"Magical Chain"

The following is from a post I made in small forum I help moderate.  There's very little activity on the forum so I haven't had to do much moderating there in ages.  Nonetheless here's my blurb about the concert I attended last night....

I got to see Ulful Keisuke in concert last night. Lady Luck was on my side this time.  I think the gig sold out in about 30 minutes.   I saw a poster with the "Sold Out - Thank You!" sticker on it at Billy's Bar back in February.  I mentioned to a friend I had seen him in concert last year and it looked like I was going to miss out on his show this year.   She said she had heard that someone had six returned tickets from cancellations.   So I asked her to put in a word for me.  A few days later she got back to me and said she had managed to secure the last ticket for me.  Needless to say I was extremely pleased with the turn of events.

I've been to Billy's Bar for concerts in the past.  It's not a big place so I've learned the lesson that it doesn't pay to show up just before shows start.  So yesterday I showed up 15 minutes before the doors opened.  Even then I has at the back of the queue.  Luckily it wasn't a long one.  So I managed to nab a good seat about a meter behind the soundboard.

Opening act was MinxZone (http://www.last.fm/music/MinxZone).   They're a trio who originally were based in Osaka but they're now based in Tokyo.  Since they don't have a bassist they had to rely on taped bass track on their opening song.  After that they chugged along as two guitartists and a drummer.  They're an upbeat feel-good pop-rock unit.   Similar to the band I saw last month, Zukunasi, they include elements of audience participation in their set.   Their output isn't limited to music as they had knick-knacks, books, and art T-shirts on sales too.

Ulful Keisuke is the guitarist for the now reformed Ulfuls.  The band started out pre-1993 in Osaka and were known for an irreverent and tongue-in-cheek style of rock and roll in the beginning (the name of the band came from dropping "so" from "soulful").   Commercial success followed in the mid nineties.   I remember seeing them on an edition of the annual Kohaku Uta Gassen (Red-White Song Battle) in the mid 2000s.

I believe Ulful Keisuke has been doing his annual tours through the Tohoku region for a number of years.   He's visited Yonezawa three years in a row.   I was at last year's show and it was a good one but the venue was too small for the size of the audience in attendance.   This year the layout of the venue was better suited to his style of show.  He likes to take an occasional stroll up the aisle to stretch out a guitar solo.  His selection of songs are his own ones which he may or may not have collaborated on with members of Ulfuls.  He definitely doesn't mine the Ulfuls catalogue. He likes to chat things up between tunes too.  Not up to the length of the monologues done by Yamada Koshi though (another person whose shows at Billy's Bar sell out too).  The selection ranged from a cover of an old Stones tune (though written by Lennon and McCartney) to a couple of ballads and a lot of peppy and energetic rockers.

I drained half my wallet again on CD purchases.  Got them autographed by MinxZone and Ulful Keisuke respectively.  I complemented Ulful Keisuke, in English, on his T-shirt selection. It was a Monty Python T-shirt that names the members of the troupe and then, for no particular reason, goes on to list "Spam, Spam, Spam" and other nonsense.  Ulful Keisuke did a double take when he asked what my name was as he was about to sign a CD for me.  Guess he wasn't expecting to get an English name delivered in a flat North American accent in the middle of a sentence in Japanese....


Footnote: I found out last week that the ticket I purchased came courtesy of Pinky-chan (real name Eriko) who sings in the house band Brilliant Shine at Billy's Bar.  I bumped into her at Yasukuni about three weeks ago when I went there to catch an acoustic night gig which I found about from our office manager.   She remembered me from when she made her rounds through the audience after Brilliant Shine finished their set when they had opened for Zukunasi.  That was back in late February,