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.
Since the Yutaka Kimura Speaks series ended back in the summer, I have occasionally used the space and time for the fifth article of Urban Contemporary Fridays on KKP for a band from the States or Europe that has exemplified an AOR sound from the 1970s and 1980s. So I've featured Young Gun Silver Fox and Ole Børud.
Well, another one that I'm bringing over to "Kayo Kyoku Plus" is Page 99, started up in the early 2020s and spearheaded by John Nixon and surrounded by a number of other artists who love their AOR. Of course, as with many other people seeing this name for the first time, I wanted to know how Nixon came up with "Page 99". According to their website, it was a combination of the band Pages and the song "99" by Toto which I have yet to cover as a ROY article but you can take a look at my ROY for their "Toto IV".
Anyways, in 2022, Page 99 came out with their second album "For Imagination's Sake" and the title track is another groovalicious tune with AOR veteran Bill Champlin helping out on vocals. There's some fine work by Nixon on the keyboards and you gotta have the sweet sounds of a saxophone. Nice vocal arrangements, too. Coincidentally enough, "For Imagination's Sake" popped up at me on the YouTube AOR channel West Coast 99.
I couldn't quite believe it when I realized that I had yet to cover this particular AOR classic, especially since I did post Ambrosia's "Biggest Part of Me" all the way back in 2021. Time to give myself a Gibbs slap up the back of the head!
Both "Biggest Part of Me" and this song were included on those BRIO compact disc compilations of those nostalgic radio-friendly AOR tunes that I'd bought years ago in Japan. And this song here is "Is It You?" by jazz guitarist Lee Ritenour and his languid playing, with Eric Tagg providing the mellow vocals. Ritenour, Tagg and another AOR veteran Bill Champlin created "Is It You?" for Ritenour's 1981 album "RIT". And indeed, the song saw some fairly high rotation on the radio stations here when I was a teen. It hit No. 35 on Canada's RPM charts while in America, it reached No. 15.
Ritenour was a name that had kept floating here and there within my musical consciousness for years before I finally found out who he was...kinda like Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）whose name had possessed this rather legendary presence before I bought her BEST compilation years later. He, like many other folks in the American music industry, had also helped a lot of Japanese artists such as Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）and the fusion band Casiopea（カシオペア）.
I've made exceptions and included Western artists even if they aren't part of the Reminiscings of Youth articles since their songs were simply so amazing. That was the case with the duo Young Gun Silver Fox because of their love of performing songs in the vein of late 70s/early 80s West Coast AOR, a genre that I've also greatly cherished over the years.
Well, here is another exception. Ole Børud is a Norwegian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer who's run the gamut of genres in his 46 years of life. His Wikipedia entry lists them as such: Children's, choral, Christian metal, contemporary Christian music, extreme metal, Gospel, hardcore punk, hymn, jazz pop, progressive metal, pop rock, R&B, soul and yacht rock. Yeah, it's that wide.
Back in 1996, Børud joined a doom metal project called Schaliach as a guitarist, bassist and drummer and they came up with the album "Sonrise" which was about as epic as metal can get.
However from 2008 onwards, Børud made a hard turn and tackled the old West Coast sound with jazz, soul and other musical influences beginning with the album "Shakin' the Ground". I knew about Japanese folk singers making the big jump into City Pop from the 1970s going into the 1980s, but Børud has trumped them.
Anyways, his latest single from April this year is "Find a Way" which absolutely floored me because it sounds so 70s/80s that I forgot that we were currently in 2023. It's that AOR! Plus, "Find a Way" is further fortified with some of the big names from that era and genre: Bill Champlin, Jay Graydon and Michael Omartian. It's such a fun song that it's given me hope that other artists along with Young Gun Silver Fox and Børud can bring back some more new examples of those sleek and smooth styles from decades past.
Welcome to another Reminiscings of Youth session. Last Friday, I put up an article on a 1984 duet between one of the best voices in Japanese music Hiromi Iwasaki（岩崎宏美）and AOR singer-songwriter Bill Champlin titled "Both of Us". Noticing that it sounded somewhat like Earth Wind & Fire's "After the Love Has Gone" (and I wasn't the only one, judging from the YouTube comments), I was reminded of yet another love ballad that had similarities with that EWF classic.
Back in my days as a callow youth of the 1980s, I was taping the heck out of songs off the the various radio stations, and those included the ones that would be considered AOR and Quiet Storm, genre names that I hadn't heard of yet, but I guess that I just had a predilection for the light and mellow. Anyways, one song that I taped but didn't bother with recording the DJ's iteration of the singer's name and the title is the one that you can see above you. Well, thanks to my lack of foresight, I would then take on a multi-year odyssey searching for this mystery tune (along with others, Japanese and non-Japanese).
First off, though, let me say how happy I was when I was finally able to track down the fact that it was Champlin who sang this classy and smooth Perrier-friendly ballad "Tonight, Tonight" and it was from his December 1981 album, "Runaway". When I hear those soft keyboards and the buttery horns and strings, despite the earliness of the release, I get images of hedonistic lifestyles of that decade portrayed through television and movies (there's always dinner on crisp linen and fine china in that penthouse). I wasn't at all surprised that it had been created by the singer, David Foster and Raymond Louis Kennedy.
