Swing West/Masayuki Yuhara/Kiyohiko Ozaki -- Ame no Ballad（雨のバラード）

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Luckily no rain in the forecast today and as I look out my window, it's brilliantly sunny out there and I've got the fan spinning behind me. 

However, I am beginning today's round of KKP articles with a rather pensive rain-based song from the 1960s. The band Swing West（スウィング・ウエスト）had its time between 1957 and 1970, first starting as a rockabilly group and then taking on the Group Sounds vibe in its last few years in the late 1960s. On J-Wiki, Swing West's changing lineup reads like a list of candidates in an election but one of the main vocalists was Masayuki Yuhara（湯原昌幸）who entered Swing West in 1964.

And I am assuming that it is Yuhara who was spearheading one of Swing West's biggest hits, "Ame no Ballad" (Rainy Ballad) that came out in May 1968. It was actually the B-side to "Maboroshi no Otome"（幻の乙女...Mystery Girl）, but I gather that "Ame no Ballad" gained more attention, relatively speaking. As I said off the top, it's a pensive GS tune about a man seeing a perhaps lonely woman off in the precipitation-filled distance and becoming oddly drawn to her. Band leader Yoshiyasu Ueda（植田嘉靖）wrote and composed the song although for the lyrics he did so under his pseudonym of Haruka Kouji（こうじはるか）. There's something about the overall feeling of "Ame no Ballad" that had me thinking about The Cascades' 1962 hit "Rhythm of the Rain" (besides the fact that both songs have "rain" in the title), although I know the songs are completely different.

I mentioned vocalist Masayuki Yuhara in that above paragraph because when Swing West broke up in 1970, Yuhara began a solo singing career which included his second single, a remake of "Ame no Ballad" that was released in April 1971. Given a bit more epicness through a horn section and some ripping percussion, unlike the original by his former band, his "Ame no Ballad" was a big hit by reaching the top spot on Oricon and staying there for a few weeks. It would eventually become the 8th-ranked single of the year.

In the same year, another cover came out, this time by big-voiced Kiyohiko Ozaki（尾崎紀世彦）. His "Ame no Ballad" was placed in his December 1971 studio album "Ozaki Kiyohiko Album No. 4"（尾崎紀世彦アルバムNo.4）which managed to reach No. 4 on the charts. There's not a whole lot different in the arrangement but perhaps Ozaki's vocals are a bit more resonant.