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.
Showing posts with label Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi. Show all posts
Welcome to Monday! I was looking down the Oricon Top 50 singles for 1983 on J-Wiki and perhaps not all that surprisingly, we've managed to cover pretty much all of them in the 14+ years that "Kayo Kyoku Plus" has been in existence.
However, one that I had yet to cover was singer-songwriter and actor Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi's（長渕剛）"Good Bye Seishun"(Good Bye Youth) which ended up as the 49th-ranked single of 1983 after hitting No.5 on the Oricon weeklies following its release in September 1983. Strangely enough, the intro for "Good Bye Seishun" was familiar to me so I had heard it sometime in the past as it reminded me a bit of "El Condor Pasa", and indeed, Nagabuchi had based the melody on Central and South American songs created into this folk-rock tune.
Yasushi Akimoto（秋元康）was responsible for the lyrics which don't give a particular happy glow to someone's days of youth. It seems like the protagonist went through some very hard times as a teenager and is more than happy to wash his hands of all of it before taking those steps into adulthood. Still, the song is plenty jaunty.
"Good Bye Seishun" was Nagabuchi's first major hit since his 1980 "Junko"（順子）. It not only got him more appearances on television but it was also used as the theme song for the 1983 TBS drama "Kazoku Game"（家族ゲーム...The Family Game） which was also a starring vehicle for him.
I don't consider myself a particularly lucky man. I've never won a lottery nor did I ever find the love of my life. However, where I did score some luck was growing up at a very interesting time in Toronto. I finally got some freedom in staying up late at night around the late 1970s going into the 1980s: music videos were just coming into their own and there were some rather intriguing TV shows popping up on the tube in my area.
I mentioned this in last week's Reminiscings of Youth when I wrote about the late Lalo Schifrin's theme for "T.H.E. Cat" suspense series. I got to (re-)acquaint myself with a number of these old TV shows and even some musical interludes through the lone season of a 1980 program called "The All-Night Show" on the local multicultural channel, CFMT-47 (popularly known as MTV just before a certain music channel down south grabbed the call letters forever). This aired most nights (so about 300 episodes) for about four to five hours overnight...a time when most channels would actually sign off and go to test patterns.
"The All-Night Show" starred comedian Chas Lawther as Chuck The Security Guard, the overnight guardian of MTV, who, out of a sense of boredom and curiosity, would basically take over operation at the station and with some drop-in buddies, engage the viewing audience in conversation and show off some of those old TV shows such as "The Twilight Zone", "The Beverly Hillbillies", the aforementioned "T.H.E. Cat" and other chestnuts. Obviously, even with my newfound nocturnal liberty, I didn't get to watch "The All-Night Show" every night. It was more like Friday and/or Saturday nights past 1 am and that wasn't even for the entire show (I don't think my parents would have been too thrilled to wake up to see that I hadn't gone to sleep).
One of the most bizarre moments on the show that I still remember to this day is when Chuck showed a washed-out video of a man outside somewhere who confessed on camera that he no longer had the will to live and would blow himself up with a homemade bomb right in front of the camera. He took his clothes off right then and there and blew himself up, although there didn't seem to be any gore. I think even Chas/Chuck looked very rattled by the sight and in the next several minutes, "WTF?!" phone calls came pouring in. Another number of minutes passed by before a woman phoned in to reassure everyone that her husband had survived his own suicide attempt of several years prior with surprisingly few injuries and that he was feeling much better with therapy and love but that he would not be willing to provide any further comment. I'm not sure if this had been an elaborate (and unfunny) hoax by the show but from Chuck's expression, it sure didn't look like it.
Along with watching some of the spookier episodes of "The Twilight Zone", one other thing that stuck with me was the de facto theme song for "The All-Night Show" which played after a few minutes of a Chuck intro. I'd heard "Strangers in the Night" before, notably with Frank Sinatra, so the song was recognizable but this version was about as spacey and bizarre and un-jazzy as it could get as it usually played over a montage of clips from B-movies and old TV episodes.
This version was provided by French composer Jean-Jacques Perrey and German-American composer Gershon Kingsley, known popularly known as Perrey and Kingsley, who were known as two pioneers of electronic music in the 1960s. In fact, their take on "Strangers in the Night" can be found in their 1967 album "Kaleidoscopic Vibrations: Electronic Pop Music From Way Out", and yeah, it was way out, man!
