Asako Toki -- Rendez-vous in ’58 (sings with バカリズム)

 

One old Japanese comedy-variety show that I never really got to watch was "Oretachi Hyokinzoku"（オレたちひょうきん族...We Are The Wild and Crazy Guys） starring Beat Takeshi（ビートたけし）and Sanma Akashiya（明石家さんま）among other comic up-and-comers who have all become decades-long presences on television. I watched far more of The Drifters'（ザ・ドリフターズ）"Hachi-ji da yo! Zen'in Shuugo"（8時だよ全員集合）which was the big comedy program in the 1970s but "Oretachi Hyokinzoku" was the successful upstart going into the 1980s.

The rotating series of ending themes for "Oretachi Hyokinzoku" also gained its share of fame since it included EPO's "Downtown" and "Doyou no Yoru wa Paradise" (土曜の夜はパラダイス）along with Tatsuro Yamashita's（山下達郎）"Doyoubi no Koibito" （土曜日の恋人）. Apparently, one of the loose guidelines for a song to be used on the show was that it should have some mention of Saturday in the title or in the lyrics because "Oretachi Hyokinzoku" was televised on that very night. All three songs mentioned were able to fulfill that guideline.

Anyways, according to singer-songwriter Asako Toki's（土岐麻子）website, Toki herself was a fan of "Oretachi Hyokinzoku" and those ending themes. In fact, she wondered where those adults went for fun after hearing the tunes by EPO and Tats. Certainly, I don't blame her...I've also wondered about the night life in good ol' Tokyo on listening to "Downtown" and "Doyoubi no Koibito" for the first time, and happily, I did get to indulge during my time in the megalopolis very often.

Well, for her February 2021 album "HOME TOWN ～Cover Songs～", she was able to come up with a track that paid some tribute to those cheerful uptempo ending themes back in the pre-Bubble Era days and nights. Titled "Rendez-vous in '58", Toki paired up with comedian, TV personality and lyricist Bakarhythm（バカリズム）to perform this just-as-cheerful and uptempo song hearkening back to the feelings of "Downtown" and "Doyoubi no Koibito". To keep things within the family, so to speak, EPO herself came up with the melody while Toki provided the lyrics about a couple imagining flying throughout time and space to settings such as Ibiza in 1985 and Newport in 1958 after having their real date cancelled due to a storm.

As the title for that 2021 album states, "HOME TOWN" is an album of covers, and it turns out that Toki first recorded "Rendez-vous in '58" as a solo final track for her June 2013 album "Heartbreakin'". Either way, it's a stylish contemporary version of the good ol' bright-lights-big-city and painting-the-town-red standards of long ago.