Hiroshi Kamayatsu -- Waga Yoki Tomo yo（我が良き友よ）

 

It's been a little over eight years since musician, singer and TV personality Hiroshi "Monsieur" Kamayatsu（かまやつひろし）passed away. During the time that I knew him when he was still alive, I had thought that he was always the happy if grizzled folk-rock veteran. But as it turns out, I'm slowly getting the impression that he was actually quite musically fluid in terms of what he's experienced. Of course, there was his time with the Group Sounds band The Spiders （ザ・スパイダース）but then I also found out through my work on the blog that Monsieur was also quite happy in his AOR mode for a while through songs like "Island Girl".

And then I slowly realize that the folk-rock part of him came later than I had assumed, considering his debut in 1960. When I was looking for information on one of his representative hits, "Waga Yoki Tomo yo" (My Good Friend), I realized that in the 1970s, he was going to live houses in Harajuku and Roppongi to actually look at the real folk-rockers such as the legendary Takuro Yoshida（吉田拓郎）. Apparently, he had always been drawn to musical artists who played stuff that was different from his own material. I'd assumed that his solo debut single "Dounika Naru sa" (どうにかなるさ) was folk, but I guess the country-style rhythms may have changed that.

Striking up a friendship with Yoshida, Monsieur mentioned that he had become an apprentice of sorts for Yoshida which included being forced to drink until he basically burst. There was also a fighting component in there but there weren't too many details there. In any case, it looks like Kamayatsu got the rough and tumble education in tackling folk rock, and one of the big results was his February 1975 single "Waga Yoki Tomo yo", which was written and composed by Yoshida with arrangement by Ichizo Seo（瀬尾一三）. People around Yoshida had been hoping that their hero would be the one to record it, but instead he offered it to Monsieur who accepted it gratefully.

As it was, the song about a relationship with a rough and tumble university student (I guess this was the Japanese equivalent of Stiffler from "American Pie") was probably a distillation of sorts of the early Monsieur and Yoshida friendship. And strangely enough, it was such a perfect fit for Monsieur that "Waga Yoki Tomo yo" has been the song that I usually associate him with...the reason that I only got to put this one up now after several Kamayatsu articles is that I couldn't remember the title. It did hit No. 1 for several weeks on Oricon and it ended up as the No. 9 single of the year, selling around 900,000 records.