Baker Shop Boogie -- Soul Taxi Driver

Wikimedia Commons via Sam Duluth

One time back in my university days, I had been out with the guys way past midnight and not being able to get a lift home, I opted for a taxi. The driver was someone who obviously liked his weed so it was an interesting 20-minute ride home. Had a Dickens of a time trying to get to sleep that night and I had to do a lot of explaining to my parents about the aroma in my room the next day. I couldn't just state that we all had a great Korean BBQ dinner.

Even earlier, I remember my first chances to watch NBC's "Saturday Night Live" near the tail end of the original run of The Not Ready for Prime Time Players in the late 1970s. Fortunately, I also got to see a lot of reruns of those early episodes with Chevy Chase, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and that included the famous Blues Brothers performances with that intro of "I Can't Turn You Loose". That was some mixture of performance art and gonzo concert.

That was the scene that came back from my memories when I first heard "Soul Taxi Driver" by the blues band Baker Shop Boogie although the rhythm was a little less frenetic. My good friend Rocket Brown of the podcast "Come Along Radio" introduced this to me via Discord a few weeks ago. "Soul Taxi Driver" has got quite the feeling of the Blues Brothers along with James Brown as singer Akira Sawauchi（澤内明）sings about a cab driver living the life that he's always wanted. The Motown soul tune originally popped up as a track on Baker Shop Boogie's 1983 2nd album "Hungry St."

Back in 1972, Sawauchi met up with guitarists Hitoshi Seki（関ヒトシ）and Hajime Yoshida（吉田 はじめ）to form Baker Shop Boogie which specialized in performing blues tunes. Members would come and go as the band did their tours with a first album, "Baker Shop Boogie", finally coming out in 1982.