So I encountered a good deal of new music on the road trip. I also met up with some old musical friends I hadn’t heard in decades. Back in 1981 or 82, I had the opportunity to interview Chris Osgood, one of the founding members of the seminal Minnesota punk band the Suicide Commandos. Osgood is creative, smart, funny, and the interview was by far the best I’d ever done–full of hysterical stories, wistful remembrances, pithy one-liners. And then I got home and realized that the tape recorder batteries had died and that only the first couple of minutes of the hour-long session were preserved….

Anyhow, at the time Osgood gave me a cassette tape that included a number of studio recordings he’d done recently with his then-current group, The L7-3 (in addition to Osgood, the band included Commandos’ drummer Dave Ahl and bassist Steve Fjelstad, late of another fine Minneapolis band, Fingerprints). I fell in love with the tunes on the tape and basically wore the thing out, playing it over and over. But The L7-3 broke up shortly thereafter and the recordings were never issued.

Fast forward to my summer 2010 trip to St. Paul: I’m flipping through the CDs in the “Local Music” section at Cheapos Records on Snelling Ave., and come across Men of Distinction, a CD by The L7-3, released late last year on the Garage d’Or label. From the cover photo, I know immediately that it’s them.

Of course I buy the thing and out in the parking lot immediately pop it into the car CD player (temporarily reclaiming hegemony over the roadtrip musical soundtrack). I break into a huge grin with the opening bars of the first song because I recognize it immediately: the CD consists of those same unreleased recordings I fell in love with thirty years ago.

The music sounds just as good now as it did then: punk rock with an M.F.A. and a sense of humor (the music contains allusions to, among others, The Monkees and The Bonzo Doo Dah Dog Band). Take the quirky fragmented sound and intellectual lyrics of the Talking Heads, combine it with the goofy garage-rock spirit of The Replacements, and you start approaching what makes this so appealing. These are two-minute punk rock workouts packed with symphonic intricacies: simple guitar chord progressions that collide with sound effects, complex musical bridges, rhythmical shifts, etc. Highlights include “The History of Philosophy,” “Metaphysics vs. Loud Music,” “Emergency Art Liquidation,” “Snafu,” “What Rock ‘N’ Roll Means to Me.” The song titles provide a hint to the band’s style, I think. Anyhow, I can’t tell you how happy I am to welcome these amazing songs back into my life.

In trying to figure out how this miracle happened, I poked around the Internet and learned that other previously lost material from late ’70s Minnesota punk was also now available. The remarkable 1978 debut EP by Fingerprints (think Iggy and the Stooges meet Television) is available at I-Tunes, as is the long out-of-print debut EP by The Suburbs.

By coincidence, The Flamin’ Oh’s, another terrific Minneapolis band from that era, has recently created a new Facebook page with lots of good stuff on it. They’ll be playing a live gig July 31 in Minneapolis in honor of their recently deceased drummer, Bob Meide. If I weren’t scheduled to be giving a talk in Tokyo that afternoon, you can bet I’d be there…. In the meanwhile, here’s a clip from a typical Oh’s gig from back in 1981 at Duffy’s (man, how much of my youth did I waste at that bar?). If you’re pressed for time, advance the clip to 2:59 for the second song in this sequence: “We Do What We Like,” a great rock anthem that should have conquered the world.

I did manage to catch some of the baseball All Star Game last night. When I heard the news yesterday morning about former Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, I had to smile at the timing. Back in his heyday in the 1970s and 80s, if the Yankees didn’t make it to the World Series in a particular year Steinbrenner would always pull some stunt right in the middle of the series (fire his manager, berate his team captain, whatever) to steal the headlines away from the teams still playing for the championship. So of course the man would pass away on the day of the All Star Game, assuring that all the coverage would focus not on the mid-season classic, but on the Boss.

Yankees’ fans clearly held the man in great affection. As a Twins’ fan and therefore a congenital Yankees’ hater, I generally despised him and everything he stood for as a baseball owner. But as several tributes I’ve read point out, wouldn’t it have been great to have a Twins’ owner as committed to winning as Steinbrenner was with the Yankees? Anyhow, I imagine he is up in heaven now (or, given the Damn Yankees thematic here, down there below), trying to rehire Billy Martin.

The very odd Nagoya sumo tournament got underway Sunday. Something like a quarter of the wrestlers in the top two divisions are suspended or banned due to the gambling/yakuza scandals, and NHK has gotten all holy about this and is refusing to televise the bouts live. Yokozuna Hakuho will no doubt take the title, as usual–on Tuesday he broke his own personal record of 32 consecutive wins. But with so many of the usual faces sitting this one out, the tournament should generate some unusual results. For starters, it’s a terrific opportunity for lower ranked wrestlers to leapfrog up the rankings.

Other than that, what have we been up to? Last Saturday night, we headed downtown to catch the Grant Park Orchestra play a free concert in Millenium Park under the energetic baton of female conductor Xian Zhang. We liked the program very much, as did Tribune critic John von Rhein and Sun-Times critic Andrew Patner. They played a piece by the contemporary composer Chen Yi, Prokofiev’s “Suite from Love for Three Oranges,” and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 in D Major. Didn’t mind the raindrops or the firetruck sirens hardly at all. It must be summer.