As I stated above, "The All-Night Show" lasted just a month shy of one year between September 1980 and August 1981. It was a good run and I've seen YouTube comments wondering whimsically if there could be another program like that to pop up in the overnight hours once more, but then again, I have to observe that YouTube is probably doing something like that right now.
Anyways, just for comparison's sake, here is Ol' Blue Eyes' version of "Strangers in the Night" from 1966. But let's go with the starting date of "The All-Night Show" which was late September 1980. What was at the top of the Oricon charts on September 22nd that year?
Welcome to another Reminiscings of Youth where I go for some of the songs from my adolescence. The Go-Gos were just one of the many acts that awakened my interest in pop music. As I mentioned in the ROY for their "Vacation", I was awfully tempted to get their 1981 album "Beauty and the Beat" when it was playing over the speakers at the record corner of the local Hudson's Bay department store back in my high school days. Strangely enough, I was passing by the now-closed down Bay store earlier today as it was being prepared as a liquidation base for another store. I could see the old LP corner off in the back.
Along with "Our Lips Are Sealed", "We Got the Beat" was another Go-Gos hit that hit hard with Gina Schock's drumming rolling in like a Mac truck at full speed. Until Belinda Carlisle and company suddenly showed up on television screens everywhere, I hadn't known any girl bands before armed with full instruments, so listening to these two songs were a revelation as they rocked it out. And apparently, they partied as hard as they worked. I saw one YouTube comment stating that even Ozzy Osbourne had dropped his jaw at how the Go-Gos went medieval on his tour bus (not sure how they would have met, but the band was punk back in those days).
Speaking of punk, I didn't know until yesterday that there had been an original version of "We Got the Beat" that came out as a single in May 1980. From the few times I've listened to this one, the rock and punk roots show more prominently here. The 1982 single version hit No. 2 on US Billboard for three weeks while in Canada, it peaked at No. 3.
Well, for some reason, I ended up putting up the Top 10 Oricon singles chart for September 8th 1980 instead of the one for May 9th and I've already gone to the trouble of getting the relevant Top 3 postings for the comparative Japanese singles. Ah, heck...too tired to change back.
By the late 1980s, I'd gotten the distinct impression that the multi-week megahit on video shows and radio programs was beginning to fade in frequency. It wasn't quite like the early 1980s when there would be a song by a music superstar taking the baton from the previous artist to be the new No. 1 (or slightly below) person for the next little while. But perhaps that was just my perception.
So, it was something when Brenda Russell's"Piano in the Dark" first appeared in the pop culture zeitgeist as a single in February 1988. I'd never heard of this singer-songwriter before and to be honest, I never quite heard from her again. But for a long time that year, this soulful song was getting the heavy rotation on radio and TV. Created by Russell, Jeff Hull and Scott Cutler, it was this melancholy tune about wondering whether to leave a guy, only for his piano playing to draw the protagonist back in (kinda reminded of a famous "The Godfather Part III" quote here). The moody and smoky arrangement was such that it had me thinking of Quiet Storm again along the lines of Anita Baker.
In Canada, "Piano in the Dark" did OK by scoring a No. 23 ranking on RPM but did far better in the United States where it reached No. 6 on Billboard. It was also a track on Russell's fourth studio album"Get Here" which came out in the same year.
So, what else was coming out as singles in Japan in February 1988?
Tomorrow is the official opening day of the Paris Olympics although there has already been some action today, and I figure that it's time to put up some Olympic fare for Reminiscings of Youth this week.
A reviewer from "Rolling Stone" once described Canadian record producer and composer David Foster as a "master of . . . bombastic pop kitsch". Like ouch! And nope, it wasn't even a tongue-in-cheek backhanded compliment. However, with all of his contributions to Canadian, American and Japanese pop music, I'd like to state that he is MY master of bombastic pop kitsch. There are songs that he helped craft for other singers that I still like to hear after so many decades.
