Tatsuro Yamashita/Hiroyuki Namba -- Natsu e no Tobira（夏への扉）

Jerry from Come Along Radio passed along some rather important information to me in regards to City Pop a few hours earlier. Today is the 39th anniversary of the release of Tatsuro Yamashita's（山下達郎）classic album "Ride On Time". Yep, on this day in 1980, when I was in my mid-teens and Ronald Reagan was in the campaign to become president of the United States, Yamashita came out with "Ride On Time" that became his first No. 1 album. And of course, years later, it has become a hit with a new generation of fans in and outside of Japan.

I kinda missed my opportunity for the grand presentation of "Ride on Time" since I had already put up my article for the album back on New Year's Eve 2015. However, there are a few songs that I didn't cover then, so this gives me a chance to at least cover one here.

And this one here is "Natsu e no Tobira" (The Door Into Summer), another wonderfully smooth and mellow track from the album under the dynamic duo of Yamashita as composer along with Minako Yoshida（吉田美奈子）as lyricist. It goes down as well as one of my favourite cocktails, the Brown Cow and has that lovely flugelhorn solo by Kenji Nakazawa（中沢健二）. All very summery...except that "Natsu e no Tobira" wasn't really titled for the season.

It was actually titled after a Robert Heinlein science-fiction hardcover novel from 1957, "The Door Into Summer" about an engineer and inventor, Daniel Boone Davis, who got cheated out of his fortune and decides to use time travel and his genius to get justice...and the girl. The one thing that got my curiosity in the lyrics was Yoshida's usage of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and so I had once assumed that "Natsu e no Tobira" had something to do with Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book". However, the fact is that Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was the childhood nickname for Virginia Heinlein, the author's third wife, and it turns out that the love interest in "The Door Into Summer" is named Frederica Virginia "Ricky" Heinicke. 

At the end of the song, there's even a sound indicating some sort of sci-fi ship taking off. It isn't exactly the TARDIS but I can imagine that it's Daniel's contraption in action.

So what was the connection between Tats and Robert Heinlein? Well, according to the liner notes for the 2002 re-release of "Ride On Time", it turns out that in the previous year of 1979, "Natsu e no Tobira" had originally been created by Yamashita and Yoshida for keyboardist and composer Hiroyuki Namba's（難波弘之）album "Sense of Wonder" which would also become the name of his own group in the 1980s. Namba, who is also a science-fiction novelist as well as a big fan of the genre (not mentioned in the English Wikipedia article for him), recorded "Sense of Wonder" with the theme of sci-fi for each of the tracks including the original "Natsu e no Tobira" at 20:20 in the above video for the whole album. Nice original and the instrumental bridge is filled with Namba's own doodlings on the keyboard instead of the flugelhorn on the Yamashita cover.

In any case, Happy 39th Birthday for "Ride On Time" and looking forward to the 40th next year! Plus, Namba is a name that I've been seeing for years in "Japanese City Pop" and when making up the articles for the blog, although I have to admit that this is the first article in KKP's history to include him. I will have to see what else is out there by him.

P.S. Also have a look at Jerry's own article on the album itself.