Interpretation by Reina Sano and Yutaka Shimono
Black and white photos by Chris Platt
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"I decided...we could play and do anything we wanted."
Panta stirs things up, part 1. |
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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, in the first half of this interview, Panta details the first wave of Zuno Keisatsu, 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. JR: Before Zuno Keisatsu, there was Spartacus Bunt. PT: Yeah, I was in that band in 68-69. Before that I was in the backing band of a singer named Mieko Hirota. We were called The Mojo, and we'd play without her occasionally, with me singing. After that, I met a keyboardist named Mr. Chiba, and I started playing bass and singing with him and Toshi. I asked him what the name was, he said Spartacus Bunt. I thought it was kind of an uncool name! Spartacus Bunt wasn't really going anywhere, so after a while I decided to go back to school and just be an amateur musician, although I told Mr. Chiba I was going to continue with Toshi. Zuno Keisatsu was originally six or seven people, but Toshi and I were the base. We took the name Zuno Keisatsu (Brain Police) from the Zappa song "Who Are The Brain Police?" and went from there. I decided that, since we weren't professionals, we could play and do anything we wanted. We weren't political at first, but we were the first band I'm aware of to play serious rock 'n' roll with Japanese lyrics.
At the time, I was going to Kanto Gakuin University, which had a radical Communist group that had separated from The Socialist Bunt. There were about 8 groups, they had their own helmets with different colors: the red helmet party was the biggest and most powerful. They were supposed to be united, but there was some infighting. Eventually, people started moving on, getting out of the politics, and the people who stayed got more radical. Zuno Keisatsu started happening around the same time as this activity was winding down, but the two weren't connected: we were still apolitical. JR: When did politics enter into the equation? PT: One day, I was passing a protest, and out from behind the protest signs this guy came up to me and said "come see what's going on." This was "Mr. M." He told me about a book called "Leap For World Revolutionary War," which was published by the communist party. I was really moved by the book, but not by the ideology. There was a declaration in the book that moved me for its humanism. Not the ideology, the humanity. The first lines said that if the bourgeoisie had the right to kill people in Vietnam, "we have the right to kill you. If you have the right to kill people innocent people in Okinawa, we have the right to kill you." Like I said, it wasn't the politics, but this sentiment really stuck with me. I read this the day before a show in Hibiya, and I was thinking I could just whisper a few words about it during the show. However, I got caught up in the moment and shouted it! People took it as an attempt at agitation, and they really seized on it. I thought "hey, maybe this is where I should go with this." From that point on, Zuno Keisatsu became a political band. I was planning on singing "Sekigun Heishi No Shi" ("Red Army Soldier's Poem," based on lyrics by Berthold Brecht) at the Hibiya show, thinking there would be a lot of red helmets (from the Socialist Bunt) there. But it turned out the audience was all in white helmets! I was so nervous I started shaking. The first line was "we are the red helmet people," so I'm thinking I shouldn't sing the song! (laughs) There were 12000 people, and a lot of security. It wasn't a show, was a rally! Fortunately, it worked. That was essentially the birth of Zuno Keisatsu as it is now. "Ju O Tore" ("Get A Gun") came later. People started thinking of Zuno Keisatsu based on the politics, and we became famous. Thing is, when I wrote songs like "Get A Gun" it was as an internal monologue...when you sing it out loud, it becomes a message, although that wasn't my intent. I was thinking that, with the world in the state it was, I should be doing something, and that song was the response. It wasn't really intended as a rallying cry. JR: So now you had your direction.