One of them has even been mentioned before when I did an Author's Pick on the man himself back in early 2019, and that was "Winter Games" for the Calgary Olympics in February 1988. I'd already been aware of his works as an 80s pop song enthusiast but this one landed a 10 on the mat when it premiered because it sounded so epic, friendly, wintry and downright Canadian for some reason. That main piano melody has always reminded me of shushing down the ski slopes without a care in the world, and I believe that it probably hit the Japanese in a nice way, too, because over the years, my impression has been that they have always appreciated nimble-fingered piano pop from musicians like Foster and Richard Clayderman outside of Japan and their own Midori Karashima（辛島美登里）and Hiroko Kokubu（国府弘子）.
So, let's see what else was being released in Japan during the Calgary Games, according to the CD/record sales calendar for 1988.
I gotta say that the A and B sides for Kaori Tsuchiya's（つちやかおり）3rd single are pretty lush in arrangement on the aidoru side of things. But when both songs have been composed by folk-rock singer Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi（長渕剛）, I gather that the final results will be a bit more different and refined.
This video by uploader Homeless Records has both "Heart Break Street" and "Coconut Waffle no Katate ni"(A Coconut Waffle in One Hand). Released in December 1982, just from what I've seen on other sites, I'm guessing that the official title for the single was always meant to be the English wording although the kanji reads "Shitsuren Sanpomichi" which means the same thing. In any case, along with Nagabuchi's contribution, Yasushi Akimoto（秋元康）was the lyricist and Masaaki Omura（大村雅朗）arranged everything.
"Heart Break Street" has one of the most attractive intros that I've ever heard in an 80s aidorutune and the jaunty rhythm does make me think that, yeah, this is something that Nagabuchi would provide in his own songs. As the title hints, this isn't the happiest song on romance at all as a woman tearfully wishes that she could return to more blissful and less lonelier days. At 3:05 is "Coconut Waffle no Katate ni", which was handled by all three songwriters from Side A, and it's an adorable slow ballad about pining for that guy in school. Again, I also like how this song sounds with that hint of AOR and the wailing electric guitar midway, and at points, I wonder whether Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）could have been offered this song beforehand. To be honest, though, I don't think that I have ever heard of a coconut waffle.
Following a few weeks of Xmas-themed Reminiscings of Youth articles, it's time to return to normal somewhat, although I know that we're still in the Holidays. And for this final ROY of 2022, I wanted to bring in something danceable and nostalgic since we're approaching the final party season of the year. Not that I will be going anywhere near a club on December 31st; I'm simply too old for that now. It's gonna be toshikoshi soba for dinner on that night.
My first ROY regarding the legendary 80s band New Order revolved around "Bizarre Love Triangle" which was a favourite on the dance floor in all of those discos that my university buddies and I had used to frequent such as The Copa and RPM in Toronto. As soon as we heard the familiar intro, we were up and at 'em. However, we also had an affinity for the band's darker but still plenty danceable song "Blue Monday".
When I saw the Wikipedia information on the song, I was surprised to see that it had been released so early...in March 1983. I certainly don't recall hearing it that early in the decade. But then, I realized that the version that we'd been used to hearing and dancing to was "Blue Monday '88" (a lot of us liked to do a march to it) remixed by Quincy Jones and released in April 1988. Indeed, I did get my copy of the record as you can see in the thumbnail photo at the top. And the video above us here is of this remixed version while the video below has the original 1983 song.
I figure that there are plenty of representatives for 1980s music. New Order's"Blue Monday" would be the ambassador for the UK dance territory. The combination of the rat-a-tat drum, the synths and the bass/bass synth and especially Bernard Sumner's vocals is iconic. If there is ever a movie set in the 1980s, this is the song for the trailer as much as "In the Mood" has usually been utilized for any flick taking place in the 1920s or 1930s.
Apparently, the movie was no great shakes but "Wonder Woman 1984" had Sebastian Böhm making his mark on its trailer with his own version of "Blue Monday". It would have been cool to use it during an action scene there.
So, what were up at Nos. 1, 3 and 5 on Oricon for April 1988?
When I was teaching at an Urayasu juku during my later years in Ichikawa, I found out that one of my students ran a small restaurant with her husband literally just around the corner from the juku. So, since I had a few hours on Friday night before I had to teach, I decided to give the restaurant a shot. I ordered their Chicken Sauté and fell in love with it immediately, especially with the rich sauce and bottomless plates of rice. I ended up going to that place every couple of weeks and usually I ordered that Chicken Sauté, much to my student's delight. They had lots of other fine examples of comfort food there, too.