The search took me around thirty years since I noted in a very early KKP article from 2012 that I had just found Champlin's cover via YouTube. And yes, I have just said cover version because "Tonight, Tonight" is a redux of the original by the aforementioned Ray Kennedy who recorded it for his 1980 "Ray Kennedy" under the title of "My Everlasting Love". Strangely enough, I had heard Kennedy's "My Everlasting Love" through one of those American AOR compilations that I bought in Japan but wasn't sure at the time which was the original and the cover. According to the article for the 1981 "Runaway", Champlin had sung background vocals for Kennedy's original. I liked Kennedy's take but it wasn't quite the Champlin cover that I really wanted.
As it has been for a number of lost songs that I finally found, I had to go through a lot of cheap Canadian Tire tapes, radio listenings, university, and two stints in Japan over three decades to finally know the truth about "Tonight, Tonight". I ended up buying "Runaway" because I had wanted to get my own copy of the ballad. It didn't score too highly on the charts (well, pretty low at No. 178) and one critic disdained the tracks as being a pale version of the band Chicago according to the Wikipedia article. To be honest, I've only given the album just that one listen myself but especially after reading the mediocre reviews, I'm willing to give it another go. I have a thing for underdogs.
Now, what was in the Top 10 of Oricon for December 1981? Well, I have Nos. 7, 8 and 9.
Over many years, I've observed that the elite of the Japanese baseball world have gotten that desire to take their chances in Major League Baseball in the United States with varying levels of success. Back in the 1980s, I think that there was a similar wanderlust by certain top singers to head over to America to work with the top songwriters, producers and session musicians. The output was usually of the West Coast AOR variety of music. There was Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）with her "Miss M" in 1980 and then Naoko Kawai（河合奈保子）and "9 1/2" in 1985, for example.
Apparently, that was also the case in between those two years with chanteuse Hiromi Iwasaki（岩崎宏美）. In April 1984, she released her 14th album, "I Won't Break Your Heart" which consisted of her second recording session in Los Angeles following her 1980 release "Wish". I haven't listened to the entire album but judging from the English titles, I am assuming that Iwasaki was indeed going for that popular soft rock sound although most of the tracks are sung in Japanese. As with Takeuchi and Kawai, Iwasaki got to work with some of the big names in the recording booth such as David Foster, Carlos Vega, Steve Lukather and Michael Landau
One of the two English-only tracks is "Both of Us" which is a duet of Iwasaki and singer-songwriter/arranger Bill Champlin. Created by Champlin and Carmen Grillo, I found the video on the YouTube AOR channelWest Coast 99, and "Both of Us" is so AOR, it hurts like anything. I ended up getting AOR ASMR for heaven's sake...had a sudden urge to wrap a cardigan around my waist (would've ended up causing forced mitosis on it). Of course, there just has to be the fluegelhorn in there. My other observation is that aside from the first few bars, Iwasaki sounds a fair bit different in her delivery here. I've heard her sing other tunes in English on at least one other album, but for some reason, she seems to be putting a tighter leash on her vocal projection.
I noticed one brief comment underneath the video: "very EWF...", and that person is absolutely correct. Not to put too fine a point on it, but "Both of Us" sounds like a chip off the old "After the Love Has Gone" by Earth Wind & Fire. That shouldn't be too surprising considering that Champlin himself (along with Foster and the late Ray Kennedy) had a hand in writing that hit for one of my favourite R&B bands. And it sounds as if the 1979 beautiful and bittersweet ballad has been a template because for my next ROY article, I will be featuring yet another Champlin tune that also has similarities to "After the Love Has Gone".
This week's Reminiscings of Youth article is the second one to feature the great band Earth Wind & Fire. Of course, the first one I did was the celebratory favourite, "September" which I did, naturally enough, on the 21st of September. And in all likelihood, I will end up doing a few more ROY articles with EW&F over the next several months.
The first time that I heard "After the Love Has Gone", EW&F's July 1979 single, it wasn't on the radio. Actually, it was on a TV show about a radio station..."WKRP in Cincinnati", to be exact. In fact, it's in the above video of a second season episode called "For Love or Money" (go to 22:37...regrettably, the song sounds like it's been largely muffled due to the usual copyright issues), and though I don't really remember the plot for this season opener, I do recollect the scene of poor Bailey Quarters being stood up by Johnny Fever while "After the Love Has Gone" is playing.
I know about Loni Anderson as the beautiful Jennifer Marlowe and how her posters were flying off the shelves while the show was on the air, but I was always drawn to (the just-as-beautiful) Jan Smithers as Bailey, and watching that scene while the EW&F classic was playing really had me wanting to stomp on Johnny for stomping on Bailey's heart.
Although it's been over 40 years since "After the Love Has Gone" was released and that episode of "WKRP in Cincinnati" was broadcast, whenever I listen to this ballad, at least during part of those 4 minutes and change that the song is playing, my memories unearth that particular scene at the radio station. It just seemed like the perfect match between scene and song for a TV show, and in fact, the Wikipedia article for the song mentions about that scene on "WKRP". Apparently, it's also been used by a number of sports teams whenever they lose at home.
And that's the crazy and amazing thing about this song. It's a beautiful and romantic creation about the loss of romance. With those soft horns and strings and the crooning by the vocalists, when I first heard this, I'd thought that it was all about a wonderful courtship between two people when it was actually about the separation of them. Maybe there is something very Japanese about "After the Love Has Gone".
That same Wiki article has plenty of information on the making of the song but suffice it to say that I couldn't imagine Hall & Oates singing "After the Love Has Gone". This is truly my favourite EW&F ballad, and it's truly a masterpiece by David Foster, Jay Graydon (aka Airplay) and Bill Champlin with Maurice White behind the production and main vocals. I'm glad that it got its Grammys.
So, what were three singles that got their release in July 1979 when "After the Love Has Gone" itself was released?
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