I've been a fan of Japanese popular music for 40 years, and have managed to collect a lot of material during that time. So I decided I wanted to talk about Showa Era music with like-minded fans. My particular era is the 70s and 80s (thus the "kayo kyoku"). The plus part includes a number of songs and artists from the last 30 years and also the early kayo. So, let's talk about New Music, aidoru, City Pop and enka.
Credits
I would like to give credit where credit is due. Videos are from YouTube and other sources such as NicoNico while Oricon rankings and other information are translated from the Japanese Wikipedia unless noted.
One of my favourite tracks on Mariya Takeuchi's（竹内まりや）"Miss M" album from 1980 was "Secret Love". In fact, I love it so much that I gave it its own article a few years after posting about the album. One YouTube commenter even mentioned that "Secret Love" seemed to be the great connector between American AOR and City Pop in Japan.
The song does go down smoother than a Bailey's Irish Cream. However in the 1980 album, there were those horns which suddenly blasted a hole in my eardrums during the instrumental bridge. It was somewhat jarring; otherwise, I would have pegged it as the perfect AOR song.
But that seems to have been resolved when one of the two guys responsible for its composition, guitarist Jay Graydon (the other guy was David Foster, so it was Airplay behind the music), released his third solo album, "Past to Present - The 70s" in 2006. The horns are now gone but the rest of the music and arrangement has basically been untouched, and this time, the vocals are provided by the lyricist Marc Jordan who also does a great job. Still feel like bombing down the Ventura in a convertible during dusk or dawn while hearing this.
All these years, I knew about Canada's David Foster since the 1980s when he was coming up with these pop instrumentals such as "The Love Theme from St. Elmo's Fire" and "Winter Games", and also songs for acts such as Earth Wind & Fire and Kenny Loggins. Then much later, I discovered that he helped out Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）and Ami Ozaki（尾崎亜美）for their own albums. Finally, I realized that he was part of a band called Airplay that was around for just 1980.
A Canadian songwriting legend was paired up with one of the great American guitar icons, Jay "Peg" Graydon, and according to Wikipedia, their backing band consisted of the members of Toto and other session musicians who have had their own connections to Japanese singers such as Jerry Hey and Gary Grant. This is the ultimate AOR grouping!
In the aim for total transparency, this week's Reminiscings of Youth is actually a bit of a misnomer because I never found out about Airplay or its arguably most famous track "Nothin' You Can Do About It" on their lone self-titled album when it came out in 1980. It was only within the years that I've been working on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" that I first discovered this really snazzy song via YouTube and it's been the eternal earworm ever since. For some reason, I don't ever recollect hearing "Nothin' You Can Do About It" on the radio when I was a kid, and yet it sounds like the type of song that would have gotten heavy rotational airplay (pun fully intended) considering what was being played on the stations back then. The horns and the keyboards are amazing, and who knew that Graydon could sound that good as a singer? I'm just glad that I was able to finally come across it in my older years (circa 2018) and that one song was enough for me to order the album from Amazon.
The thing is that the song created by Airplay and Steve Kipner was originally recorded by The Manhattan Transfer as a track from their 1979 "Extensions". And "Nothin' You Can Do About It" fit hand-in-glove with the Transfer's move into smooth classy pop that time. Still, when I think of the arrangement, I have to go with Airplay's cover.
I'm just lifting this brief excerpt from a 2014 interview with Graydon via Wikipedia:
Interviewer: Did you guys ever envision Airplay becoming a full-time, touring type of band?
Graydon: David wanted to tour and I didn't. A dumb move on my part.
Well, no worries Jay! It looks like you made up for that oversight with the above performance in 1994!
I gave my compliments to Neo-AOR Norwegian singer-songwriter Ole Børud about a month ago for "Find a Way". Well, he and his band gave his own tribute to the song a year ago.
Going with the Manhattan Transfer's October 1979 release of "Extensions", what other songs were coming out in Japan at that time?
As a PS, I also read that Foster played for the band Skylark in the early 1970s. Me, I ate at Skylark! And the crazy thing was that the manager looked like a Japanese Jay Graydon!
"Secret Love" is a track from Mariya Takeuchi's（竹内まりや）"Miss M" album from 1980. As I mentioned in the article for her 4th album, "Miss M" is about as City Pop/AOR that the divine Miss M has ever gotten. And "Secret Love" seems to be Ground Zero for that genre. It sounds so West Coast circa that decade that I wondered whether Takeuchi had decided to put up stakes somewhere along the Ventura Highway in California.
Written by Marc Jordan and composed by Jay Graydon & David Foster (aka Airplay), the AOR keyboards start things off as if they are welcoming in the sunrise and then Mariya brings in her mellow tones with backup from the horns before everything and everyone takes the song into broad daylight in Los Angeles. Listening to it, it felt like I was sitting by that off-pink plastic radio that used to sit on the dining room table back in the late 70s.
"Secret Love" is about as nostalgic and slick as they come for me. However, the only thing that irked me is during the bridge when those sunrise keyboards came back in for a couple of seconds only for the horns to suddenly blast in. It seemed like the guys wanted to lure the listener in up close to the speakers before playing that sonic joke on him. Happened to me the first time and just struck me as being a bit intrusive. Still, if someone asked me about what City Pop was all about, I could just point him to this song as an example.