Outside of his songs' inclusion in Reminiscings of Youth articles, it's been over four years since I featured singer-songwriter and actor Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi（長渕剛）, and I have this song which has been familiar to me for an even longer period of time. His 16th single from May 1987, "Rokunamon ja ne" (Ain't Good), was a popular request at karaoke in my later years at those university outings to Kuri, the local karaoke bar in downtown Toronto. Though at the time, I couldn't remember the title of the song, I knew it because of the opening line "Pi, pi, pi, pi, pi, pi..." which was a bit of onomatopoeia to get things going.
Listening to it again after so long, "Rokunamon ja ne" is a lot softer than I had remembered it to be. I had thought it was one of Nagabuchi's uptempo rockers, but it actually sounds and has been categorized as a folk tune (although I'm still putting in the J-Rock label since I still think that there are elements of that genre in there, too). Written and composed by the singer, it's an acoustic guitar-and-piano dominant number about expressing those years of depression and anguish in adolescence that have bubbled up to the surface.
"Rokunamon ja ne" was often a hit at the bar so I could only imagine what it has been like at concerts such as the one featured above. It peaked at No. 3 on Oricon and is a track on Nagabuchi's 10th studio album"License" from August 1987. The album spent two weeks at No. 1 and won Best Album honours at that year's Japan Record Awards.
The song was also used as the theme song for the 1987 TBS family drama "Oyako Zig Zag"（親子ジグザグ...Parent and Child Zig Zag） which starred Nagabuchi as the owner of a small Tokyo diner serving comfort food (which is why I started with that first paragraph) and having to do deal with some complicated family issues. From what I've seen of some scenes, there are plenty of punches thrown which seem to be par for the course for a Nagabuchi drama.
Well, back to the regular Thursday edition of Reminiscings of Youth following last night's tribute to "Star Wars". And tonight, I wanted to focus on one of the first female rock singers that I had ever experienced on television and radio.
Pat Benatar, I was happy to hear, will be inducted into the 2022 class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame later this year. I first heard about her right when I was starting to get into music on both sides of the Pacific and at around that time, music video was beginning to rise in the media. This video of her "You Better Run" was my first view of Benatar, and she looked stunning, intimidating and cool-as-all-get-out at the same time. Her cheekbones could be anyone's well-sharpened scythes!
However, it was her 9th single from September 1980, "Hit Me With Your Best Shot", that got me with her best shot. Eddie Schwartz was the songwriter behind this typically growling Benatar rocker of defiance and challenge, and not surprisingly, it was the song of choice for a lot of team sports coverage including ice hockey. I mean, it would be a perfect tune for the best of the best goaltenders.
I was amused to find out from the Wikipedia article on "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" that Schwartz had been inspired to create the song from a pillow-punching therapy session in Toronto of all places. Never thought that my hometown was that violent way back when. Regardless, the song hit No. 10 on Canada's RPM singles chart while in the United States, it went up to No. 9 on Billboard, going Gold. Long may Pat Benatar rock!
Allow me then to give Nos. 1, 2 and 4 for September 1980 on Oricon.
Strangely enough, the inspiration for this Author's Pick came from that Sanma Akashiya（明石家さんま）special that I referred to in Masayuki Suzuki's（鈴木雅之）"Tokubetsu na Ichi Nichi ~ a special day"（特別な一日）back on Xmas Eve. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the video for the entire show got taken down in the last couple of days (although I was able to replace it with Milet's talk with the comedian) but it did show not only Martin's chat with Sanma but also a karaoke performance of the cool singer's famous 80s"Lonely Chaplin" with R&B chanteuse AI. Apparently, AI was so nervous performing with Suzuki that her microphone was about to slip from her hands due to sweat.
But on seeing that performance, a light bulb sparked off over my head. All these years, I've been telling readers that my sources on finding about all this kayo and J-Pop have included CD shop browsing, the old "Sounds of Japan" radio broadcasts on CHIN-FM, and watching anime. But I have neglected to mention that I've also discovered songs through my old karaoke visits to Kuri in Yorkville and then those karaoke sessions in Japan, notably Gunma Prefecture. So I have decided to put down a short list of songs that I first found out about from those visits since after all, I've already talked about my favourite karaoke tunes and the ones that I utterly failed at. As well, Noelle Tham has given her karaoke experiences here, too.
