Makiko Takada -- Yuutsu Denwa（憂鬱電話）

I don't get to see too many of these anymore on the streets of Tokyo, but that is indeed a bona fide phone booth in Ginza with the typical green phone in there. I used to buy those picturesque telephone cards to make those calls in lieu of actual coinage, and back then I had thought that it was a pretty evolved way to communicate in a public setting. Of course, smart phones with LINE are more the thing nowadays.

(29:17)

Golly, I really like the third track on the B-side via the YouTube video of Makiko Takada's（高田真樹子）2nd album "Fukigen na Tenshi"（不機嫌な天使...Moody Angel）, released in 1977. "Yuutsu Denwa" (Depressing Telephone Call) has that guitar and chorus really doing it for me.

"Yuutsu Denwa" is another Tetsuji Hayashi（林哲司）winner with that languid melody that has me thinking of what Tokyo was like back in the 1970s (despite some brief memories of 1972 that one night in Ginza there). Etsuko Kisugi（来生えつこ）provided the words delivered by Takada in a softly funky and throaty manner. Going back to that guitar and chorus, Hayashi's arrangement reminds me of what Kazumasa Oda（小田和正）and Off-Course（オフコース）did later on in that decade going into the 1980s with their more AOR songs.

The crazy thing is that opening riff also gave me a reminder of the opening riff from "Heartbreaker", a hit duet single for Dionne Warwick & The Bee Gees that was released later in 1982.

As a bit of a postscript, that album cover for "Fukigen na Tenshi" is quite memorable since I first saw it in "Japanese City Pop" all those years ago. It looks like the photographer had barged in on poor Takada when she was doing her hair.