Yumi Matsutoya & Carl Smoky Ishii -- Ai no Wave（愛のWAVE）

 

Kome Kome Club（米米CLUB）made an appearance on last week's "Uta Kon"（うたコン）and leader Tatsuya "Carl Smoky" Ishii（石井竜也）was his usual cheerfully goofy self, and during his chat session with the hosts, it was announced that the band was celebrating its 35th anniversary in show business. I was just finishing off my freshman year at U of T back in 1985 when K2C started its run of epic entertainment. Many congratulations to the band and I'm hoping that it's going to keep on entertaining the masses.

Anyways, I was leafing through one of the "Young Song" inserts that come with the monthly "Myojo" magazines. I still retain a few of those as they appear more and more like archaeological pop cultural artifacts, but getting back on track, I was looking through one of them when I saw that there was this most unusual duet between two vivacious singer-songwriters. Never did I imagine that the aforementioned Carl Smoky and Yumi Matsutoya（松任谷由実）actually team up on a song, but they certainly did and I took the picture that serves as the article photo at the top.

Released in November 1992, "Ai no Wave" (Love Wave) had both Ishii and Yuming creating and recording this one and only single together with Hiroshi Shinkawa（新川博）behind the arrangement as the theme for a Fuji-TV campaign. It's a fun song to be sure but I think the news that the long time Queen of New Music and Mr. Charisma were working together also helped gained its No. 1 ranking on Oricon. And apparently, according to Yuming in the concert video above, the two of them had performed "Ai no Wave" just once live on the noon-hour show "Waratte Ii Tomo!"（笑っていいとも!）before Carl Smoky popped up that night at the concert.

Akiko Wada -- Saa Boken da (さあ冒険だ)

Since I've gotten into that nostalgic "Ponkikies"（ポンキッキーズ）mood thanks to writing about "Kimi to Boku"（キミとボク）in the last several minutes, I found another catchy song from the Fuji-TV kids' show. The songs used for the program were not only used in the music segments but also for the intros and outros. One particular song that resonated with me at the end of an episode was "Saa Boken da" (Hey, It's An Adventure) since the video involved scenes from the 1902 French movie "A Trip to the Moon".

This was sung by veteran soul singer Akiko Wada（和田アキ子）as her 59th single from September 1995. At first, I hadn't been able to recognize that it was the relatively tall and tough Wada since she approached it vocally with a lighter touch, and certainly it was a different sort of melody for her. In fact, I was downright impressed by the names involved in the making of "Saa Boken da". Chisato Moritaka（森高千里）and Shigesato Itoi（糸井重里）wrote the lyrics while Tatsuya Ishii（石井竜也）of Kome Kome Club（米米CLUB）took care of the music with the band arranging the whole thing.

"Saa Boken da" has that fun and carefree spirit of a road trip whether by car or motorcycle, and it looks like it was filtered through The Beatles with that harmonica in there. However, that melody also seems to be following a pattern similar to that old musical song "Ol' Man River". And just like that standard, "Saa Boken da" keeps rolling along to the next destination.

Tatsuya Ishii -- Hi-Tension Love

If I were a fly on the wall....I think that's what the director behind the video for Tatsuya Ishii's（石井竜也） "Hi-Tension Love" was thinking about when he came up with the concept. But the fly here seems to be the mirror ball looking in on the hijinks at an old-fashioned disco (unfortunately the official video has been taken down.).

In any case, this was Ishii's 5th single as a solo singer away from Kome Kome Club（米米クラブ）. I first heard it at a karaoke box along with several of my students at the time. One of them was a fairly timid young lady in the classroom but once she got into the lounge with a microphone, it was all hands on deck. And she was a huge Ishii fan, to boot, so she was more than happy to find "Hi-Tension Love" in the thick tome of listings. As I was listening to her warble the tune, I realized it was a pretty hyper song (as would be the case for a K2C single) with a tribute to good ol' disco.

Not long afterwards, I was doing a bit of rummaging through the used CD single section of one of my favourite music haunts, RECOfan, in Shibuya (just a few floors below The J-Pop Café where some of Rinko Kikuchi's scenes from "Babel" had been filmed), and I came across "Hi-Tension Love". It obviously was once in a CD rental shop according to the markings on the cover but the disc still sounded fine. It was indeed Carl Smokey's voice there but no sign of Big Horns Bee. Still, the thick disco bass was plucking away like a rabid turkey farmer before Thanksgiving. Not quite up there with K2C's best stuff but still fun to listen to nonetheless.

According to J-Wiki, all or most of the fawning women at the disco club where Ishii's character, the Disco King (or Pimp), held court actually belonged to his fan club. I can imagine that all of those expressions on their faces were quite genuine. I know that my student/No. 1 Ishii fan probably tore her hair out in envy. As for the almost unrecognizable Ishii, to me he actually looked a lot like the foppish Toshihiko Takamizawa（高見沢俊彦） from ALFEE right down to the dark nail polish.

Well, the above video has Ishii looking more like himself. "Hi-Tension Love" made it as high as No. 28 on Oricon after its release in December 1998, and was written/composed by Ishii. It's also a track on his 2nd album, "DEEP" which came out in January 1999. The album peaked at No. 10.

http://music.163.com/#/song?id=22665465