By chance, if any of you commenters have any songs that you discovered through a trip to your friendly neighbourhood karaoke joint, please feel free to share. It's the Holidays, after all.🎉
Kiyomi Suzuki with Rats & Star -- Lonely Chaplin (ロンリー・チャプリン）
Indeed, it is Thursday night and so once again, it's time for Reminiscings of Youth!
I've long been a Pet Shop Boys fan ever since I first heard their "Opportunities" in the early 1980s. My first...opportunity...to hear Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe was on the car radio because that particular song was regularly getting on "The Top 6 at 6" on the old CFTR-AM station. Then, of course, there came their other danceable synthpop confections such as "It's a Sin", "West End Girls" and the cover of "Always on My Mind". Of course, I ended up getting some of the remix versions on vinyl as a kid at the local Sam The Record Man.
However, it has been "Left to My Own Devices" which was released as the Pet Shop Boys' November 1988 single that has imprinted itself on my brain as their theme song...personal choice, I know. Along with Che Guevara, Debussy and that Roundhead general, "Left to My Own Devices" simply has this epicness with the regularly amazing PSB beats paired with a pop orchestra which must have been channeling the soundtrack of the greatest spy caper ever made as they played this. In fact, I'm surprised that this has yet to become part of a motion picture and I would say that it belongs with a montage credit sequence on the level of "Mission: Impossible".
Nope, I'm not one who particularly went to a lot of concerts (ironic for a guy with a music blog) but I actually had a charleyhorse of envy when I saw the above performance. Just imagine being among fellow Pet Shop Boys fans when the opening dramatic strings from "Left to My Own Devices" activated. When I first heard this on the radio in the late 1980s, I knew it was a PSB song but it took me a couple of days to track down the title, which I did ravenously and when I finally did get the title, I went "Aw, that's so Pet Shop Boys!". And yet, the lyrics were all about a guy who just wanted to spend some time alone with an imagination the size of Godzilla.
I ended up buying the 1988 album"Introspective" (the album cover looks like a TV test pattern designed by Benetton) on the fact that it contained the extended version of "Left to My Own Devices", a slightly less intense take on the original single but with added French horn and an opera singer to compensate. "Introspective" also has a very special place in my heart because it is the very first CD that I ever bought in my life, and it was one of the few albums that I brought over with me to Japan when I started my job on the JET Programme in the summer of 1989.
Strangely enough, the single wasn't all that much of a hit in the United States or Canada, only getting into the mid-80s on Billboard and RPM respectively but it did reach No. 4 on the UK charts according to the Wikipedia article about the song.
So, what were the Top 3 singles on Oricon in November 1988?
"So, Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi also composed aidoru tunes, eh?"
I translated the comment by the uploader of this video, and like him/her, I was also quite surprised to find out that the tough Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi（長渕剛）, who has been behind folk-rock songs such as "Tombo"（とんぼ）, also provided music for the teenybopper singers of the 1980s.
His client here was Chiaki Watanabe（渡辺千秋）whose career was not too short and not too long (1983-1992). In April 1984, she released her debut single"Natsu ni Refresh"(Refresh In Summer) and is an appropriately bouncy aidoru tune composed by Nagabuchi with future AKB48 organizer Yasushi Akimoto（秋元康）taking care of the lyrics. "Natsu ni Refresh" is breezy and skip-worthy but Nagabuchi also includes some West Coast AOR sounds in the middle as well...kinda feels like a vacation in California or a commercial for orange juice. However, in actual fact, the song was used for a Nivea skin cream ad.
Watanabe released a total of 3 singles with no albums, although those singles did end up as part of an overall aidoru compilation called the "Aidoru Miracle Bible Series"（アイドル・ミラクルバイブルシリーズ）. She also appeared as an actress and tarento in a number of series before calling it a showbiz career and returning to her native Yamaguchi Prefecture.
I was reading about veteran singer-songwriter Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi（長渕剛）who I first got to know through the songbook at Kuri, my old karaoke haunt back in my university days. There were quite a few tipsy and warbling customers who loved to croon "Kanpai"（乾杯）and "Tonbo"（とんぼ）in the lounge over a beer or a scotch. By the time I actually got to see him perform on TV in Japan, he gave me the impression of being one of the toughest-looking singing dudes with his crew cut and beefed-up physique. What furthered that image was his appearances in J-Dramas as gangsters or suffer-no-fools detectives.
