Interpretation by Nate Shockey
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"If there's a God, He'd tell me I wasn't finished.
I haven't done what I'm supposed to do yet." Carmen Maki contemplates her Persona. |
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 From the long list of Japanese rock artists in the 70s still making music today, Carmen Maki is one of the most uncompromising. From her beginnings in the legendary Tenjo Sajiki theater troupe, through rock superstardom and the inevitable disillusion, Maki has never stopped searching and experimenting, always looking for new ways to express herself. This has resulted in a wildly diverse career, encompassing folk, pop, blues, punk, jazz, and improvisation, all of which has retained her distinctive stamp. Her most recent album, Persona, may surprise those who know her only as the firebrand of her work with Oz and Blues Creation. But looking at her overall career, it makes sense: she's never been afraid to say what she feels, critics, public, and record companies be damned. Recently, she sat with Jrawk for a series of interviews in which she discussed the struggles of growing up in the spotlight, the pursuit of her muse, and how much she likes rock supergroup Cactus. JR: When you started off as a teenager, was rock a rebellion for you? CM: In a way. In rock, there's a personal dimension and a social dimension. In America in the 60s, rock music had the social backdrop of political unrest, Vietnam: the people you played with and grew up with were going off to war and dying. The music became very powerful in a way that made sense, it was a way of getting a common, relevant message across. Japan was the same way, you had the student movement, and rock fulfilled a roll in that situation. For my personal dimension, that's when I was young, discovering what I wanted to do. To hear the music at that time with who I was, it spoke to me. I think for everybody, where they're born and their experience growing up decides the kind of people they become, and the kind of choices they're going to make. When I was very young, my father had gone back to America. When he left, people were still traveling on ships. I have this memory of my mother holding me in her arms, and we watched my father sail away. I remember the tape, the streamers people would throw overboard as the ship sailed out...it stretched out as the ship moved away. That was my last memory of him. I never saw him again. That was in Yokohama.
I've heard this story from my family so many times that even though I don't personally remember it, it feels like I do! (laughs) My mother and I were supposed to follow him there, but then she came down with Tuberculosis. My father and I became pen pals throughout my childhood. At the time, Japan was still pretty poor. Having tuberculosis then was very serious, like having cancer now. Odds were that you wouldn't get better, and with something like tuberculosis, which is contagious, you certainly couldn't travel on a ship. The doctor told us there was no way she could travel, since she'd get everybody sick. So I ended up getting to know my father through letters while my mother was sick. My family wasn't wealthy, but they saved up to send me to good schools, girls' schools in Tokyo. All the girls there were from "good" families, everybody was rich. I couldn't really relate and turned delinquent, went to Shinjuku all the time, went drinking, went to clubs, hung out in jazz coffee shops. There was this poster at one of the coffee shops that was really striking, it drew me in. It was by Tadanori Yokoo for one of the Tenjo Sajiki performances. I went to see it, and it changed my life. When you're 17, you're emotional and it's easy to be swept away by these things. I was listening to Janis and Jimi, and Tenjo Sajiki hit me in the same way. I knew already that I wanted to get away from my family situation, and this was where I wanted to go. JR: How did you move into music? CM: I saw Tenjo Sajiki, and I ended up joining the group. I never thought of being a singer...I was on stage, and I was scouted by the music industry. I hated the show business aspect from the beginning. I didn't want to be a singer! There were always problems with the contracts. I was still young, still finding out how to build myself. JR: So the work you did that fit within the rock mold...the Blues Creation album, Oz, your album with Carmine Appice. How much of it was your idea, how much of it was pushed on you in the name of showbiz? CM: When I started singing, it was more like kayou kyoku and folk...the song "Motherless Child" (Maki-san's first hit) is really a folk song. The first time I was able to do music that I felt was in the spirit of Janis, Jimi and Jim Morrison was with Blues Creation. Kazuo Takeda was the Jeff Beck of Japan. He played guitar in ways that no one else in Japan could do, with the possible exception of (Flower Travellin' Band's Hideki) Ishima-san. I wanted to sing for them! I'd be at the live shows and they'd pull me on the stage, and that's how that started.
JR: Really? Why? CM: At that time, I was someone from the pop world, or show business world, not the rock world. I was outside the scene. People would boo and throw things. I was trying to move away from pop and folk, but I hadn't done much actual music yet, so for the public, I was still a pop singer. Have you heard the Blues Creation with Carmen Maki album? JR: Of course! CM: (puts her head in her hands and laughs) JR: Really? CM: My English was so bad! JR: A friend of mine liked it so much he stole it from me. CM: I want to be happy about it...but I have to think that he liked he because there's this girl singing screwed up English! (laughs) JR: After the album with Blues Creation (1971,) there was a four year gap, and then there was Carmen Maki and Oz. Why the delay? CM: The main company that brought rock to Japan at that time was CBS/Sony. CBS was bringing all this rock 'n' roll, and I was on the label! I was sick of kayou and folk, I didn't want to do it anymore. I ended up having this big fight with CBS because rock wasn't selling yet...they wanted me to keep doing things like "Motherless Child," because it was selling. I ended up leaving. They were businessmen, I was selling records based on folk and kayou. It's just ironic that they were the label bringing all this rock in from overseas, but wouldn't let me move in that direction. So I quit. When I put together Oz, that was in '72. But it took about three years to get to the debut album. We just kept practicing and kept a low profile, playing in beer halls and proto-discos...small clubs. After three years, we were ready for the album. JR: Why that long?
CM: Well, we played around, we started building a following. Eventually A&R scouts would come and offered to help us make a record. We'd say no, we weren't ready...we weren't sure what we wanted to do, weren't sure if we knew how to make the record we wanted. So we turned down offers for quite a while. We actually didn't have that many original songs yet...we were playing beer halls, clubs, places where you had to play a lot of covers. After about three years, we had enough strong interest to made the first record in '75. I think in Japanese rock history, there's not really any other band that could have done (what Oz did.) I really feel that Oz was a band that had something special to them, that could appeal to people outside the context of Japan. Anyway, with Oz, the first album sold really, really well, so the label said they'd do something for us. They ended up flying us to America, to LA, to record the second album. We were there for four months. It was a huge culture shock...the roads were huge! We saw all these bands: The Who, Johnny Winters, the Doobie Brothers. A lot of those people are no longer with us, and I'm very glad I got to see them when I could. JR: Did the culture shock transfer to the making of the album? CM: There were language barriers, but a studio is a studio. It was more or less the same. JR: So no wild parties? CM: In terms of the recording itself, it was pretty tight...our manager was there, label staff...the actual time in the studio was basically the same. So far as outside the studio...one time, we got to the studio and it was filled with black people, which for a Japanese person who had never been outside Japan was quite a shock! Everybody was seriously done up...full blown 70s clothes, the men looked like pimps! Everybody's showing off...turned out it was an audition for Quincy Jones' chorus! So everyone was trying to get noticed. We saw Ringo Starr at one point too...it wasn't quite a party, but we'd go to the studio and things would be happening. So far as the music, that's probably our heaviest album, which doesn't really reflect LA at the time. Honestly, I'm not sure why we went to LA! Probably just PR. That was the hip thing...recording in LA, for the Japanese music world, was a huge deal.
JR: Why did Oz end? CM: We did what we set out to do. I especially was ready to do something else. JR: After Oz, you did all sorts of different things...an album (Night Stalker) with Carmine Appice (Vanilla Fudge/Cactus/Rod Stewart drummer,) and the band projects 5X and Laff. It seems you were searching a bit. CM: 5X was a punk band. I buzzed my hair and wore leather! (laughs) Right after Oz had broken up, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. They asked who I wanted to work with, I said Cactus. I love Rusty Day, and Carmine's name came up. The album didn't really live up to my dream, unfortunately. JR: There seems to be a string of records that you're not very fond of. Is this what led to your decision to drop rock? CM: I was frustrated, yes, but the change came later. In 1989 I got married and had a child, and I stopped music totally, became a housewife. I looked back at all this music I had been making since I was 17, worked with different people, different labels. But I still hadn't done what I wanted to do, made the music I wanted to make. If there's a God, He'd tell me I wasn't finished yet. I haven't done what I'm supposed to do yet. I spent years raising my child, and thinking of what kind of music I wanted to make now. It was also right around the 10th anniversary of (Tenjo Sajiki head) Shuji Terayama's death. When my daughter was 3 or 4, I did Moon Songs for her, it's an album of lullabies. I didn't end up liking it, I thought again about quitting. But it was about 2000 that I came around to the attitude and approach I'm doing now. But I thought again that I couldn't let it end that way…Moon Songs couldn't be the last album. JR: And you're still going from there. For the new album, why the title Persona? CM: It's a song from 40 years ago, from when I debuted. Last year was my 40th anniversary, and the album was to commemorate that. I was still 17 the first time around. The song isn't one of my more famous songs, it never had a proper single, but it became a fan favorite. It's a bit of a hidden song in my catalog. I wanted to bring it back...it's an unusual and difficult song. It doesn't work off of typical verse-chorus-verse structure. It starts in one place and ends up somewhere else. Now, after 40 years and having lived my life, I feel like I can really understand it. With Persona, the way the song is structured, it has to be played from the beginning every time when you're rehearsing. The person who wrote it isn't really a songwriter. Makoto Wada is an illustrator for weekly magazines, usually, and the lyrics were by Mutsuro Takahashi. Not a song written by a musician. JR: So was the anniversary album an explicit attempt to connect with the past?
CM: For the anniversary album, I wanted to take the old songs and create a sense of closure and totality by reworking them with different arrangements and different musicians. They're the same songs, but they're performed differently, and my outlook is different. A performance is like a film: it captures a moment. It's not like a typical live performance where you perform one song, everybody claps, you talk a bit, then move on to the next song. It's more like poetry, there's a sense of flow between songs, a sense of story as part of the performance. It creates a larger sense of drama. That's one of the reasons why I don't like talking between songs. JR: There's obviously a strong theatrical bent to what you do. Also, I've seen you twice, and while you performed some of the same songs, you had a different instrumental setup. You seem to have more of a live performer mindset than that of a recording artist, who repeats performances based on recordings and what people expect. CM: That's true, yes. I'm glad that comes across. I have this history, sometimes people come with certain expectations. I still occasionally have some internal struggles about what I'm performing now. With rock...there's something about it that tires me out. I get a little tense about it. It's something that's already been created. What I really want to do is take who I am, who I am every day, and naturally turn that into music. With rock being this existing form, I find myself tiring out, as opposed to having it come out naturally as music. That's my goal, to feel the creativity naturally. I like to think about my music...the Japanese word is "shishosetsu," which is sometimes called "The 'I' Novel." The idea behind that is that personal experience, creating from your personal experiences, is the truest way to creativity. If you look at a popular novel, people will buy it, of course. JR: When did you finally make the music you wanted? CM: Hasn't happened yet. All of my albums are what I was at that time, but I'm still not 100% satisfied with any of them. Which feels strange to say to the people who bought the records! (laughs) JR: Do you think you'll get there, or is it about the journey? CM: Well, three things: one, I'm living to make that album. Two, so long as I have yet to make that album, I won't die. But, three, maybe I'll die without having made it after all! That's life. --- Persona is available at Amazon Japan |