PT: The music we ended up making was great, so we decided that we needed to find a way to make a record. In 1969, I think it was April 1st, we played a show in Kanda with The Flower Travellin' Band. It was their first gig under that name. The first Zuno Keisatsu album was partially recorded there, the rest was in Kyoto. We started getting pretty popular. Then one day, I open the newspaper, and I read that someone had opened fire on a policeman...with a rivet gun! It was (Spartacus Bunt's) Mr. Chiba! He was trying to steal a real gun from the police. I was pretty shocked. Then the incident got me thinking about the name "Spartacus Bunt." It was a German political party that eventually became the German Communist party. I was pretty apolitical when I was in Spartacus Bunt, but when people hear the name, they assume I was into politics from the beginning! (laughs) It turned out that Mr. Chiba had become active in the Chuo University socialist party. "Bunt" means road, and different groups would have different colors. Chuo's was red. A lot of the New Left people were very much against Stalin, but were pro-Mao. I can't really say I was influenced politically by Mr. Chiba or the band, but I had gotten caught up in the new left wing politics that were starting to pop up in campuses all over Japan after Spartacus Bunt. I think it's possible that our popularity got Mr. Chiba thinking, which might have led to the incident! JR: Popular as you were, you had a big struggle actually getting recordings out. PT: Zuno Keisatsu 1 was actually the last album to come out! There was a group in Japan that would check lyrics in Japanese albums, kind of an ethics in music committee, and they stopped the general release. We had put a column in a local magazine saying we wanted to sell the first album. This was in 1972, 600 people responded. The money disappeared, we weren't organized enough to respond efficiently, but I wanted to make good on the promise. It took a while, though! The front cover was a guy who robbed a bank by dressing up as a policeman. They never caught him. The cover designer suggested the bank robber, and even though it wasn't directly relevant to the lyrics, I liked it: I wanted to convey the attitude of rebellion. The cover ended up being a lot bigger than normal, because we used LP mailers instead of actual LP sleeves. It was self financed, the mailers were cheaper! I stamped and sent the albums out by hand from a post office in Shibuya, and immediately afterwards, I went to our last show in Yaneura on December 31st, 1975. JR: You also had a lot of trouble with 2nd. Yeah, it was banned. The political content got the album pulled. The ethics committee came down on us: They didn't like the lyrics. They didn't even like our name. They got the first album stopped, which is why we had to take out that ad in the paper. This was just before we signed to Victor Japan.  I actually told Victor that they might not want to record us, but they said not to worry. At the time, there was a lot of concern in Japan that was stirred up by the Yodo-Go hijacking, and the Tel Aviv airport attack by the Japanese Red Army, and all this made things very difficult for a strongly political band like ours. Particularly with "Red Army Soldier's Poem." It was actually from a poem by Berthold Brecht, about the Red Army in Germany, but politics in Japan were so sensitive that nobody bothered to pay close enough attention to find that out. Victor and I agreed to remove that song, but the album was still banned a month after it came out. Victor kept pressing them anyway! (laughs) The album did have "Get A Gun!" and one song had some lyrics about marijuana, that's why it got banned. After that, they really had it in for us. We eventually made 3 the same year, that was the first one that was realistically available! (laughs) We were pretty frustrated, the first song on the album was basically saying "fuck off!" (laughs) We still had to deal the ethics committee, so I made up some really foul lyrics, a lot of bad language. Of course, they hated them, so second time around presented the actual lyrics and said "OK, I fixed them." I changed "marijuana" to "grass," things like that. The ruse worked! (laughs) Everybody pretended they didn't know what was going on, but of course, our label was supporting us! (laughs) All the bannings got us a lot of attention, and that attention let us make the third album. That was our best year, but we were weighed down by our reputation afterwards. I guess that's an inevitable consequence of being uncompromising about your art. JR: Was that a factor in Zuno Keisatsu's split? PT: Well, things had gotten stale. When people saw us play, they wanted to hear things like "Red Army Soldier's Poem," and it was making it difficult to branch out in any creative way. Everybody wanted politics, but I had other ideas. It got to be about fitting people's expectations, and not about creating something sincere. I started thinking in terms of writing outside the band, starting fresh. I told the band we should give Zuno Keisatsu a send off, some kind of final ceremony, before things started getting really ugly and dysfunctional, and they were relieved: they were waiting for me to say it. We played our last show on New Years, 75-76. 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. Victor (the 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 ("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)
JR: You had one more solo album after Pantax's World, Hashire Atsui Nara (i.e. Run If 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 "Ningen Modoki" ("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. 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 (Note: in Japan, the term "director" for an album is used instead of "producer." The term "producer" is used to mean what is known as "executive producer" in the west.) 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? 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 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.) Three songs really stand out for me on that album: "Hadaka Ni Sareta Machi" ("The Naked City,") "Nefuudo No Kaze" ("The Winds of Nefud," about Lawrence of Arabia) and "Gokurakuchoo" ("Bird Of Paradise.") "Gokurakuchoo" 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. Part two of this interview can be found here. |
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