So it was with some surprise on realizing that when he started his career from the early 1970s, he was this long-haired and skinny sort in a leisure suit. Furthermore, according to the Wikipedia write-up about him, he paid some pretty hard dues along the way when he was performing at some late-night venues and he got booed and had bottles thrown at him. So I think the toughening up part had already begun on the inside.
When I was reading up his biography at both Wikipedia and J-Wiki, I was a bit confused about his debut single since apparently, there were two of them. It took a look at the English side of things to figure out that at least to Nagabuchi, his official debut was in October 1978 with "Junrenka", a Take Two of sorts since he wanted to disown his original debut of "Ame no Arashiyama"（雨の嵐山...Arashiyama Rain）the year before because he so hated the arrangement that he felt was too close to enka. I will definitely have to cover that song then in the near future....not because I want to troll the fellow (I am not going to go up against a guy that solidly built) but because I am genuinely curious.
As for "Junrenka", the term doesn't seem to exist officially in the dictionaries but from reading Nagabuchi's lyrics, I gather that the translation can be "Roundabout Love Song". He seems to be singing from the woman's point of view; the woman is complaining that she just can't find Mr. Right because she always finds some sort of insincerity in terms of love within the men that she's dated.
Listening to Nagabuchi's music, it's definitely not enka but a pretty rousing folk with the guitar and harmonica. And when putting together the lyrical content and the music, I could imagine that "Junrenka" could also be a number that Miyuki Nakajima（中島みゆき）would have performed.
I also discovered through reading the J-Wikiarticle for "Junrenka" that he was obviously quite proud of his re-debut single since the footnote source was given in a 1981 book, "Orera no Tabi wa Highway"（俺らの旅はハイウェイ...Our Trip is the Highway） in a section called "Jishinsaku 'Junrenka'"（自信作「巡恋歌」...My Pride -- Junrenka）. One of the pieces of information there revealed that the Yamaha Music Foundation which had gotten a demo tape of "Junrenka" contacted Nagabuchi to suggest that one of their up-and-coming aidoru could sing it as her debut single to which the singer replied, "I haven't even made my debut yet...I want to sing it!" Yamaha acquiesced and recommended Nagabuchi to enter the Yamaha Popular Song Contest once more (he had done so with "Ame no Arashiyama"). He ended up winning the Kyushu championship and was nominated within the final selection. After receiving some rave reviews, his Take Two took place with Toshiba EMI. Sounds like just the story for an NHK biography.
As it was, "Junrenka" only got as high as No. 173 on Oricon. However, the album that it was placed on, "Kaze wa Minami kara"（風は南から...The Wind is from the South） which came out in March 1979 ranked far higher at No. 15, and from looking at the recent video above, "Junrenka" seems to be a concert favourite.
It looks like tonight will be my tribute to insect kayo after just completing "Kita no Hotaru"（北の螢）. I have a bit more of a connection with Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi's（長渕剛）"Tonbo"(Dragonfly) since it was a song that I heard frequently at the Yorkville karaoke bar Kuri back in the late 1980s. At the time, I didn't know the details about the lyrics but I could sorta figure out that it was one of those tunes that guys sang to vent their frustrations.
Written and composed by Nagabuchi for release as his 20th single in October 1988, it was originally created as the theme song for the TBS drama "Tonbo", a show that starred the singer-songwriter himself as a yakuza member just out of prison only for him to face more trouble. I actually saw the very last scene of show through an afternoon rerun as his character of Eiji, looking like he went through a full 12 rounds with Mike Tyson, sullenly and defiantly bulled his way through the regular working crowd coming from the other direction as the strummy tones of the title song played in the background.
