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.
When I first saw the trio listed for the GS Gosanke or The Big Three for Group Sounds bands, I was a little surprised at the trio. No offense meant against Ox fans, but I thought that The Spiders with Jun Inoue（井上順）and Masaaki Sakai（堺正章）would be in there instead, but actually the trio is indeed Ox, The Tempters and The Tigers. Ox was actually the latest of the three bands to debut in 1968 while the other two first appeared in 1967.
Not sure when the media decided to come up with the tag for the three groups but there isn't a lot referencing this term of the GS Gosanke so perhaps this was more a name coined by fans over the decades. Regardless here they are.
I almost forgot that I had another topic within the "P.S. on Tokyo House Party" series that I had to get off my chest. A week ago, I did the rather shibui tribute to Mood Kayo which had its huge heyday in the 1950s and 1960s although the genre would continue forward well into the 1980s at least.
Well, another genre that actually had a much shorter life span consisting of the latter half of the 1960s, but still left quite an impression is Group Sounds, so dubbed since the bands that resided within this type of music emulated some of the rock n' roll groups in the West such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Beau Brummels and Herman's Hermits. So we had a fair share of Japanese rock n' roll bands which likened themselves to members of the animal kingdom including The Tigers, The Spiders and Ox, although there were other bands with names such as The Blue Comets and The Golden Cups.
The GS bands also left a number of songs that still have nostalgic appeal today, and some of the members also found success years later after the boom died out in the early 1970s. Those would include singers such as Kenji Sawada（沢田研二）, Akira Terao（寺尾聰）and Hiroshi Kamayatsu（かまやつひろし）. So without further ado, here are just a few of those bands.
I figured that I would be getting a compilation album of a famed songwriter's works sometime, and sure enough, I purchased this one called "Tsutsumi Kyohei: Jisen Sakuhinshuu"（筒美京平自選作品集...Kyohei Tsutsumi's Personal Selection）, not realizing that 2018 is composer Kyohei Tsutsumi's（筒美京平）50th anniversary in the music business. This man has created so many songs for so many different singers and bands over the past half-century that his collection has had to be divided into three 2-CD sets depending on genre (and that still doesn't come anywhere near his total output). There is the set devoted to aidoru, a second devoted to more AOR pursuits and then there is the one that I got: City Pop. Heck on this blog, only Takashi Matsumoto（松本隆）has more entries than Tsutsumi as a songwriter. Furthermore, I've already written his own Creator article.
Tsutsumi and Jun Hashimoto（橋本淳）created this ballad for the Group Sounds band Ox (and the two of them also provided the band with their debut single), "Swan no Namida" (Tears of a Swan) as their 3rd single in December 1968. It was not only on CD 1 of the tribute compilation that I now have (although I'm not sure if I would call it City Pop) but by grand coincidence, the song was even performed on NHK's "Uta Kon"（うたコン）a little over a week ago.
Considering the band was named after a pretty husky animal, "Swan no Namida" is a tenderhearted GS ballad about a young couple who may be keeping their relationship secret and who may be considering a breakup for the good of all. They are having a final walk together and visiting some of their favourite places including a church and a terrace. Hashimoto's lyrics mention some place up in the north so I'm wondering if they had any particular place in mind such as Sendai or Sapporo.
Selling over 250,000 records, "Swan no Namida" managed to reach as high as No. 7 on the embryonic Oricon, and ended up as the 44th-ranked single of 1969.
There have been plenty of covers of the song over the decades with perhaps the earliest being done by Chiyo Okumura（奥村チヨ）in June 1969 for her 3rd album"Anata to Chiyo to..."（あなたとチヨと…You and Chiyo and...）. Her take is a bit more of a straight kayo version from that time with the strings and flute.
(cover version)
Another cover was provided by the trio Mi-Ke, whose modus operandi was dusting off a lot of those old kayo and breathing new life into them. It looks like their take on "Swan no Namida" went through the B'z arrangement filter. The song was included in their debut album"Omoide no GS Kujukurihama"（想い出のG.S九十九里浜...Memories of G.S. Kujukurihama）which peaked at No. 19 on the Oricon charts.
It had been quite the while since I actually put up a Group Sounds article so looking through the list of GS bands on J-Wiki, I came across the band Ox（オックス）. Now, how the band got that name I have no idea, but it's a name that I had seen in the past so I decided to give them a look-see. My pre-look-see image was that, considering the name, the guys would be these pretty well-built All-Japan jock types. And then I saw the cover for their debut single above...they looked like Shakespearean ice hockey referees (Thy penalty is icing, my young thane!)!
"Girl Friend" is the title of that debut single from May 1968, and it is this fairly soft-sounding ballad done by the band that reminded me of the band The Beau Brummels from the same decade. Written by Jun Hashimoto（橋本淳）and composed by Kyohei Tsutsumi (筒美京平...one of his very early works in a very long career), lead vocal Hideto Noguchi sings about putting that young lucky lady on that very high fantasy pedestal as he hopes that the two words of the title can become one at last. The single was the most successful of their career (which lasted from 1968 to 1971), hitting No. 6 on Oricon. In total, they would release 9 singles and 2 albums before the breakup came.
Ox consisted of Noguchi（野口ヒデト）, bassist and leader Toshio Fukui（福井利男）, drummer Yuji Iwata（岩田裕二）, guitarist Shiro Okada（岡田志郎）, and organist/vocal Ai Akamatsu（赤松愛）. Fukui and Iwata had belonged to the band Kings but decided to break away and create a new group and eventually recruited the other members to become Ox. After the band broke up in 1971, vocalist Hideto Noguchi changed his name to Hideto Maki（真木ひでと）and became an enka singer. Drummer Akamatsu left the group in 1969 to be replaced by Yuki Taura（田浦幸）for the remainder of their time together.
