Graham Reid | | 4 min read
It's not so much a language barrier as a kind of vocabulary sieve which comes between a well-intentioned English-language interviewer and Japan's semi-legendary Guitar Wolf.
The words go back and forth down an international phone line but only a few either way are mutually decipherable. Words like "rock'n'roll," "Joan Jett," "yeah, rock, yeah" and "punk rock'n'roll."
No matter, it's all in the grooves, as they say - and Guitar Wolf (aka leatherclad Seiji) is one of the grooviest.
A press release which describes Guitar Wolf (the man and the band) as "an amphetamine feedback-driven oriental Eddie Cochran jamming with MC5 in a bullet-train wreck" understates the case.
Guitar Wolf are a kind of mutant throwback which puts Link Wray and Eddie Cochran (their new Jet Generation album features a cover of Cochran's Summertime Blues) into a blender with garage-band punk thrash. The result is as fast as the Ramones (they throw "one-twothreefour" into the middle of songs regularly), as trashy as the Cramps, and thrashes around like Iggy Pop with a grudge - and it sells well in Japan despite giving new meaning to "lo-fi."
Guitar Wolf perpetrate no-fi rock with few aspirations beyond reaching the end of the song, maybe even the end of the set, with a minimum of physical damage for the maximum expenditure of energy and noise.
Filtering through Guitar Wolf's fractured English, we glean, "Punk rock'n'roll is small in Japan but people like it."
Enough people, apparently, for the mid-thirties'n'married Wolf to have been a fulltime guitar wolf since he formed his trio back in the late 80s. And Guitar Wolf albums consistently sell half a million copies back home, the band has done 12 tours of the United States, and is signed to Matador (Pavement, Jon Spencer) after impressing the label when he drunkenly stomped around on top of the record bins at an in-store in New York and was briefly knocked unconscious by a ceiling fan. But he roused himself and continued to play as badly as he did before.
Of such things - and their wacko lo-fi, sci-fi, sleazy videos which are screened in Japan "maybe midnight, maybe later" - are rock'n'roll legends made.
But for all he's permanently leatherclad and behind wraparound shades, Guitar Wolf loves the overnight-then-gone "idol pop" of Japan, the telecreated stars like SMAP, a diluted Boyzone, if that's possible to imagine.
"Yeah, idol power is good, everybody cannot be idol but some have the power to charm everyone ... just for a short time."
The beer-guzzlin', motorcycle-ridin', guitar-abusin' Guitar Wolf is also a self-confessed Joan Jett fan.
"Same birthday. I was surprised."
He frequently kisses a badge of her before sculling a beer and launching into another frenzied bout of three-minute feedback heavy trashpunk. And in his bedroom he has a shrine to her where, legend (and the press release) has it, he meditates daily.
"I just love her. I have just seen her in a show and it was great for me."
The Wolf's latest album is a tribute to Jett (the final "t" somehow disappeared in the translation), although more sensitive Jett fans might find Guitar Wolf's take on three-minute pop a little too close to an explosion in a biscuit-tin factory.
It's wired up and weirdly wonderful rock'n'roll with very few pretensions (other than the leather'n'shades), and in one lengthy lucid quote to a Japanese journalist the Wolf acknowledged, "Playing guitar is the easiest thing in the world. You have to realise that the trick is not so much playing - but also looking good when you play.
"You bang the thing, jump around, then add some bass and drums and you've got music.
"It should work for everyone because playing guitar is really nothing more than plucking around on the thing and making silly sounds come out."
There you go. Rock'n'roll at its most reductive and entertaining. Sounds too good to miss really.
"Onetwothreefour, lock'n'looooollll!!"
The words go back and forth down an international phone line but only a few either way are mutually decipherable. Words like "rock'n'roll," "Joan Jett," "yeah, rock, yeah" and "punk rock'n'roll."
No matter, it's all in the grooves, as they say - and Guitar Wolf (aka leatherclad Seiji) is one of the grooviest.
A press release which describes Guitar Wolf (the man and the band) as "an amphetamine feedback-driven oriental Eddie Cochran jamming with MC5 in a bullet-train wreck" understates the case.
Guitar Wolf are a kind of mutant throwback which puts Link Wray and Eddie Cochran (their new Jet Generation album features a cover of Cochran's Summertime Blues) into a blender with garage-band punk thrash. The result is as fast as the Ramones (they throw "one-twothreefour" into the middle of songs regularly), as trashy as the Cramps, and thrashes around like Iggy Pop with a grudge - and it sells well in Japan despite giving new meaning to "lo-fi."
Guitar Wolf perpetrate no-fi rock with few aspirations beyond reaching the end of the song, maybe even the end of the set, with a minimum of physical damage for the maximum expenditure of energy and noise.Filtering through Guitar Wolf's fractured English, we glean, "Punk rock'n'roll is small in Japan but people like it."
Enough people, apparently, for the mid-thirties'n'married Wolf to have been a fulltime guitar wolf since he formed his trio back in the late 80s. And Guitar Wolf albums consistently sell half a million copies back home, the band has done 12 tours of the United States, and is signed to Matador (Pavement, Jon Spencer) after impressing the label when he drunkenly stomped around on top of the record bins at an in-store in New York and was briefly knocked unconscious by a ceiling fan. But he roused himself and continued to play as badly as he did before.
Of such things - and their wacko lo-fi, sci-fi, sleazy videos which are screened in Japan "maybe midnight, maybe later" - are rock'n'roll legends made.
But for all he's permanently leatherclad and behind wraparound shades, Guitar Wolf loves the overnight-then-gone "idol pop" of Japan, the telecreated stars like SMAP, a diluted Boyzone, if that's possible to imagine.
"Yeah, idol power is good, everybody cannot be idol but some have the power to charm everyone ... just for a short time."
The beer-guzzlin', motorcycle-ridin', guitar-abusin' Guitar Wolf is also a self-confessed Joan Jett fan.
"Same birthday. I was surprised."
He frequently kisses a badge of her before sculling a beer and launching into another frenzied bout of three-minute feedback heavy trashpunk. And in his bedroom he has a shrine to her where, legend (and the press release) has it, he meditates daily.
"I just love her. I have just seen her in a show and it was great for me."
The Wolf's latest album is a tribute to Jett (the final "t" somehow disappeared in the translation), although more sensitive Jett fans might find Guitar Wolf's take on three-minute pop a little too close to an explosion in a biscuit-tin factory.
It's wired up and weirdly wonderful rock'n'roll with very few pretensions (other than the leather'n'shades), and in one lengthy lucid quote to a Japanese journalist the Wolf acknowledged, "Playing guitar is the easiest thing in the world. You have to realise that the trick is not so much playing - but also looking good when you play.
"You bang the thing, jump around, then add some bass and drums and you've got music.
"It should work for everyone because playing guitar is really nothing more than plucking around on the thing and making silly sounds come out."
There you go. Rock'n'roll at its most reductive and entertaining. Sounds too good to miss really.
"Onetwothreefour, lock'n'looooollll!!"
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