, it’s taken me longer to discover the rawk of my ancestral homeland, Japan.

My earliest exposure to western-influenced music from Japan was the Tokyo Happy Coats 45s (big hit: “Forevermore” on King Records, same label as James Brown back in the day) my grandfather sent me when I was a kid. I also witnessed a performance, at La Mama in Off-Broadway, of Golden Bat, a Hair-like “rock musical” by the Tokyo Kid Brothers, an adventurous troupe whose album Throw Away the Books, Let’s Go Into the Streets Julian Cope likes a lot. (Cope’s Head Heritage website is an invaluable resource for information on Japrock, as will his book Japrocksampler: How the Postwar Japanese Blew Their Minds on Rock ‘n’ Roll be when it’s published later this year. Also useful: the web tendril of the currently inactive New Zealand-based noise rag Opprobrium.)

Fort Worth Teen Scene compiler Larry Harrison had made me tapes of mid-‘60s Group Sounds (analogous to Nuggets-style U.S. garage punk or English freakbeat) bands like the Spiders, and when I was writing for the I-94 Bar, I heard CDs by scads of mostly lousy post-Guitar Wolf garage revival outfits, the best of whom, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant, were actually a big band on a major label at home, but had their records released by an indie (Bomp) Stateside and played the rawk toilets when they toured here. MC5 Japan webmistress Yukiko Akagawa sent me cool discage by Slunky Side, a band that neatly straddle the line between Hendrix/Cream-inflected psychedelia and Stoogian punkitude.

It wasn’t until Jon Teague pulled my coat to Boris, though, that I started to get a clue that there was something going on here beyond fashion and novelty. (After the late-‘90s glut of MC5-aping Scandinavians, the mere presence of airbrushed flames on a CD slick is enough to land it in my straight-to-Half-Price-Books-without-listening pile.) Ex-Yeti/current Great Tyrant drummer Teague’s a scholar of history as well as music, and when he declares, “The World War II Axis has psychedelia down,” he knows whereof he speaks (‘70s Krautrock also being a big influence on his own music). Besides Boris, Teague also turned me on to the folkloric musical collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi and acid-folkie J.A. Caesar, who was in the Tokyo Kid Brothers and supposedly once won a contest for having the longest hair in Japan. But I digress.

Boris usually gets tarred with the “doom-metal” brush, and it’s true that a lot of their music is both heavy and slow, but they’re hardly one-trick ponies, equally adept at slammin’ punk and something approximating mid-period Pink Floyd psych. Their numerous and mostly hard-to-find albums come in two flavors: the “one-long-song” variety (Absolutego, Flood, Feedbacker) and the kind that feature more, shorter pieces (Amplifier Worship, Heavy Rocks, Akuma No Uta, Pink). That’s not to imply that the former are totally monochromatic in sound, either. Boris brings majesty and beauty to a music that sounds at times like the spaced-out, feedback-and-Sun-Ra side of the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams taken to its farthest extreme. Myself, I think they’re the most interesting band in the world right now.

Frequently mentioned as precursors of the doom-metal and stoner-rock genres are the early ‘70s aggros Flower Travellin’ Band and Blues Creation. In the fullness of time, it’s become clear that Black Sabbath was probably the most influential band of their era, but it took westerners a lot longer to catch on to that fact than it did these two bands of Jap brats. It was Sabbath, not Jesus, that hit Japan like an atom bomb in 1970, causing formerly Brit blooze-aping crews like FTB and Blues Creation to put aside their Howlin’ Wolf records and start composing original music that incorporated some of the tonalities of their native land (which is probably what makes it sound so “advanced” for its time today). FTB’s Anywhere album featured covers of the eponymous title song from Sabbath’s first album and King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man,” along with a jacket photo of the four band members riding motorbikes in the nude; the one after it, 1971’s Satori, is the one that’s best known to folks in the west and a sizzling slab that puts me in the mind of the best of early ‘70s psych-tinged hard rockers like SRC and the original Amboy Dukes.

The atom bomb reference above isn’t just smartass bad taste, either; like the original Godzilla, both of these bands had songs to remind Yanks of our lost moral imperative (“Hiroshima” on FTB’s third album, Made In Japan, and “Atomic Bombs Away” on Blues Creation’s awe-inspiring second album Demon and Eleven Children). FTB frontman Joe Yamanaka had a scream to rival Robert Plant’s and an Afro to rival Rob Tyner’s. His father was an Army of Occupation GI; it’s somewhat disconcerting in latter-day videos to see Joe as a suit-wearing Japanese man pushing 60 with a Bob Marley dreadlock ponytail. Blues Creation was primarily a vehicle for heavyweight guitar-slinger Kazuo Takeda. In the mid-‘70s, they got to play with former Cream producer/Mountain bassplayer Felix Pappalardi, and it was that incarnation of the band that had an album released in the States. It was far from their finest hour.

While the MC5 might have spouted half-baked blather about “dope, sex, and fucking in the streets,” the band Les Rallizes Denudes -- a feedback-and-lightshow simulacrum of the Velvet Underground in its Exploding Plastic Inevitable stage that came together in ’67 and didn’t fold the tent until ’96 -- were associated with the leftist Japanese Red Army faction, to the extent a couple of band members were implicated in an aircraft hijacking by that group.

Poetry rocker Dan McGuire of Jamnation/Unknown Instructors fame says Fushitsusha “sounds like the soundtrack to entering the gates of hell (in a good way).” Funnily enough, that used to be my operational definition for the Mahavishnu Orchestra when they were good (e.g., around The Inner Mounting Flame/Birds of Fire time), but McGuire’s an astute cat and I have no reason to doubt him. Fushitsusha’s a vehicle for Keiji Haino, a resolutely underground figure who sings and plays guitar and whose messy psych noise supposedly shows a strong Blue Cheer influence (weird how the Cheer, long reviled in the west, are regarded in Japan with a reverence approaching that of the French for Jerry Lewis). According to Opprobrium, the Fushitsusha sides to get are the 1991 double live album on PSF Records 15/16 and the band’s first recordings from 1989 on PSF 3/4. Will have to cop from Forced Exposure when I have some scratch.

Try as I might, I’ve been unable to find the way into the sprawling Makoto Kawabata/Acid Mothers Temple discography, although people I know whose opinions I respect swear by ‘em. Their music just seems too monolithic and impenetrable to me. It’s been suggested that the best route might be via the Mellow Out album from 1995 by Mainliner, a power trio consisting of Kawabata on “Motor Psycho” guitar, bassist Asahito Nanjo from the band High Rise, and free-jazz drummer Hajime Koizumi, but that sucker goes for 50 bucks on Amazon, so I might have to wait awhile on that one. (Well, maybe not so long...Forced Exposure has vinyl reish for somewhat less.) In High Rise, who were originally known as the Psychedelic Speed Freaks (from which the PSF label took its name), Nanjo has worked with guitarist Munehiro Narita and a Spinal Tap-like succession of drummers. Mr. Cope likes their 1994 Live album on PSF real much.

To be continued...