They don’t make them like that anymore, for better or for worse.
Yuya Uchida, who passed away on March 17th, cemented his rock’n roll credibility forever by opening for The Beatles on their momentous Japan tour of 1966. He even came up with a song for the occasion, called “Welcome, Beatles.”
At the time he was already a music industry veteran, having got his start as an Elvis-obsessed rockabilly singer in 1958. He went on to surf the musical zeitgeist, covering Chuck Berry songs, giving his band The Flowers a psychedelic makeover and a hippy image, then morphing into an outrageous, butt-baring punk rocker.
Uchida never had many hits, did not write many songs or play an instrument and was no more than an average singer, but primal creative energy and bottomless chutzpah kept him in the public eye as scene-maker, film actor, script-writer and all round provocateur.
In 1992, he even ran for Mayor of Tokyo. His party political broadcast, mostly in idiosyncratic English, turned out to be a classic of the genre.
In the early 1970s, realising that he would never be a credible frontman in the new genre of heavy rock, he fired himself from his own group and became the producer instead. Renamed the Flower Travellin’ Band, under his guidance it went on to make some classic albums such as Satori, Anywhere and Made in Japan.
Uchida was also a prominent figure in the “Japanese Rock War” of the time, which was a heated dispute between people who maintained that English was the only proper language for rock lyrics and those who believed Japanese bands should sing in Japanese.
Here Uchida found himself on the wrong side of history. The Flower Travellin’ Band and other offshoots of the 1960s “Group Sounds” era continued to sing their lyrics in English. But the new generation, epitomized by Happy End, Japan’s answer to Crosby, Stills and Nash, proved that Japanese language lyrics sounded fine with rock rhythms and were well accepted by the public.
Bands singing only in English were soon to disappear, while Happy End’s Haruomi Hosono was to go on to found Yellow Magic Orchestra, then embark on a long solo career which continues today.
Uchida maintained his bad boy reputation almost to the end, managing to get himself arrested at the age of seventy one for breaking into the home of a girlfriend who had dumped him.
His relationship with his wife, the actress Kirin Kiki of “Shoplifters” fame, who predeceased him by a year, was a curious one. They married in 1973, but two years later were living apart due to Uchida’s unacceptable behaviour. Despite both parties preparing divorce filings, they chose to stay married while leading separate lives for the next 42 years.
A different side of Uchida’s personality manifested itself in the aftermath of the triple disaster of March 2011, when he and twelve other volunteers took an enormous load of food supplies to a tsunami-afflicted area of Tohoku long before official aid programmes were on stream.
Rock on.