"Tonbo" may have started life as the theme song for an antisocial malcontent angry at the planet but I think it quickly became the anthem for anyone in the working world trying their best from not being worn down to a nub by overly long hours, too much work and dilettante bosses. I always thought it to be the equivalent of an especially astringent shot of shochu. It goes down good and rough and you want to spew out all that bad air. This would explain why it became a huge hit for Nagabuchi when it went all the way up to No. 1 and quickly became the 16th-ranked song of 1988. And it was enough of a powerful long seller that it even ended up the 3rd-ranked song of 1989. I was also a bit surprised to find out that "Tonbo" was the first single in 5 years sinceTakashi Hosokawa's（細川たかし）"Yagiri no Watashi"（矢切の渡し）to have become a million-seller.
I remember watching one of the morning shows on Japanese TV in my apartment several years ago. Apparently, it was the morning after the retirement of one of the big stars in baseball, Kazuhiro Kiyohara back in 2008. Immediately following his final game with the Orix Buffaloes, there was a ceremony right on the baseball field with Nagabuchi coming up and performing "Tonbo" in front of Kiyohara. The player tried to stayed stoic but didn't quite succeed.
As for the meaning of the dragonfly in the title, Nagabuchi apparently meant it to be the target of envy for all those corporate cogs as the insect in question just seems to enjoy a footloose and fancy-free life flitting about from place to place. I can say that it lives a very brief one as well, but hey, let's keep to the intention of the song here.
Considering the image over the past number of years of singer-songwriter Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi （長渕剛）as this hard man of Japanese popular music and the acting business (chiseled body, Clint Eastwood taciturnity, tough guy roles), it's almost rather soothing and surprising at the same time that his 5th single from June 1980, "Junko" is such a lovelorn ode from somebody who would most likely be the easy victim of Nagabuchi's recent characters.
It definitely hit a chord with the fans back then as it hit No. 1 and would eventually be the 5th-ranked singleof the year. I gather that might have been because there were more of the guys to get sand kicked in their faces than the ones who were doing the kicking. The way Nagabuchi sang this struck me as being symbolic of that Tokyo school dweeb in the Coke-bottle glasses and ill-fitting uniform who pines for her pretty and completely oblivious Junko. So much for the tough guy act back then.
What I love about "Junko" is the combination of that early 70s J-Folk melody and the especially silky strings that accompanied a lot of early 80s ballads whether they be sung by aidoru or other pop singers. And just how Nagabuchi delivers in that sing-song style reminds me of all of us at that certain age when our voices were starting to break and our emotions were starting to roil. There is also that last part of the refrain where he repeatedly implores Junko in spirit not to knock on the door of his heart almost in a comical way.
"Junko" actually started life earlier in 1979 when it was part of Nagabuchi's 2nd album, "Gyakuryu"（逆流...Counter-Current） which came out in November. The album would be given the Best Album honours at the 1980 Japan Record Awards.
One of my favourite songs that I often heard being sung at Kuri was "Kanpai"(Here's To You!) by singer/songwriter/actorTsuyoshi Nagabuchi(長渕剛）. It was originally written and composed by the Kagoshima Prefecture native as a musical present at his old friend's wedding party, but he included it in his 3rd album"Kanpai" released in September 1980. Since then, it's been a ballad to be sung at weddings and graduations everywhere. And the karaoke videos for this song pretty much have to show a bride in either Japanese or Western wedding dress. I especially liked the string-filled bridge in the middle of the song.
That old video of "Kanpai" at Kuri never showed the young Nagabuchi. In fact, I only got to see him in Japan as this tough-as-nails rocker/balladeer who often played rough-hewn roles like yakuza enforcers in movies and TV dramas. So it was with some surprise to see his picture in the video below looking like a well-dressed hippie.
It was during my 2 years in Gunma Prefecture that I came across the 1988 CD single of "Kanpai". This version, released as a single for the first time, has Nagabuchi singing in a much more gravelly voice...kinda similar to Tom Waits or a later-day Bob Dylan. Also, the melody comes off as being more stately and elegiac...as if the celebration came after quite a bit of sacrifice. It sounds just as much as a tribute to lost ones as it is a toast to the ones who made it. Released in February 1988, it hit No. 1, as did the album it came on, "Never Change", a release of covers of his old songs. The single eventually became the 5th-ranked song of the year.
In 1990, Nagabuchi had his premiere appearance on that year's Kohaku Utagassen. In what became the longest individual performance in the history of the annual NHK special, he performed "Kanpai" and 2 other songs in succession in front of what was left of the Berlin Wall, about a year after its downfall. Definitely a fine place to give a toast to.
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