Southern All Stars -- Hello My Love

 

Southern All Stars（サザンオールスターズ）, true to their reputation as being one outrageously fun-time legendary band, has also come up with some very notable album covers over their career. One such cover was the one for their July 1981 release "Stereo Taiyo-Zoku"（ステレオ太陽族...Stereo Sun Tribe） with the junior high school girl wearing a very stylized mask. I've got no idea what the significance of it was, and when I read the J-Wiki article for "Stereo Taiyo-Zoku", leader and singer Keisuke Kuwata（桑田佳祐）himself in 2015 even said that the cover looks horrible. Well, it's a cover that I first remember seeing decades ago, so I think that it did its job.

Anyways, Rocket Brown introduced me to the first track on the album when we spoke last weekend, and it's quite the pleasant and slightly atypical Southern All Stars tune. "Hello My Love" begins with strings that almost had me thinking AOR then it evolves into a surprising Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）arrangement, complete with those horns. But Kuwata's distinctive vocals reassured me that this was indeed an SAS tune as the song continues to change into its main form of cheerful Dixieland jazz although the Tats rhythm comes back now and then.

Kuwata took care of words and music. I remember from one KKP article about the band in which I mentioned that it has been standard operating procedure for Kuwata to inject some sex into the lyrics. I had thought that considering the old-timey nature of "Hello My Love", maybe an exception was made for this track, but when I took a look at the lyrics, it turned out that ol' Keisuke was still getting that knocking for knocking boots. And hey, the following second track is "My Foreplay Music".😮

Incidentally, "Stereo Taiyo-Zoku" was at the No. 1 position on Oricon for 6 straight weeks before finishing the year as the 13th-ranked album. I guess that it really stayed up.😜