Pop Defensive

This past Wednesday's episode stands as testament to the indomitable spirit of Pop Offensive--proof that no malady, be it canine or technical,will keep us from delivering our message of hope to a battle ravaged world. Getting it to air required our emergency co-host Aaron Harbour to rebuild the KGPC website from scratch in a desperate race against time. To hear the result of our heroic struggle, simply go to the Pop Offensive archive, where the episode can be streamed in its entirety. If you are a deaf person with a vivid imagination, you can read the playlist for the show, which has just been posted over at the Pop Offensive Facebook page.

Fighting Femmes, Fiends, and Fanatics Episode 7: Hey, You, Go!

With this latest episode of Steve Mayhem's Fighting Femmes, Fiends, and Fanatics, I rev up my magic bus and take you on a magical mystery tour through the world of 1960s Japanese Group Sounds movies. My subject: Hey, You, Go!, an engaging bit of psychedelic fluff starring the Jaguars, who were just one of Japan's many answers to the Beatles.

Hey You, Go! (Japan, 1968)

More often than not, writing about the type of films I do is its own reward (as well as, on occasion, its own punishment, but we’ll save that for another post). Sometimes, however, the karma cookies come from without, as when a post inspires one of my esteemed peers to share the fruits of her or his own compulsive film habit. Such was the case a couple months back, when I wrote about the series of 1960s rock and roll movies starring Japanese Group Sounds sensation The Spiders. Professor Grewbeard of the fabulous Magic Carpet Burn stepped forward with the opinion that Hey You, Go!, the sole cinematic venture starring The Jaguars, one of The Spiders leading contemporaries in the Group Sounds scene, was also well worth checking out. In fact, he made it sound so good that I just couldn’t resist tracking it down.

Of course, as is most often the case with films I review for this blog, the DVD of Hey You, Go! that I tracked down lacked English subtitles. Because of this, I can only tell you what Hey You, Go! looks like, but not necessarily what it means. That said, Hey You, Go! looks like a very fun little film indeed.

At the time of their initial rise to fame, the Jaguars’ repertoire included Japanese interpretations of bluesy Western garage rock tracks like The Blues Magoos’ “Tobacco Road”. As such, their sound is a bit more strident and rough edged than that of The Spiders, who, with their more varied pop sound, seemed more reluctant to alienate the moms and dads of their teenaged fans. Correspondingly, Hey You, Go! is a much looser and more irreverent affair than either of the Spiders films I’ve seen, delivering more of the type of good natured anarchy that Westerners steeped in the big screen exploits of the Beatles and Monkees might expect. While director/writer Yoichi Maeda puts an emphasis on fun, frolic, and effervescent pop art style, he also doesn’t shy away from darker territory, or turn a blind eye to the events of the day -- something that, to be fair, was probably much less of a viable option in 1968 than it was in the comparatively less turbulent previous year, when the majority of The Spiders’ movies were produced. Basically, you could say that Hey You, Go! leans more toward The Monkees’ Head than it does The Monkees.

In my review of the Spiders’ Go Forward and The Road to Bali, I pointed out how Nikkatsu, the studio behind those films, played to its own strengths by incorporating into each elements of its popular action films, basically turning both into spy spoofs with frequent musical interludes. Of course, the other reason for this was simply that, it being the mid 60s and all, spy-mania was in the air. After all, even The Beatles had lampooned the Bond movies’ tropes in Help! And so it is that the Shochiku produced Hey You, Go! also seeks to place its mop-topped stars at the center of a web of intrigue, complete with larger-than-life villains and preposterous high tech gadgetry.

In this case the threat comes from a Goldfinger-like mastermind who, ensconced within the chrome-lined recesses of his secret island hideout, commands an army of minions hilariously clad in matching eye patches and black berets. (Nods also seem to be being made here toward Toho’s Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster, released two years earlier.) For some reason, said mastermind is bent on eliminating The Jaguars’ singer Sin Okamoto, and dispatches for that purpose everything from a duo of bumbling assassins, to a trio of phony monks, to a quintet of murderous fembots in color coded bikinis. Why this is might have something to do with the star-crossed romance that Okamoto has embarked upon with the evil mastermind’s pretty young daughter –- and, if so, is an example of parental overkill that brings to mind Obama’s crack about targeting the Jonas Brothers with predator drones.

Out of the six members of The Jaguars, the film’s focus is so exclusively upon singer Okamoto that the remaining musicians -- including drummer and band leader Yukio Miya -- barely register. Instead, Okamoto is provided with a couple of fictional associates to interact with, including a hapless tour manager type and a band muse and girl Friday played by pop singer Akiko Nakamura. The presence of Nakamura –- who, with her tall, bony frame, waifish beauty and penchant for modeling eye popping Carnaby Street fashions, reminds me of a Japanese version of Francoise Hardy -- insures that Hey You, Go! is not only a good time for Japanese Group Sounds fans, but also for fans of the more female-centric Japanese pop of the era. In addition to Nakamura’s one showcase number (with The Jaguars playing back-up), we also get a cameo from her fellow pop siren Aki Azumi, who shows up to belt out her then-hit “Yuuyake No Aitsu”. (You can hear another track by Azumi on Big Beat’s wonderful recent Nippon Girls compilation.)