Our Japan@Chicago conference this year was held in late May and devoted to the topic of “Engaging Commodities: Crossing Mass Culture and the Avant-Garde in 1960s Japanese Film, Music, and Art.” The event included several specials guests, musicians who were active in the 1960s rock scene in Japan. They spoke about their experiences then, and they also brought along their guitars and played a few songs for us. These included Alan Merrill, who was active in Japan in the 1960s Group Sounds band The Lead, then as a solo artist signed to Watanabe Productions, and later in the early 1970s pioneering glam rock band Vodka Collins. Here is video of Alan performed his 1973 Vodka Collins hit, “Automatic Pilot.” Alan closed his impromptu set at the conference with a rendition of a song he wrote and first recorded in 1975 with his UK band The Arrows after leaving Japan: “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” (video here).

We also were lucky enough to have three original members of the legendary Yokohama band The Golden Cups join us for a question-and-answer session: Eddie Ban (lead guitar), Louise Louis Kabe (bass), and Mamoru Manu (drums and vocals). At the end of the evening we had a jam session with Eddie Ban and Alan Merrill. They played three numbers together, including a sly Japanese-language version of “Sweet Home Chicago” (video here).

It was a terrific year, and we’re already planning some very interesting events for next year….

To make matters worse, I’ve just learned that Bob Meide, drummer for the Flamin’ Oh’s, passed away a few days ago. The Oh’s were probably my favorite local band in the Twin Cities in the early 1980s. They had a number of local hits and were monsters live, but never broke out nationally. I had the chance to interview them a couple of times and hang out with them at one or two shows. I remember one night in 1981 or 82 at Macalester College: after they finished playing a show on campus, I took them up to the broadcast studio of WMCN, the campus radio station, and we drank beer and played cool records for hours. Meide was a terrific drummer; as the obituary in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune notes, “He looked like Ringo Starr but played like Keith Moon of the Who.” RIP, Pete and Bob. Heaven has a new rhythm section, it seems.

(Update on 6/25/10: More tributes to Pete Quaife are coming on-line now, from Dave Davies, Facebook, Geoff Edgers (of the movie Do It Again), and Rolling Stone magazine.)

If I were in England this weekend, I’d be trying to worm my way into the Glastonbury Festival. Among many others, one Raymond Douglas Davies will be taking the stage for a set on Sunday. A preview article notes the role the Kinks had in establishing this annual music festival back in 1970:

In 1970, founder and dairy farmer Michael Eavis decided to hold a music event and booked the Kinks for 500 pounds but, when they failed to show, got Marc Bolan instead.

Typical. Ray is a little better about these things nowadays, so presumably he will actually play his scheduled set.

Tonight, the plan is to catch the fabulous jazz chanteuse Dee Alexander in a free concert out on the Midway Plaisance. Summertime, and the living’s easy….

One of the songs featured in the Tokyo live shows was “Day Tripper,” originally released as a single around the world the previous December. As he introduces the number, John isn’t quite certain if it was released in Japan as a single, and he gives a very awkward impression of spoken Japanese, but no one in the audience seems to mind.

Also in the audience for the Tokyo concerts were members of The Spiders, one of the top Group Sounds bands. In fact, they had famously turned down an invitation to appear as an opening act for The Beatles in those Tokyo concerts. The Spiders were one of the first Japanese groups really to “get” The Beatles, after their chief songwriter Kamayatsu Hiroshi discovered a copy of the Meet the Beatles LP at the American Pharmacy in Tokyo in early 1964. They were famous for inserting new Beatles’ singles into their live act even before the original records had had the chance to climb the charts.

The Spiders recorded many covers of Beatles’ songs on their own albums. One of the best is, in fact, their version of “Day Tripper,” included on The Spiders Album No. 5 (1968). The Spiders were so hip that their cover version is based less on the original Beatles’ recording than on Otis Redding’s marvelous soulified take on the number: the famous guitar hook fades away, replaced by a very funky organ riff and The Spiders topped this off with some nifty Group Sounds choreography. Here’s video from a wonderful 1981 reunion gig:

The Spiders weren’t the last Japanese rock band to record the number, either. In 1979, Yellow Magic Orchestra released an industrial-grunge, postmodern take on the song, one that is as inventive as any of the other recorded versions (including The Beatles’). Moreover, YMO’s version is clearly rooted in The Spiders’ take on the song. Drummer Takahashi Yukihiro’s vocals are run through a filter that makes him sound like an android, the tune decays at key points into metal machine music, and what we are left with is an ironic undermining of the whole teenage pop concept. Very cool. Here are YMO performing it live in NYC in 1979.

YMO will be playing a reunion gig in Tokyo this summer when I’m there, and I’m debating myself over whether I should go. Do you think they’ll play “Day Tripper”?

A .pdf file of the English language version of the article is here, and the Japanese language version is here.

