This is part two of a multi-part interview:

Part One - Part Three - Part Four

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In the West, if people know Zuno Keisatsu, they're known as key figures of 70s Japanese rock, releasing six politically incendiary albums before their split in 1975. What these people generally don't know, however, is that the story didn't end there: frontman Panta went on to an enormously successful solo career, and even reformed Zuno Keisatsu in 1990. Next year, Panta, along with Zuno Keisatsu mainstay percussionist Toshi, will be celebrating the band's 40th anniversary with a new album based on the poetry of the late Shuji Terayama (of Tenjo Sajiki fame.)

You can't do 40 years of history justice in one sitting, so in the coming weeks, Jrawk will be posting installments of this exclusive interview. Here, Panta details what happened after Zuno Keisatsu was given it's sendoff, the beginning of his enormously successful solo career, and stopping things at the right time, commercialism be damned.

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JR: When people talk about Zuno Keisatsu, they focus on the politics. What about the musical side? There's an underlying base of rock in a general sense, but there's not much in the way of what was normally considered standard rock signifiers at the time.

PT: Well, as a kid, I loved the blues: John Lee Hooker, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, etc. When I started playing music as a teenager, I was just mimicking the blues, and it's not something you should just be aping: it comes from a culture and a situation, it's not just a style. It belongs to American blacks first and foremost, I shouldn't be trying to compete with them on their turf. I never stopped loving it, but I threw all that out of my own music when I was 18. I decided to sing about what I felt was appropriate to me, and that led to Zuno Keisatsu. As much as I love the blues, there's none in Zuno Keisatsu. It doesn't belong to me. That was a conscious decision.

JR: OK, so Zuno Keisatsu had it's sendoff at the beginning of 1976. Did you have a conscious idea of where you wanted to go, musically?

PT: Yeah, I already had an idea of what I wanted to do. In Zuno Keisatsu, I had put up a kind of mental barrier between us and the music business, an us versus them attitude. But once I discussed the split with (Zuno Keisatsu constant) Toshi, I started hunting for people to start up a new band.

Pantax's World

Victor (Panta's label) had the idea of having three or four units that could play together behind me, as opposed to having one group. One of them had (pre-Jonny Louis and Char / Pink Cloud) Char and Jonny, Shinji Shiotsugu from the Kyoto group West Coast Blues Band, and Yukari Uehara (of Sugar Babe, etc.) I was excited at the possibility of making something different from what I had done before: music at the time was very soft, boring, so "Pantax's World" ended up being a hard rock album.

Right around that time, the Doobie Brothers came to Japan with the Memphis Horns. I really wanted to record with them, but the timing didn't work out. Fortunately, my brother in law at the time was (trombonist) Hiroshi Itaya. We couldn't get the Memphis Horns, so he offered to make the Pantax Horns! That's why there's so much brass on that record, we had a great horn section.

The last song on Pantax's World ("マーラーズ・パーラー," or "Mahler's Parlor") was very surreal. I based the lyrics on poetry by (prominent surrealist) André Breton, using imagery from his work. But I had a friend tell me it wasn't about Mahler at all, but Marat Sade. I realized he was probably right, that interpretation made more sense. He said he was sitting in a café, watching people walk by, and he was hit with the feeling that everyone who passed by the window was in an asylum, but didn't know it. That led to his interpretation, and I think it's better than mine. I don't push an interpretation on an audience. I write what works for me, but what the listener thinks is ultimately more important.

I also started writing music for other artists. One was named Danielle Viddel, she was what was called at the time a "doll girl," she sang in French. I wrote some songs for her at the last second, the night before they were recorded! Then I got a second call, and they said hey, can you write the lyrics too? In French! (laughs) I had only taken one hour of French in my life! I stayed up all night writing and working with the dictionary. I showed her the lyrics the next day, she said there were a lot of errors. I got pissed off, told her to fix them herself. "You speak French, I don't!" (laughs)

走れ熱いなら (Run If You're Hot)

JR: You had one more solo album after "Pantax's World," "走れ熱いなら" ("Run If You're Hot.")

PT: The cover on that one is a bit glam...we cut out a poster and stuck it on sheet metal. We went on tour with Suzi Quattro to promote it, that tour was TOUGH. We did 29 gigs in a month, in 22 cities, playing matinees occasionally...it was great fun, though. Suzi's band kept miming "In The Mood" in the tour bus, guys standing up to mime the horn parts, stuff like that. They found a Suzi Quattro song on a jukebox in a roadside restaurant, and started dancing around the place. Just stuff to blow off steam, but it was necessary.

There's a song on that album called "人間もどき" ("Humanoid,") which is about the Tenno in Japan. The drummer in my band (called "The Second") for that tour was Takahiko Shijyo, and he was from a royal family! Fortunately, he wasn't offended by the lyrics, but really, he shouldn't have been. I'm not against the Tenno himself, but the system. I'm glad he didn't take it personally.

JR: So why discard the idea of having a backing band? Why form Panta And HAL?

PT: I realized I preferred being in a band. The name HAL was from (Stanley Kubrick's film) 2001, he had come up with the name HAL by taking the letters for IBM and moving one letter up in the alphabet. We spent two years just playing, getting ready, focusing on the music. The next album was gonna be big, so we were spent a lot of time on planning.

マ ラッカ (Maraca)

There was a lot of drama leading up to the recording, though. We had originally hired Ryuichi Sakamoto to direct,* but our producer (Kunijiro Hirata) didn't get along with him. He wanted Keiichi Suzuki, but I was reticent.

JR: Why?

PT: (laughs) Oh, it's a long story!

JR: OK, now I'm really interested! (laughs)

PT: OK! Well, back in the Zuno Keisatsu days, there were two factions in Japanese rock. There were the people who sang in English, and the people who sang in Japanese. I sang in Japanese, but I was good friends with (Flower Travellin' Band guru and all around rock star) Yuya Uchida, who was in the English camp. Ironically, the bands that sang in English tended to be more uniquely Japanese, whereas the bands that sang in Japanese tended towards more Western styles! (laughs) The boundary became folk (Japanese) versus rock (English.)

So...Zuno Keisatsu was playing a handful of music festivals in campuses around the country. The last one was at the Mita Festival at Keio University, we shared the stage with Happy End and Hachimitsupai (later to be known as Moonriders.) We had played a show on the other side of the country and had jumped on the bullet train to get there as soon as we could, but we were still a bit late. When we got there, they told us we couldn't go on. As it turns out, that was motivated by a lot of behind the scenes politics that I only found out about years later.

Anyway, they told us they were going to skip our slot. Happy End were going to play next. I said screw it, let's go home. We got to the parking lot and Toshi said "Are we really just gonna fucking walk away like this?" I thought about it and agreed with him, so we headed back. While all this was going on, the black helmets had gotten wind of the situation and were getting antsy.** Hachimitsupai were finishing up, and Happy End were backstage, stretching and getting ready to go on.

When they left the stage, Toshi and I hijacked it. The black helmets surrounded the stage, keeping Happy End from going on. We played for an hour and left immediately. Afterwards, Happy End played one song, supposedly because people threw rocks at them! Turns out that story was greatly exaggerated...I found out years later that only one rock was thrown, and it hit (Happy End's) Haroumi Hosono's bass. Apparently, they only played one song because they had a train to catch! There were stories of a riot, all kinds of stuff that turned out to be greatly exaggerated.

So now, fairly or not, there was a rift between Happy End and Zuno Keisatsu. I spoke with (Happy End guitarist) Shigeru Suzuki about ten years later, and we straightened things out. The other three might still be angry, though! (laughs)

JR: Wow. So how did that translate into concerns with (Panta And HAL producer) Keiichi Suzuki?

1980X

PT: Well, he was part of the Hachimitsupai camp, so I was worried about conflicts. But Kunijiro was a good friend, he said stop worrying, I want you two to meet. We went to a little café behind Victor Japan's offices, it was a hangout for Happy End, Moonriders, lots of new music people. Keiichi was a bit reticent at first as well, he only knew me by my image. But Kunijiro was right, we hit it off.

JR: ...and he ended up producing "マラッカ" ("Maraca.")

PT: Yeah, I had two ideas for the first Panta and HAL album: either the silk road, or the oil road. The oil road is a trade route that goes through the strait that separates Morocco from Spain. My mother was a nurse in a Marine hospital, she had all kinds of stories about being there. I'm always thinking about Morocco. Anyway, I mentioned these two ideas to Keiichi, he immediately said "oil."

JR: So now you had your conceptual direction. What about the band?

PT: In Zuno Keisatsu, I felt responsible for everything: songs, lyrics, arrangements, everything. But with HAL I could allow the musicians more freedom. I would have a basic framework, but HAL had a lot of freedom within that framework. We had a percussionist named Pekka (from Orkestra del Sol,) he had an enormous influence over the Latin sound of that album. I was a bit skeptical at first: this is about the Moroccan strait, why are we using a samba beat? (laughs) But I let it go. They were all solid musicians, and I wanted to try a bit harder to foster a band atmosphere, rely on the others around me. It worked. The mainstream at the time was all synthpop and fusion, I wanted something different. We got it, but it was expensive: we spent 25 million yen! (Roughly $250,000 American.)

TKO Night Light

Three songs really stand out for me on that album: "裸 にされた街" ("The Naked City," translated lyrics can be found here) "ネフードの風" ("The Winds of Nefud," about Lawrence of Arabia) and "極楽鳥" ("Bird Of Paradise.") "Bird Of Paradise" was about (T. Rex frontman) Marc Bolan. The time signatures on that one are really rough, it's difficult to play!

JR: As successful as "Maraca" was, you only had two more albums with HAL.

PT: Well, next was "1980X." In Japan, "X" marks an important day in Japan. I wanted to show Tokyo through slices of life, different vignettes. "Maraca" was about a distant country, I wanted something with a more personal edge. I also wanted an edgier sound, something leaner, more provocative. That was successful as well, and we recorded "TKO Night Light" live at Nihon Seinenkan. The show had gone well, but we weren't thinking together anymore. We'd try to focus on one thing together, but that just hastened the collapse. People had to sacrifice what was important to them in order to work as a group, and it didn't work.

On the way back from a gig in Kansai, I started talking to people individually, asking what they wanted to do. After I spoke to everyone, it was pretty obvious we were musically incompatible. Unfortunately, that was the make or break point commercially, so the label wanted to keep the band together! But creatively, it was over. I'm not a businessman! (laughs) it was a purely musical decision: there was no animosity, it was objectively decided.

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Part 3 of this interview, where things start to crash and burn, is here.

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