Between its musical interludes and vaguely plot-driven escapades, Hey You, Go! goes off on a number of pop culture themed satirical digressions, including an extended dream sequence spoofing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and a Romeo and Juliet bit that was likely inspired by Zeferelli’s recent hit film version of same. At one point a -- perhaps Timothy Leary inspired -- fellow in a suit and tie shows up to read passages from The Little Prince and talk about LSD. There is also a recreation of the ski sequence from Help! that is somewhat distracting, though whether it was intended as another satirical jab or was just a desperate attempt at emulation I can’t say for sure. In any case, director Maeda never lets anything stay on screen long enough to really rankle, seeming instead ever anxious to get on to the next silly bit of business, spicing the assemblage with a generous application of psychedelic optical effects and mod-ish, brightly colored set design.

Things take a somewhat serious turn during the final third of Hey You, Go!, when the villain’s foot soldiers, in the course of their attempts to rub out Okamoto, accidentally kill the singer’s beloved instead. This dramatic development puts a bit of a tax on the thespian skills of Okamoto, who, despite being attractive and likeable, has already been called upon to spread those skills pretty thin by virtue of being the only member of his band to appear in almost every one of the movie’s scenes. Thankfully, things quickly go back to being giddily irreverent once the group sails off to the villain’s island to stage a counterassault. There they come upon a World War II era Japanese soldier who has been hiding out in a cave since before the war’s end. In one of the movie’s most darkly hilarious bits, the boys then bring the old fellow up to speed with a sped-up, chipmunk-voiced tune that plays over footage of everything from the bombing of Hiroshima to Vietnam War atrocities. Then the soldier leads them in an armed attack on the villain’s compound that, in its violence, might convince you that the Jaguars’ mantra, in defiance of the countercultural sentiments of the age, was indeed “make war, not love”. And then, for a final parting shot, Akiko Nakamura and the band pose in mimickry of the Iwo Jima Monument.

One of the many wonderful things about 1960s pop culture is that we are still today asking ourselves what a lot of it was supposed to mean -- and that’s only considering the portion of it that was in a language we could understand. Without the benefit of linguistic comprehension –- and in consideration of a product of a country as intrinsically baffling as Japan –- I am especially loathe to speculate. All I will say about Hey You, Go! is that it has an engaged, switched-on sensibility that suggests to me that at least some of the people involved in its creation were no strangers to chemical inspiration. Thus what we get, in opposition to what one might expect, is a case of folks who are less attempting to walk in the Beatles’ footsteps than they are along their own whimsically addled path -- even if those footsteps end up overlapping quite a bit anyway. In any case, I really enjoyed the film, and would even go so far as saying that, cultural differences aside, there is a deeper level on which I really think that I get what it's trying to say. Now pass the bong.

Hey, hey, they're The Spiders

The Spiders were the most successful of the Japanese beat groups that cropped up in the wake of the Beatles’ triumphant sweep through the Land of the Rising Sun in 1966 -- part of a musical movement that came to be dubbed “Group Sounds”, in part due to the unique challenges that the English term “Rock and Roll” presented to the average Japanese tongue. Albeit on a much more localized level, the band followed in the footsteps of their Scouser counterparts by scoring a string of hit records in their native country and inspiring hysterical scenes throughout the nation’s airports and concert halls. They also, like the Beatles, made the move from the juke box to the big screen, starring in four feature films produced by Japan’s venerable Nikkatsu Studios between 1967 and 1968.

Given the circumstances of The Spiders’ rise to fame, it’s difficult to resist making comparisons between them and The Beatles, just as it’s hard not to draw comparisons between theirs and The Beatles’ cinematic output -- even if, in reality, that’s a little unfair. The Beatles’ movies, after all, were events in themselves. Such was the spell cast by the Fab Four at the time that audiences likely would have flocked to see a film of them reading from the Liverpool phonebook if that was all that had been available. As such, director Richard Lester had a great deal more leeway to indulge in experimentation and creative play in making those films than he would have had on films whose success wasn’t guaranteed by stars with such singularly phenomenal appeal.

Scenes from Go Forward!

On the other hand, The Spiders’ films are all modest formula pictures, competently, but nonetheless hurriedly, made in order to quickly cash in on their young stars’ current popularity. While making occasional stylistic nods to both the Beatles’ films and the Monkees TV series -- some fast motion capering around, a dreamily surrealistic musical sequence here and there -- the two that I watched were soundly lacking in the sense of anarchy and visual inventiveness that Lester brought to A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Of course, given that The Spiders themselves were far from being musical trailblazers, that is perhaps fitting.

Which is not to say that the group’s take on 1960s guitar pop isn’t an appealing one, although it can be said to be a bit unfocused. In their second feature, 1968’s Go Forward!, the band’s songs run the gamut from Merseybeat to soft psychedelia to teen idol balladry to freakbeat, and even include a pass at country & western, giving the impression of an act that is, to some extent, trying to be all things to all people. In their fourth and final film, the same year’s The Road to Bali, The Spiders’ sound seems to have coalesced a bit, with their staid approach to melodic pop loosening up to accommodate an emerging tendency toward fuzz-tinged rave-ups. Even still, there remains something steadfastly agreeable about the music, which contributes to the overall impression that, translation or no, there probably isn’t much going on in these films that could really be called countercultural.