Ugaya Hiromichi, J-Poppu to wa nani ka: Kyodaika suru ongaku sangyo (What is J-Pop? The expanding music industry, 2005). A provocative study of the music business in Japan since the late 1980s, when marketing executives coined the word “J-Pop” to suggest the appearance of a Japanese pop music scene that could compete on an international basis. Ugaya isn’t as interested in musicians as he is in the business, technological, and marketing sides of the industry. He shows, for example, how the switchover to the CD format (along with the rise of inexpensive CD players) transformed the gender and age demographics of the music-buying audience in Japan.

Jane Austen, Persuasion (1816). In which a British female writer tells us what women really want. It’s amazing how contemporary Austen’s characters remain, despite the now-archaic nature of the world they occupy. Differences of birth or class are both overcome and reinforced (just like today!), and of course the colonies hover in the background: the widowed Mrs. Smith gets her happy ending when her rights over her late husband’s estate in the West Indies are recognized. No wonder Natsume Soseki loved her writing so much. A fine novel to begin the summer with.

Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch (1998). In which a British male writer tells us what men really want. Hornby’s comic memoir of his life-long obsession with soccer seemed a good choice to accompany this year’s World Cup. As usual with Hornby, it’s inlaid with countless funny, poignant observations–e.g.:

The first and easiest friends I made at college were football fans; a studious examination of a newspaper back page during the lunch hour of the first day in a new job usually provokes some kind of response. And yes, I am aware of the downside of this wonderful facility that men have: they become repressed, they fail in their relationships with women, their conversation is trivial and boorish, they find themselves unable to express their emotional needs, they cannot relate to their children, and they die lonely and miserable. But, you know, what the hell?

They opened last night with Symphony #1 in C Major, Opus 21, a work in which Beethoven doesn’t realize yet that he is Beethoven. It’s a pleasant combination of Mozart and Haydn, and the orchestra played it smoothly: at times, I found myself imagining an accordion winding its way through a Viennese waltz as I floated down the Danube River. We noted that concertmaster Robert Chen, one of our favorites, was absent from the stage, his place ably filled by assistant concertmaster Yuan-Qing Yu.

The first half closed out with the more Beethoven-like Leonore Overture No. 3. Here, the real stars of the evening began to emerge: the woodwind section, especially principal flutist Mathieu Dufour, who played with such aching beauty that the audience exploded in cheers when Haitink acknowledged him during the ovation. On the haunting trumpet call from the distance that occurs twice in the piece, it seemed to me that none of the visible members of the brass section were playing, and I wondered if they were using an extra trumpeter in the back corridors behind the stage (we saw the orchestra use this trick with the chimes-from-hell in Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique a year or two ago). But no one emerged from backstage during the ovation, so now I’m not so sure….

After the intermission, the orchestra played my favorite of the symphonies, No. 7 in A Major, Opus 92. The last time I saw this rendered live was about fifteen years ago in a wretched, underrehearsed summer gig by the Minnesota Orchestra, but last night was simply brilliant. The cellos and basses at the beginning of the second movement played with such warmth as to be physiologically chilling. The woodwinds again played spectacularly well (the cheers they received were even louder than those following the Leonore overture). Robert Chen was in his usual seat for the piece, and the violins played wonderfully. Haitink took things fast, especially in the third and fourth movements: I cut my teeth on the Seventh with George Szell’s impatient recording with the Cleveland Orchestra, but last night Haitink left even Szell in the dust. But it all worked magnificently well, and the audience lept to its feet for an enthusiastic standing ovation at the conclusion.

For the first time all evening, as he slowly shuffled off and then back onto the stage to acknowledge the applause, Haitink looked his age (81). He had conducted with great energy and fire, and it was clear now that he had given his all during the performance–just as he has given his all during his four-tenure here in Chicago. Godspeed, Mr. Haitink, and thanks for a magnificent 7th. And here’s hoping the woodwind section sticks around for a few more years: it will be fun to see what Riccardo Muti, the incoming Music Director, does with their talents.

Sad news from Los Angeles re the passing of legendary basketball coach John Wooden. One of the pleasures of teaching at UCLA in the late 1990s and early 2000s was that every once in a while you would walk past the great man on campus, still quite spry in his 90s. “Don’t give up on your dreams,” he once said, “or your dreams will give up on you.”

Kan Naoto, the new Prime Minister of Japan, was actually our local Diet representative when we lived in Fuchu-shi in western Tokyo from 2005-2007. We used to see posters of his face all around the neighborhood at election times. And now I live just a few blocks from the residence of the current President of the U.S. Apparently, I am fated to haunt the neighborhoods of power….

Finally, here’s a lovely new feature on one of the last Kinks’ music videos, “Lost and Found” (1987). A rarely seen clip based largely on Ray Davies’ cinemaphilia, it takes up a lovely, melancholic tune, and the folks at the Kast Off Kinks website have tracked down several people involved in filming the video. Be sure to check out the video and the interviews there, but for now let me leave you with another video of the Kinks ‘performing’ the song ‘live’ in a late 1980s television appearance: