Les Rallizes Dénudés -- Shiroi Mezame（白い目覚め）

 

I think that I may have mentioned this show in a past article but one sign that I was getting well into my teen years was the ability to stay up way past my bedtime to catch the late-night shows. Of course, there were the weeknight talk shows with Johnny Carson and David Letterman but there were also the cool music video programs. And then there was "The All-Night Show" in the early 1980s on Toronto's multicultural channel, CFMT-47 which broadcast for several hours past midnight every night although I only caught the show on early Saturday and Sunday mornings,..with the volume turned down very low.

Chuck the Security Guard was our congenial host and he took over the production booth for those hours, putting on an eclectic mix of 60s music vignettes that used to play on movie theatre screens before the main feature, old shows such as "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits", and oddball contemporary music videos before Canada's version of MTV, MuchMusic took over that gig with "City Limits" later on in the decade. I only wish that someone on YouTube had uploaded the usual greeting video consisting of a montage of weirdness and old TV clips set to a techno version of "Strangers in the Night" that was featured every show. It was the type of cool show that high schoolers and university undergraduates loved to catch because of the looseness and oddness of it all. And for a guy like me, I needed all the cool that I could get for years.

I think one song and one video would qualify very well for a "The All-Night Show" segment and it's the one that I found up here by the Japanese rock band officially known as Hadaka no Rallizes（裸のラリーズ）but known overseas as Les Rallizes Dénudés (the name that I prefer). In this case, probably the best way to describe them is through the description given through Julian Cope's 2016 "Japrocksampler" via Wikipedia:

Les Rallizes Dénudés were a Japanese rock band formed in 1967 at Kyoto's Doshisha University. They were initially active between 1967 and 1988, and then again briefly between 1993 and 1996 before permanently disbanding. The band's name comes from a corruption of French: valises dénudées (literally translating as naked suitcases) which was derived from fake French slang invented with the theatrical group Gendai Gekijo. The band's style is typified by simple, repetitious instrumental passages, shrieking, cacophonous guitar feedback and folk arrangement. Their discography is made up mostly of live bootlegs, soundboard archives, and even a few rare aborted studio recording attempts as they have never officially released any of their material, although there are archive releases on independent labels such as Univive, Rivista, Phoenix, and Bamboo.

I also found out that a couple of the members, original bassist Moriaki Wakabayashi（若林盛亮）and vocalist Takashi Mizutani（水谷孝）, had ties to the Japanese Red Army terrorist group. Plus, they never officially released any of their material so their discography had consisted of bootlegs, archival material and some studio recording attempts until official releases came out starting in 1991 by Rivista.

According to the Discogs website, "Shiroi Mezame" (White Waking or White Awakening), a comforting rock lullaby of sorts, was first performed in October 1975. From reading about Les Rallizes Dénudés' style, "Shiroi Mezame" might be one of their mellower creations. Although there is something quite avant-garde (especially with the music video above and Mizutani's high feathery vocals) and psychedelic about it, the slow rhythms make me think about 1950s country ballads played for that slow dance at the end of the party. Incidentally, the Discogs site has one of those bootleg releases shown, "Great White Wonder" by Phoenix Records, but for some reason, it can't be sold on the site itself.

Apparently there were different versions of "Shiroi Mezame" with the one above being Version II. The one below hasn't specified which version it is, but it is from a July 1994 concert performance.

I haven't really gotten into the J-Wiki article for Les Rallizes Dénudés since it is a very heavy one but my impression of the Wikipedia article for the band is that there is a certain skepticism of the statements given there, and that includes the news of frontman Mizutani's passing in 2019. But if there are any fans out there who can give any further information or confirmation of this, that would be great. One more piece of information is that another band member was Makoto Kubota（久保田麻琴）who was there for the early years before leaving for the United States in the early 1970s.