Makoto Kubota & Yuyake Gakudan -- Bye Bye Baby（バイ・バイ・ベイビー）

It's close to 11 pm as I type this but I wanted to put in just one more before calling it a day since a video that I saw was so fascinating.

The video was put up almost 10 years ago by a fellow named Nobuyoshi Maeda, and it features the band Tin Pan Alley（ティン・パン・アレー）playing a good ol' rock n' blues song titled "Bye Bye Baby" with singer-songwriter Chu Kosaka（小坂忠）pouring it on while Minako Yoshida（吉田美奈子）is backing him up. I don't get to see either performer actually singing on a YouTube video so it was an interesting exercise to see them back in the 1970s jammin' away. There's also a bit in the above video where Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）and friend were actually trying something that might have looked like an embryonic form of the Moonwalk.

Considering how "Bye Bye Baby" sounds, I had initially thought that Tin Pan Alley was performing a cover of some tune from the United States. But as it turns out, it's a wholly Japanese original that had been composed by Hosono himself and written by Yoma Fujita（藤田洋麻）. And the original performers were Makoto Kubota & Yuyake Gakudan（久保田麻琴と夕焼け楽団）on their 1975 debut album "Hawaii Champloo"（ハワイ・チャンプルー）.

Fujita's lyrics talk about a traveling band going from town to town doing the gigs on a seemingly never-ending train ride through America. And the band just sounds like they've lived the life and have been enjoying it, or at the very least, treating it like a good enough living. One would almost think that some of the members would have picked up a drawl or a twang in their speaking.

I don't usually listen to this genre but both the original and the cover done by Tin Pan Alley are actually quite fun to the ears. "Hawaii Champloo" has been previously represented on the blog through another track which is much more Okinawan, "Haisai Ojisan"（ハイサイおじさん）.