Sugar Babe -- Yuming

OK, first off, I got a message from my friend Jerry, aka Rocket Brown, at Come Along Radio. His one-hour City Pop Xmas special is up on Soundcloud so why don't you give that a listen while wrapping up those presents and writing those cards?

Also, you may be wondering why I put up a video of a pivotal scene from "The Blues Brothers" as the thumbnail. It has to do with Jake, Elwood and the band performing some of their stuff at a bar whose customers initially don't take too well to their brand of music with only their repeated renditions of "Rawhide" coming in to save the day.

The reason I mention this is that Rocket also sent me a video of an interview with Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）, singer-songwriter extraordinaire, on what I recognize as an NHK afternoon talk show, in which she said with an utterly stony face that her old band from the 1970s, Sugar Babe（シュガー・ベイブ）with Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）, Ginji Ito（伊藤銀次）, etc., had gone through the same thing apparently. Yup, bottles and other solid detritus were thrown at them since their brand of music didn't exactly sit well with the audience at the time. I guess that would be called paying one's dues. In any case, the interviewers looked somewhat uncomfortable. Fortunately for everyone involved, happier days were to come. Well, Ohnuki still had another bump on the road in her career with "Mignonne", but then after that, things were probably better.

Rocket also later told me another thing about Sugar Babe. Apparently, there is a mystery tune that was never released as either a single or as a track on the band's lone album "Songs" from 1975. Certainly, I don't recall ever hearing this one on my copy of "Songs", but Tats wrote and composed this tune called "Yuming" after his famous contemporary, Yumi Arai（荒井由美）later to become Yumi Matsutoya（松任谷由実）.

I don't know why it was never officially released although we can hear it on YouTube, and apparently the author for this Japanese article on the song, Tamotsu Thomas Ueda, isn't sure either. However, he also mentions that even the lyrics that he got from one recording of "Yuming" may be different from what is heard since apparently Sugar Babe often modified them each time they performed.

"Yuming" may not go down as an absolute Yamashita/Sugar Babe classic but it's still a fun and carefree tune in that Sugar Babe way in tribute to one of the most famous and vivacious singer-songwriters in Japanese pop music. I can imagine that Tats may have whipped this one up as a sorta birthday gift for Yuming at a party.