Scenes from Go Forward!

Both Go Forward! and The Road to Bali take their cue from Lester’s Help! by depicting The Spiders as haplessly finding themselves at the center of a perilous international intrigue. Thus both films play out as a series of episodic encounters with an assortment of gun-wielding shady characters, all taking place as the normally carefree young musicians go about their daily routine of playing concerts, making TV appearances and running away from girls -- with the intermittent dead body unexpectedly flopping out of a closet or some-such as a cursory nod towards maintaining the thriller atmosphere. This is a wise approach, not the least because it requires little emoting from the band members that goes beyond the level of “Yikes!” But, even more so, because the inclusion of these thriller elements seems like a shrewd way of capitalizing on the strengths of the studio in charge, seeing as Nikkatsu was still at the time dedicating much of its resources to churning out its distinct brand of formula crime films.

Go Forward! was directed by Ko Nakahira, who had directed the seminal “Sun Tribe” film Crazed Fruit for Nikkatsu in 1956 -- and who would, not too long after completing Go Forward!, go on to helm a handful of movies for Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers studio, among them the oddly sedate spy caper Interpol 009. Certain of the film’s elements -- its crisply attired, sunglasses-sporting assassins, for instance, or the final showdown at a derelict waterfront lot -- seem as if they could have been plucked of-a-piece from one of the studio’s “Nikkatsu Action” films from the period. Furthering the similarity are some familiar faces from those films, most notably that of the striking Mari Annu, who had starred in Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill a year previous. If you think that Suzuki used Annu to unnerving effect in that film, it might be instructive to note that her glacial, trancelike demeanor here remains completely unchanged, and is no less unsettling in this markedly breezier context -- not to mention well suited to her role as a cooly calculating foreign agent on the trail of a precious diamond hidden within the tambourine of one of the blissfully unaware Spiders.

Scenes from The Road To Bali

Neither Go Forward! nor The Road to Bali sees all of the Spiders’ individual members emerge as distinct characters, which I suppose could count as another unfavorable contrast to those films starring the band’s more famous British counterparts. Of course, this is understandable, given that there were seven Spiders in all -- a bursting of the ranks that insured the films’ scope photography would be used primarily for the purpose of fitting them all on screen. Rather than laboring to give each his own identifiable screen persona, the filmmakers instead chose to focus mainly on the group’s two lead singers, the conventionally handsome Jun Inoue and the more clownish and theatrical Masaaki Sakai. Together these two serve as a sort of Martin and Lewis duo within the films, with Inoue playing the straight man to Sakai’s constant mugging and carrying on. Of course, for Sakai, who was the son of famed Japanese comedian Shunji Sakai, The Spiders’ movies were just the beginning, as he would later gain wide international fame for his titular role as the Monkey King in Monkey, the Japanese television adaptation of the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West.

Apart from some pretty juvenile slapstick -- yes, you will see people slipping on banana peels -- the majority of the Spiders films’ humor is dialogue based, which makes watching them without subtitles fairly unrewarding for the non-Japanese speaking viewer. Still, of the two I saw, I liked The Road to Bali best. It has a great, stylized title sequence in which the band plays in silhouette behind some mini-skirted go-go girls -- somewhat reminiscent of the opening to Nikkatsu’s earlier Black Tight Killers -- and overall has more the kind of candy colored visual pop that you’d hope to find in a putatively swinging 1960s romp of this type. The film’s range of international locations, from Hong Kong to Jakarta and Bali, also provides a great deal of visual interest.

Scenes from The Road To Bali

I also found The Road to Bali’s spy movie plot to be better integrated into the whole than that of Go Forward!, this time with a gang of international crooks hunting the band down in order to access some pilfered plutonium that has somehow been concealed inside one of their amplifiers. There’s even a bit more straightforward Nikkatsu-style action this time around, including one of those gigantic shoot outs so typical of the studio’s 1960s crime films. (The band themselves, of course, being fun-loving hipsters, do not participate, though they do get involved in the occasional bout of fisticuffs in both films.) Not surprisingly, the film was helmed by another Nikkatsu stalwart, in this case Katsumi Nishikawa, who had earlier directed a number of youth films starring diamond liner Yujiro Ishihara.

Preference aside, I got a kick out of both Spiders films, as much for the way they reflect the worldwide pop mania of their time as for the agreeable tunes and good-natured antics specific to them. Within a year or so of their original release, Spider-mania would subside in Japan, and the band’s members would all go on to fulfill their separate destinies. Of course, for many of the people who were touched by that mania, the band and their music remain an enduring memory. For the rest of us, there are these movies, which do the service of allowing The Spiders to momentarily step out from behind the shadow of their more widely heralded musical peers, giving brief, colorful life to what would otherwise be a dry footnote in the Euro-centric annals of pop history.