Blues on the Highway

You know how the best nights out always seem to be those random ones where you end up somewhere you never really intended on being, and along the way meet a whole stack of bizarre and amusing people? Well I had one of those nights last night and my, it was an absolute screamer. Dave and I had decided to shoot into Chinatown to grab something for dinner and in the process bumble through ordering and conversing with patrons in Japanese. We’re kind of going for the immersion approach for learning Japanese. That is, if you misunderstand something enough, and make an utter tit of yourself repeatedly, everything suddenly becomes clear and you’re talking in fluent Japanese. Yeah, right. Anyway, dinner out of the way and feeling suitably humbled by our complete and utter inability to understand anything on the menu, we decided to cruise across to a bar we had wandered past a month or so earlier that looked pretty interesting.

After spending ten minutes trying work out where the hell we actually were, we managed to gain our bearings and make our way to said bar. Your typical Japanese bar is a lounge room sized box on the third floor of a faceless office block. As they say, everything in Japan happens behind closed doors. It’s actually quite intimidating trying to find somewhere good to go because it involves sticking your head into about twenty of the previously mentioned bars. Each time you open a door, instantly all noise in the bar cuts off and fifteen drunken Japanese business men turn to stare at you. It really does feel like you’re interrupting someone’s private party. So with that in mind we were more than a little intrigued when the door to this particular bar opened onto a huge worn down wooden staircase with lighting and pariphenalia that you could imagine the Addams family would have really dug if they’d lived in the 70s and really been into surfing.

So we trotted up two stories of creaky stairs to another closed door. Dave pulled it open to reveal a huge room full of what looked to be second hand sofas. Suddenly there was a shout and a burst of rapid fire Japanese. To our right the stairs continued and another storey up stood what looked to be a doorman gesticulating that we had, in fact, opened the wrong door but that was alright really because we were stupid foreigners who couldn’t really be expected to understand that the bar was on the third floor rather than the second. Bobbing his head and looking for all the world like Osama Tezuka’s vision of Bob Marley he announced proudly that tonight was “Liveu nighto desu ne. You buy drink at counter. Blues” and with that he flung open the door.

What greeted our eyes was what happens when you give a Japanese person 50 large sofas, a huge empty room, and a whole bunch of kitsch and tell him make a fuck-off cool club. It was both familiar and different. Sure, there were sofas, the first real ones I’d seen in Japan, but they were lined up in bizarre arrangements of squares and rectangles, interrupted by the 20 or so comfy armchairs in perfectly straight lines. The lights were down but flickering red neon signs provided all the ambience of a 50s American truckers bar. This particular theme was further reinforced by the fact that every thirty seconds or so a huge truck would thunder past on the expressway outside the window. Expect we were three storeys up. This is the Japan that I seem to run into every single day. Similar on the surface but when you take a closer look so very, very different.

Music for the venue was being pumped out by a four-piece blues band being led by a short Japanese guy with snow white hair and sunglasses. They were really good. By really good, I mean fucking incredible. This guy was a god on guitar and the bassist was equally impressive in that laid back “I’m not really doing anything in particular” way that only bassists can achieve. The drummer was a white guy that looked equal parts Jack Black and Ashton Kutcher, and rocked twice as hard as either of them. Then there was the pianist, who some managed to actually remain heard even when sunglass man was busy trying his very best to explode the very very large speakers on both sides of the stage. After a couple of songs the band wound up and wandered off the stage.

Everyone seemed to be hanging around, so we thought we’d grab another drink and stick around for a while. After about ten minutes the band reappeared and began noodling around while they waited for everyone to shut up. With them was a tiny Japanese woman who looked like she’d just jumped out of a hair dye commercial. She grabbed the mike and in a small and polite voice that the Japanese do so well announced “Minasan, Konbanwa” (Everyone, Good Evening). She and the guitarist bantered in Japanese for a while, and she did a lot of bowing and giggled a bit. Right, time to leave, we thought. Then the drummer kicked off, and she picked up the mike and opened her mouth.

Holy Fuck.

It was like being beaten over the head by a wall of sound. The sheer volume and power coming out of this woman’s throat defied every single rule of acoustics I’ve ever come across. She had somehow eaten an entire choir of black american gospel singers and then feasted on Maynard James Keening for dessert. Incredible. Half hour later and after about another six songs she grabbed another girl and dragged her onto the stage. They busted out one of the most impressive displays of vocal tag teaming I’ve ever seen. What the hell do they feed these Japanese women?

The blues bar conquered, we decided we’d wander toward the station and maybe grab one final drink at another bar on the way home. Right before we reached the station, we saw a sign saying “Toy Bar: B1” and the sounds of Duran Duran echoed up the stairwell. We shrugged at each other and decided to check it out. Cue us opening the door and six or so shocked Japanese looking at us with baffled expressions. The toy bar was probably about four meters square and every available surface was covered with bizarre imported American toys. We ordered some drinks and introduced ourselves to our fellow drinkers. Two of them announced that their names were Mr. Smith and Carlos. We remarked that these were remarkable sun-Japanese names. Carlos said, “we make these names up. They all say I am crazy boy. Ho ho ho. Like this. Ho ho ho. Crazy. Also, they say I look like South American. Carlos is good name. Brazil. Argh! Arno, English, difficult desu ne” he then looked mildly shocked that he’d given such an extensive speech and sat back down and had a big swing of his Corona. We then indicated in very broken Japanese that yes, English was difficult, but so was Japanese and that he was doing a lot better than us.

We spent the next couple of hours talking about all kinds of shit swapping back and forth between languages when we came across a point which neither party seemed to understand. If the singer at blues club had jumped out of a hair dye commercial, the bar girl at the Toy Bar was the archetype of anime. Short, with perfect features and a bowl haircut and wearing a school-girls uniform, she also had the squeakiest voice I’ve ever come across. I kept expecting her to jump through a magical portal or pull some kind of fantasy creature from behind the bar at any moment. The night culminated in good old Carlos running back to his apartment to get the Underworld Everything, Everything DVD which he made the owner put on. “Ahh,” he said “Underland. English. I think they are very crazy. Dance like this”, he began swinging his hip in a pretty damn good impression of Karl Hyde, “Born Srippy. Very cool. Crazy. Ho ho ho”

What a night.

Posted in Mwah on Saturday November 8, 2003.