Rockabilly Redux.

I’m presently enjoying a sabbatical in the big city, but still can’t get this song out of my head, so am scratching the itch and getting it on record, especially since youtube is introducing some sort of pay wall in the near future.

Country music pioneers the Delmore Brothers wrote Blues Stay Away from Me in 1949.

Their original version – which has a very traditional country slant – with some great biographical notes from various commenters.

Blues stay away from me
Blues why don’t you let me be
Don’t know why
You keep on haunting me

Love was never meant for me
True love was never meant for me
Seems somehow
We never can agree

Life is full of misery
Dreams are like a memory
Bringing back
Your love that used to be

Tears so many I can’t see
Years don’t mean a thing to me
Time goes by
And I still can’t be free

Blues/jazz great Lonnie Johnson also did a version, but it’s not available on youtube, so here is his version of Broken Levee Blues where Johnson’s vocals could easily be mistaken for Blind Willie McTell, while backed by Black American string quartet instrumentation so popular on the medicine show circuit from an earlier epoch. That was a time when rural rubes could watch dancing chickens, jeer at the geek and then purchase a patent medicine which, at a minimum, provided a jolly good alcohol/narcotic habit.

Anyway, back to our main theme.
There are just so many versions of Blues Stay Away from Me.
Sleepy La Beef giving it a blues reading and, not surprising, given his baritone vocal range.

Johnny Burnette with a version which combines country, blues and rockabilly elements.

Gene Vincent’s version where he nails the lyrics in perfect rockabilly mode, and with just the right amount of added studio echo.

Finally, The Band’s version with some tasty organ by Garth.

Obviously, like any holiday, this post is well and truly on the slippery path to self-indulgence and excess.

Chains of Love written by Big Joe Turner.
Chains of love
Has tied my heart to you
Chains of love
Have made me feel so blue
Well, now I’m your prisoner
Tell me what you’re gonna do

Are you gonna leave me
Are you gonna make me cry
Are you gonna love me
Are you gonna make me cry
These chains of blues gonna haunt me
Until the day I die

Well, if you’re gonna leave me
Please won’t you set me free
Well, if you’re gonna leave me
Please won’t you set me free
I can’t stay here with these chains
Less’n you stay on here with me

Well, three ‘o clock in the morning
Baby the moon is shining bright
Yeah, three ‘o clock in the morning
The moon is shining bright
I’m just sitting here wondering
Where can you be tonight

Blues/deep soul version by Bobby Bland.

Johnny Burnette (like his confrere Gene Vincent) was equally at home in the blues idiom.

Finally, everyone needs a country sweetheart.

What can I say. Holiday lite!

Girls Go Wild in NK.

If you are serious regarding developments in North Korea, you would be reading Adam Cathcart’s Sino-NK site, and if you are you would be listening to the Moranbong Band, North Korea’s late entry in the K-Pop phenomena. Here are some samples of Kim Jong Un’s latest addition to his Military Industrial Theatre Complex (DPRK- MITC).

While Adam and his Sino-NK colleagues provide academic analyses of the band and their place in the Great Chain of Hangul NK-Being, I would like to go down market a bit and provide some style advice.

To borrow a metaphor from the world of musical journalism, the Sino-NK staff are similar to heavy weights like Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau and Pete Guralnick enjoying their annual sabbatical. Some mild gluttony and lots of sparkling conversation on reified gender relations, the male power gaze and other heavy duty concepts from …… yikes….. various post-Marxist discourses. In contrast, I’m taking a Lester Bangs approach when writing for something like Creem or Tiger Beat for your basic teenage male who focusses on the lowest common demoninators.

This audience had real issues with the name. The Moranbong Band. Hardly a name capable of conjuring up images of hotness, North Asian teenage vixens and the like. Just look at the Japanese competition here. Anyway, I leave it to you think of a new band name, since that is the least of our worries in this Malcolm McLaren makeover. And there was a man concerned about his post-mortal legacy. I’m quite sure McLaren had some intern scrub the internet of any mention of his grand Oriental failures – Jungk – an Asian girl group with Spice ambitions.

Jungk

McLaren also managed forgotten groups such as the Chinese punk-rock band Wild Strawberries. The Guardian

Chinese punk band Wild Strawberries, plus some further reading on McLaren HERE.

With that background in place, lets get on with the task. A band consisting of a dozen members. It goes against the evidence. Four to seven members at the most, three chords and seventeen songs. Next step is a wet T shirt contest and we can get rid of five in the band, probably marry them off to deserving members of Kin Jong Un’s Praetorian Guard.

The engine house of any band is the drummer and this girl just doesn’t cut it. Looks like someone who is handing out small helpings of food in some workers canteen. What is required is some dervish with wild hair, bee sting lips and Keith Moon’s attitude and kick ass drum technique.

Then there is the choice of other instruments. Let’s get rid of the bloody piano and that piano harpsichord thingy as well as all those fucking violins. They belong to old dead European culture and have no place in this Asian century. Three of the girl should be armed with Strats or SG’s and the piano should be deep-sixed for a Farfisa or Vox Continental organ. Finally, the absolutely hottest of the dozen should take on the central singing role. She must have Deborah Harry’s stage presence and Tina Turners microphone technique.

Finally, the wardrobe mistress should be reassigned to the Gulag. Those demure nurses outfits, chaste, but ass-hugging military uniforms and not to forget the spangly irredescent dresses and heels right out of a Thai go go bar are 80s clichés. They should be raiding PSYs Kim Hyuna’s dressing room and also work on their dance routines while they are at it.


You get the picture of the type of band I’m envisioning, so you can google Ms Kim’s photos later, and in your own time.
Maybe something like The 5,6,7, 8s.

Truly a band which has compacted all the great influences in the America Garage repetoire.

In lieu of my usual Japanese surfer girl update, a quick boarding expedition along the Korean peninsula.

Busan, South Korea

Read the background story HERE and thanks to BusanHaps.
Looking for something more challenging? How about The Hidden Surfing Paradise of North Korea which includes satellite photos of what probably are truly pristine beaches with juche characteristics.
Finally, I thoroughly recommend Shannon Aston’s Surfing the 38th Parallel, Photo Essay Series: Winter HERE.

One from Shannon Aston’s slide show with thanks

Oh well, back to the final of the Blue Sky series.

Blue Sky Markets: Part Three

The theme being highlighted here are the Blue Sky Markets, which were a commonplace in Post-WW11 Japan during the years of Macarthur’s shogunate (1945-1951). Anywhere from 17,000 to 20,000 black markets (depending on your choice of authority) sprang up, often, within days of Hirohito’s capitulation.

Osaka citizens listening to Hirohito’s speech.

Two Yamato Race understatements in his weasel-word speech:

…..the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.
The welfare of the wounded and the war-sufferers, and of those who have lost their homes and livelihood, are the objects of Our profound solicitude

And the feudal emperor worshippers, militarists and industrialists showed their real solicitude towards a general populace now living in hovels: they took control of vast amounts of materials which had been hoarded for the anticipated last ditch Battle on the Mainland, and made their fortunes by diverting these materials into the Black Market. Medicines, penicillin, metals, cement, gold and jewellery and just about everything else required for plain survival and/or economic reconstruction.

The peasantry, hitherto the expendables at the bottom of the feudal order, now enjoyed a sense of empowerment as they traded food to starving city dwellers for anything of real value. Sort of ironical as they had been previously been exploited to the hilt, with their young men being drafted into the army as cannon fodder, while young rural women were sold into prostitution by their parents. In Tokyo Ground Xero, the serial murder and rapist Kodaira Yoshio was able to lure his female victims into isolated spots by promising to introduce them to farmers selling cheap rice.

Blue Sky Markets: Part Two: Reading.

If you’ve read John Dower’s beyond brilliant Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of WW11, you would have encountered images similar to below. You can find a critical review of Dower’s book – albeit one which ignores his path breaking analysis of the transformations within Japanese popular culture (movies, style, cabaret, pulp novels and magazines HERE – and HERE is a good synopsis on prostitution based on Dower’s work. The latter is the most interesting blog I’ve come across for ages, and look forward to having a good flick thru. Recommended, if only for its historic b/w photos.

Blackmarket in Shimbasi.

One of the main settings in Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace.

Blue Sky market in Okinawa

Love it. Pepe Le Moko - first film deconstructed in Narrative Studies.
Hollywood in Japan
Pan Pan

And, the ironic image of Pan Pan

Post WW11 Ground Zero.
Many horsemen of the apocalypse stalked the land. Epidemic diseases. Psychological trauma. Widespread starvation. Wholesale corruption by govt officials and industrialists. Millions of now despised ex-soldiers and former colonists returned to the mother country with zero prospects. Women selling their bodies for a couple of rice balls (“That is when I sank into the despised profession of being a ‘a woman of the night’”[Mizoguchi]). And, as in all Hobbesian societies, the blackmarket ruled what was left of a devastated economy.

Some 20,000 of what were termed Blue Sky markets sprang up across Japan to meet every social need. Not surprisingly, all this offered great advancement opportunities for Yakuza gangs, who now found themselves clashing with previously ‘untouchable’ communities of Koreans, Formosans and Chinese in black-market turf wars.

You can read a chapter of The Yakuza by David Kaplan @ Alec Dubro (University of California Press, 3003), by hitting up UCAP and opening the PDF file right side. It is well worth the effort, as they stress the deep continuities in Japanese society, the symbiotic relationship between militarism, big business and yakuza mob activities on the domestic front. Post WW11, Yakuza gangs functioned as de facto instruments of government, being involved in running markets, fire brigades, unions, real estate, building construction, tax collection departments, the ubiquitous entertainment industry, etc. Which is to say that gang criminality was completely institutionalised.

2013 updates on recent accommodations between the Yakuza, the police and the political sphere can be read HERE and HERE. While both reads uncover nothing that is not common knowledge, they do provide excellent overviews.

(And on a lighter note, the HQ of the Yamaguchi-gumi family was/is situated next to the Australian Embassy. The Oz Ambassador lodged a complaint with the Tokyo govt in the 90s. Apparently, while gazing out of his master of the universe office, he would see the guards patrolling the grounds routinely pissing on shrubs and fences. A quiet message was sent and the ambassador’s dignity was restored.)

SCAP’s (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) – ie Macarthur and the Americans – social engineering designed to demilitarise, democratise, empower workers and women etc produced quite limited, superficial results. Harry Emerson Wildes (Typhoon in Tokyo 1954), a political adviser to SCAP, who also had a hand in drafting the new Japanese Constitution, resigned in 1946 claiming that the new political parties were little more than hooligan gangs. Finally, a surprising fact is that Macarthur made sure that the Army of Occupation (Shinchu Gun) for the most part consisted of newly minted troops fresh from the US, rather than veterans of the Pacific campaign, thus removing the hate and payback factor.

The end result of the above ploy by Macarthur led to massive fraternisation between the Victors and local communities, which is to say that the prostitution business expanded exponentially. And if Blue Sky markets constituted capitalism in its rawest form, corruption among the Occupation forces also became the norm. As Robert Whiting writes in Tokyo Underworld:

“…., the soldiers stationed in Japan each month remitted to the United States a sum that exceeded their total payroll. When the Bank of Japan entrusted the United States Army with 800,000 carats of diamonds, the diamonds simply vanished. When the Tokyo police force handed over its guns to the Americans, the entire armoury somehow disappeared”.

You can read a tremendous chapter of Whiting’s book HERE, which vividly illustrates the points above.

The black market was probably the most important institution in any Japanese city or town. A loci of all the power relationships then existing in Japanese society, and a site where demand met supply in their most brutal form.

Not surprisingly, the black market – Shimbasi in this case – features prominently in Tokyo Ground Zero by David Peace (Faber @ Faber 2007). A police procedural with plotlines and characters which incorporate most of the themes mentioned above, even though it involves unravelling the activities of the serial killer Kodaira Yoshio, who honed his murderous skills with the Japanese army in Manchuria.

The Guardian provides a good account of Peace’s writing technique, which I found plain annoying. The last thing the literary world needs now is more of the James Ellroy noir style. Nonetheless, gripping plot and behind the scene machinations right up these with anything found in Ellroy’s LA Quartet.

Finishing Part Three. Blue Sky Markets: Cinema.

Blue Sky Markets: Part One

All bloggers have a tendency to recycle and, in this case the process provides an opportunity to focus on a number of cinematic, historical and fictional texts which have provided much pleasure over the past few years, providing the grist for my first attempt to write about:

Kenji Mizoguchi the great Japanese auteur/director of women’s point-of-view movies, and

The birth of Japanese film noir in the form of Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 masterpiece Stray Dog which morphed into a brief discussion of a couple of path breaking yakuza movies HERE.

Also recycling a couple of previously written paragraphs simply because I can. If you want professional reviews, you will of course go to Midnight Eye: Visions of Japanese Cinema, unquestionably the most erudite site on Japanese cinema, and do your own homework. There are also a number of other quality resources on the net which I will link.

Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to congratulate Justrecently’s Weblog/China on his completion of five years of blogging and essential Chinese-English translation work.

Rockabilly Archaeology: Part Three.

To pilfer from an earlier post:

Train lyrics encompass all the most endearing themes central to great songs – rootlessness and Manifest Destiny, love, lust and romance, significant meetings and departures, outlaws and ladies (loosely termed), hobos and travel lust, fast trains, slow trains, last trains and every variant inbetween.

Trains play a metaphoric role in a mythic US landscape, and probably have bugger all connection to reality. But do they provide grist for the art of great song writing.

Wicki provides a list of song referencing trains HERE, and if you can’t add another dozen, you obviously grew up on diet of Queen, Oasis and rap and are therefore doomed to a future of self-harm and deserved suicide.
Now there are a lot of really dark songs, Long Black Veil and The Dark End of the Street being at the top of my list.

James Carr’s version with truly subline backing by the Muscle Shoals studio musicians.
We also have Hank Williams Travelling Man, which is surely an essay on his short and troubled life. And despite some negative reviews, I thoroughly recommend Chet Flippo’s semi-fictional biography Your Cheating Heart.

God, I fucking hate youtubes pre-song advertising.
………………………………………………………………………………..
Its time to finish this post: rain, birdsong and other distractions outside notwithstanding.
Recall that in a previous part of this series, I mentioned that musicians didn’t regard themselves as genre specific artists, and they hopped musical boundaries without considering the matter. Rock and roll, rockabilly, country, pop and gospel comfortably co-existed in most Southern musicians play lists.
Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio were perfect examples, and this link is by far the best available on the net.

Burnette hailed from Memphis and was a contemporary of young Presley: they attended different high schools. A truly tremendous voice which covers a wide register. Not a velvety or as playful as Presleys or as thin as Chris Isaaks. And no slouch in the yelp and hiccuping department either. They might look like rubes in their early photos, but were cutting edge musicians in their day.

Its time to crank up the Stereo, although I’ve been sampling from a brilliant collection off the pc.
Train Kept a Rolling all Night Long covered by millions and written by Kay, Bradshaw and Mann in 1951.

High velocity rockabilly.

Well, we made a stop in Albuquerque
She musta thought
I was a real cool jerk
Got off the train, and put her hands up
Lookin’ so good, I couldn’t let her go
But I just couldn’t tell her so

I’m in heat, I’m in love
But I just couldn’t tell her

Honey Hush written by Joe Turner.

The killer sound of the bass line was due to a loose valve in the amplifier, a fact which befuddled numerous wannabe guitarists including Clapton. (See first link.)
Equally at home singing blues. Chains of Love every bit as good as Bobby Bland’s version.

And I leave you with Midnight Train which begins as a ballad before segueing into a rockabilly conclusion. At first I though his vocal delivery was rather naïve but after a lot of listens, decided he really nailed this narrative of pure despair.

I left my gal sad and lonely, left her standing in the rain
I went down to the railroad, I caught myself a midnight train
I beat my way into Texas, landed in a gambling town
I got myself into trouble, I shot the county sheriff down
Oh Lord, I shot the county sheriff down
They put the handcuffs on me, tied me with a ball and chain
They took me to El Paso, they tied me with a ball and chain
These prisonbars all around me, no-one to call my bail
My heart’s sad and so lonely, I want to get out of this jail
Oh Lord, I want to get out of this jail
The jury read the verdict, murder in the first degree
The judge said, take this prisoner to the penitentiary
They put the handcuffs on me, tied me with a ball and chain
I’d left my home forever and I’ll never see my gal again
Oh Lord, I’ll never see my gal again

Touch Me. Totally killer vocals. Also covered by The Cramps.

I was going to finish with a brief account of rockabilly’s transmigration to Japan and Finland, but that will have to await another day.

Rockabilly Archaeology: Part Two.

The conventional wisdom is that when Elvis released Heartbreak Hotel on 27 January 1956 the world surrendered to this new phenomena. And as you would expect, those perps from Rolling Stone are aiding and abetting this fabrication:

In 2004 it was ranked number forty-five on Rolling Stone’s list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time”,[44] the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included it in its unranked list 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll[45] and in 2005, Uncut magazine ranked the first performance of “Heartbreak Hotel” in 1956 by Presley as the second greatest and most important cultural event of the rock and roll era.

This is hogswash of the first order. Rock and Roll, rockabilly, call it what you like, was well and truly percolating in the major cities in the South prior to this date and via numerous musicians who are now mostly footnotes. The whole idea of placing the first dot on a musical timeline is an idiot’s exercise. Musicians of that period simply didn’t think of themselves as genre artists: that was a retrospective exercise undertaken by both the musicians themselves (at least those that survived) and rock journalists.

Insipid pop, pure country, rock and roll or blues: The South was one massive melting pot of sounds and musicians turned their efforts to song types where they (or more exactly their managers/record companies) thought they could make a buck. Royalties from the sale of vinyl were non-existent: the only way to pay the bills and buy that mandatory pink cadillac and/or bus was really exhaustive touring – bars, roadhouses and high school hops, whitey’s version of the Black America’s chitlin circuit. And Black and White sounds of the day routinely intersected as bands ground out a living on the road. Songs were routinely pilfered, rewritten and sanitised, with Black musicians opting for the more visceral versions.

This abbreviated rant out of the way, let’s turn up the speakers and listen to some major and minor footnotes. Charlie Feathers HERE and HERE always enjoyed pointing out that he held a musicians union ticket well before Elvis.

Prior to his death in 1998, Charlie downsized and turned his family into his backing band. Just think that years later Tarantino (or more correctly longtime associate Robert Rodriguez) included the following in the Kill Bill double bill. (Rodriguez is unquestionably the most interesting sound track creator in decades.)

Interview with Charlie. You’ll need a linguist.

Sorting thru Gene Vincent’s catalogue for song gems is a bit like ploughing thru Rockally Rarities Vols.1 -4: it’s not worth the time or effort. There is just too much dross. Vincent led a pained life (naval injury) which was not helped by his love of bourbon and flick knives. And like Jerry Lee, he had to vacate the US to avoid the demands of the Inland Revenue. However Be Bop-a-Lula is a shining example of all the rockabilly mannerisms.

I think this was the clip used early on in Scorsese’s No Direction Home.
And here’s the same, but with superior sound values.

Vincent’s guitarist Cliff Gallup seriously inspired Beck, Page and others and the guy never left his day job. He was the Director of Maintenance and Transportation for the Chesapeake, Virginia city school system, where he worked for almost 30 years. Wicki
Update. Just realised that I forgot this piece Catman by Gene Vincent, where Gallup’s breaks the mold with guitar playing which precursed The Cramps, The Gun Club etc by decades. And since this is a family friendly site, I leave the Catman signifier to you lecherous imagination.

For the full road house opera, there is little to surpass Lonnie Mack’s Why. Mack, a reverb twang, country and blues sojourner displays his Otis Rush skills here – brass riffs to die for, strong lyrics and incandescent guitar.

Finally, we come to Sleepy La Beef, The Human Jukebox, capable of doing three hour concerts without a break and covering a massive sweep of songs in a variety of genres including gospel. Saw him on two occassions and had my musical parameters seriously extended.

Readers who are interested in guitar porn will have noted the Danelectro on the right, and there are some of you since the The Luthiers Art….post has been read around 2,500 times, which is sort of gratifying.
The final in this series will focus on Train Mythology.

Rockabilly Archaeology: Part One.

Been having quite a love affair with rockabilly of late. This is a bit of a scatter shot post as I’m adopting the Eugen Duhring approach (Frederick Engels. Anti-Duhring Translated by Emile Burns from 1894 edition) and discussing everything under the sun and a few things beside. Okay, so I fudged the quote.

Now, before we discuss the means of production utilised in this now-mostly-ignored genre of white boy musical expression, I feel impelled to warn the class against any short cuts to rockabilly knowledge ie hitting up rockabilly on wicki. The wicki entry is undiluted crap, shorn of all socio-cultural context and probably cobbled together by some hacks from Rolling Stone. And if ever there was a case for a fully-fledged Cultural Revolution in the world of music journalism (sic), those bastards would be for the high jump or an extended dip in the village outhouse. They function somewhat like the Vatican continually restating canonical ‘truths”. 100 best LPs, 100 best guitarists, etc. Fucking sickening self-referential problematic****.

Now that that itch has been scratched, lets look at rockabilly’s basic means of production.
Hit the images link below for the Gretsch Chet Atkins in all their sunburst glory.

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1249&bih=569&q=gretch+chet+atkins&oq=gretch+chet+atkins&gs_l=img.12..0i10i24.3991.13241.0.14512.18.17.0.1.1.0.408.4346.2j0j11j3j1.17.0…0.0…1ac.1.7.img.hZHkNsOz8kw

More specifically, the Gretsch G6120 Double Cutaway which will kill your bank account.

Next on the shopping list is a valve-driven Fender Tweed Bassman.

Finally, a very elemental drum kit and a double bass.

Kimchibilly: Trust the Koreans to go genre excessive. Died laughing with this one.

You have spent a fortune so far, but the mandatory sneer and greasy pompadour are gratis.

******
The concept of problematic coined by Louis Althusser to describe the regularities in the way problems are formulated and the types of answers consequently sought. Althusser tpoints out that ” …. a word or concept cannot be considered in isolation; it only exists in the theoretical or ideological framework in which it is used”. Equally importantly, ” …it is centred on the absence or problems and concepts within the problematic as much as their presence;…”. Furthermore, it is not the vision or recognitional capacities of subject (musical) historians who establish the framework of questions, answers, modes of proof: the field of vision of the problematic establishes this explanatory framework. @ KT

Historical Revisionism and the Surf Aesthetic: Part One

Lets begin with an IQ test.

What were the seminal events of the 1960s?

1. JFKs (aka The Haircut, 60 Second Jack for James Ellroy fans) inauguaral speech in January 20 1961:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

2. The photos of US troops landing at Da Nang (shades of Mogadishu), South Vietnam in 1965, the first of (some 40 plus) imperial ventures to be reported as a visual television event.

3. The first man on the moon.

The Canned Heat version

4 How about Charlie Manson and/or The Stones when they croacked the Sixties Dream at Altamont Speedway?

Okay, so I cheated, since the seminal event of this watershed epoch was the invention of this contraption.

Farfisa organ manufactured in Osimo, Italy.

Now, if you were the last member to join your local garage band and really hoped to pull hot babes after the gig, chances are that got the following instruction: “go buy a Farfisa and perfect the two hand-two finger technique of playing a simple melody, and if you can play in time, you’ve joined the band”.
However, this wasn’t the complete story, since there were other intructions.
Your were told to be well dressed, even if the drummer looked like an escapee from a hog farm. Furthermore, there were those choreography instructions. Remain relatively immobile, no fucking jumping around, since all posturing, scowling and stage leering was the sole property of the singer and guitarist. With the exception of Sly Stone, these simple advices to organ players persist to this day.

Technology is nothing without human imput, namely Bobby, the Franks and Roberto aka Question Mark and the Mysterians.

96 Tears exemplifies my above remarks as well as being one of the seminal moments in the formation of Garage Band Culture, not to forget a royality stream to die for.
The Young Rascals were brilliant understudies with organ melody lines which set the bar, until the appearance of Prog Rock in the late Sixties, when the whole organ sound turned to shit. (See my negative views on Prog Rock via Musicology (One Of Three) – archived 19.6.2012).

There is no logical leap here, but I’m concluding with some Japanese surf tracks which recently caught my attention.
We have already noted that Japan embraced the surf band sound soon after The Ventures toured in 1962 and 1965.
Love the classic two finger melody line in this 1967 track by Takesha Teriuche and the Bunnys.

Terry meets the fan club.

Despite its industrial transformation since WW11, Japan remains very much a traditional society, so it isn’t surprising that the Japanese surf twang persists into this new century.
Chicche covering Pipeline in 2005

A few years later, Chicchi as a teenager. Note the classic organ players stance left side… neatly dressed, little body movement etc.

Now, if you’ve followed this nonsense thus far, you will also have noted that Ms Chicchi plays a Mosrite, so she is not a complete traditionalist as most surf reverb artists rely upon Fenders: Strats, Jaguars and Jazzmasters, and here I refer you to the highly specialised site SurfGuitars101.com and this particular post which gives you all the technical information you need to form your own band.

Look, if I continue in this vein, I’ll need counselling.

And, a warm welcome to the recent Japanese readers.

Surfers are back in Town: Part 3

Some weeks ago during the ill-fated Beijing Cream experiment, some commenting worm – obviously an individual with libido issues and fear of a healthy lifestyle – wrote that my sole purpose in life was to indulge a fetishist ie use the column to propagate photos of Japanese surfer girls wearing bikinis.

Well, I ask, what does one wear when cutting the waves apart? Wetsuits in cold water, bikinis or board shorts in warmer water. Obviously, this creature is an aficionado of the facekini or something equally silly.

Time to go on the public record. The Japanese surfer girl file is a public service, a bit like the weather report or Beijing’s daily pollution reading.

The Association of Surfing Professionals ASP World Tour for 2013 site HERE.

ASP Women’s World Ranking 59 – superhot Nao Omura.

Nao Omura

ASP Junior Women’s World Ranking 9 – Minato Takahashi.

ASP Women’s Longboard World Ranking 5 – Hiroka Yoshikawa.

Hiroka Yoshikawa

ASP Women’s Longboard World Ranking 9 – Yuko Shimajiru

ASP Women’s Longboard World Ranking 25 – Hatsumi Ui

Hasumi Ui

Finally, highly rated bodysurfer Minami Hatekayama.

Enough!