A couple of years ago, we were up around this part of the world playing at the Natsu Festival. Right? (cheers from audience) Ah! This is great! Some of you were there. Perfect! I've got something I wanna explain to you. Some of you might remember this. You're gonna get your question answered right now!We go out, gonna play NatsuFest - we've been living in Tokyo, cooped up in the practice room, working on what became our latest record. So we've got all these new songs we wanna play, and we've got, like, five of them that are ready to be taken out and played live. And so, I'm still getting the lyrics memorized, you know, I'm changing them, Mio-chan's rewriting stuff - the band is reworking stuff, like, "Yui, we're going to - you're going to sing another four lines and then we'll put the chorus further town, let's try it that way," we're still working on the stuff. But we agree on five songs we're gonna throw into the set and turn people on to what we're workin' on.
First song we're going to play is a song called "Go Go Maniac", which didn't come out on the record, it's a B-side or something, but anyway. It's a good song! And... I have the lyrics pretty well set in my mind. I realize that if I can get the first line of the first verse out, the rest of the song will flow right outta me, I'll be fine.
So I'm memorizing that first line. Gotta get it right, gotta get it right. "The microcosm called the heart that's inside everyone is chock full of joy, anger, sadness, humor, and love." Kaboom. I know. Very - Mio and Sylvia Plath, there you go.
So. Our warmup is finished; our road manager, y'know, brutal Nodoka-chan - "All right, you fools, let's be having you," she's always really abusive. "Come on, you losers, get up there." So we run out there and there's like 50,000 people, RAAAAARRRR, and I'm like "All right, freakin' rock on!" And we go slammin' into this song, and I get the first line out, I'm, "Yes! I did it!" I'm into the song, the rest of the song is gonna go great, my nervousness disappears. I'm havin' a great time, I love this song, the audience is cool, we're playin' it good - everything's great.
So we're rockin' out, we get to the end of the verse, and next is a bridge section to get to the chorus. No problem. I go for the bridge, Mio and Ritchan go for the bridge, Mugi goes for the bridge... Azusa goes for the chorus. Because we're still getting the song together! It's not that she's a bad guitar player, she's great! We're still learning. You know? And so basically she goes ERRRRRRT - CRAAAASH into the song.
You see Ritchan and Mio-chan close their eyes in concentration because now the rhythm guitar line is wrong and it's very distracting. So you see Ritchan like, "Five, six, seven, eight, come on, Azusa," and Mio's like, "Come on, you can do it," and Azu-nyan immediately sees her mistake. You see her go "AAAGH!" and rework her stuff, and she gets back into the song and makes it - catches up with the bridge about, like, on the three. Y'know?
OK, no big deal. This happens in music all the time. We do it nightly. You know, Ritchan spaces out and tries a new roll, and we're all like, "What was that about?!" Suddenly we have to figure out new mathematics on how to get through the song, so everyone's on stage with a calculator going (thumpthumpthumpthump) "OK the one is... NOW" and we all dive on it and the crowd goes, "Whooaaa!" It's almost like a mid-air collision, like, "Aah, that was close, OK, moving right along." I mean, that's what happens, you know? And so... no big deal.
Usually no big deal. Azu-nyan's mad at herself 'cause she's a total perfectionist - OK. Now, this little deviation in the song made all the lyrics disappear from my little screen. I, forgot, all of 'em. And I was so mad at myself for forgetting 'em, I was so ticked, I couldn't even come up with anything to improvise with. And usually I can fake it - if someone says, "Here's a beat, here's a riff, come up with some words," I can go, "Go." And I can just like come up with something - moon, June, spoon, you know, something, you know how it is, you can fill it out and kind of get by.
You know, or you can go the Boston, Journey, or Kansas route, "Hey hey, whoa whoa, tonight, whoa yeah hey come on." That stuff works great! And if you can sing, you can make "c'mon whoa hey tonight" last for like eight measures, man. Come oooo-o-oo-oooo-oo-o-ooooonn!! Yeeeaahhh!!! People are going, "Heck yeah! That was awesome! That was some deep stuff, girl! When you sang 'C'mon whoa-ho,' baby, I cry when you do that, baby!"
Some of you are somewhat acquainted with the kind of music we do and the kind of lyrics Mio-chan writes - she's not a whoa whoa hey hey tonight kind of girl. She's trying to write some lyrics that've got some meaning so she doesn't have to hide behind Ritchan in shame when I sing them. Now that we're Real Live Grown-Ups she gets really annoyed at me when I do that baby baby all right stuff in her songs - although I still write that kind of music, because I think it's cool, I'm just not allowed to sing hers that way any more. (This is as close as we get to what other bands call "creative differences", by the way.)
So what am I gonna do now that I can't improvise anything and I have, uh... about three and half minutes' worth of song to get through? Here's what I have to do: I basically have to make an entire audience of people, in broad daylight, think that a song that sounds like "verse bridge chorus verse bridge lead bridge verse outro" is really this song where the singer sings a verse, two lines of a thing that sounded like a bridge, and the rest of the song is a weird instrumental.
So how am I gonna do that? What am I gonna do with this three and a half minutes of time, which is an eternity on stage when you are messing up the song? I'm gonna go for the Big Rock Maneuver. I'm gonna go split one-fourth of the song, by spending a fourth of the song with with each girl in the band, rocking out with her. OK?
So I run over to Azu-nyan - to check her out! And in my mind I'm like, "Oh yeah! Check her out! Azu-nyan Nakano! NatsuFest, get down! Look at this little cutie rock 'n roll! Yeah!!" And people are like, "... What's she doing?!" And Azu-nyan's looking at me like, "What the hell are you doing, senpai?!" because - I do not come over and go "Oh rock on!!" I don't - that - I've never done that. This girl's been playing with me for a decade, I've never done that. And I'm just like, "Shut up! Just keep playing! You're the one who started this thing, kitty cat!"
I'm keeping count in my head, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, forty-two, OK, that's a quarter of the song - I run over to Ritchan, I'm like, "Awright! Oh yeah! OK!" I'm doing the thing with the snare hits with her, you know, "Awright! It's Ritsu Tainaka! Check her out!" And she's like "What the crap are you doing, Yui?!" And I'm like, "Just keep playing, awright, get down!"
Thirty-nine, forty, OK, run over to Mugi-chan, "Awright, from Sakuragaoka, give it up for Tsumugi Kotobuki!" And she's just grinning and playing away because she loves it when weird stuff happens, nothing ever fazes Mugi-chan, we're jumping up and down together with the beat behind her keyboard, thirty-nine, forty, I go out front and throw down the guitar solo, then I run over to Mio-chan, "On the bass guitar, Mio Akiyama!" And Mio's like, "What the hell are you doing?! Sing the song!" I'm like, "Shut up! Just keep playing!" and we get to the end of the song like JANG JANG JAANNNNGG and I go like "YYYYEEAAAHH!!" and the crowd goes RAAAAAAAAAAA and I'm like "Thank God, they went for it."
Now, a couple of weeks ago, when we were in... Nagasaki, I think, or Fukuoka? Fukuoka, I think - I told this story. And a guy came up to me afterward and said, "I was at that show! We didn't know what the heck you were doing up there! Thank you for answering that question! We were like, 'What is her problem?' You were running around doing all this stuff with your head, that kinda chicken thing where you're like 'Aw rock on!' That rock 'n roll oochy-koo thing."
And I don't have any of that in me, you know? I don't even do the big stage raps, like, "Awright Wakayama!" If I came out here and was like, "Awright boys and girls!! Are you ready to rock?! I CAN'T HEAR YOOOUUU!" I'd be getting water bottles thrown at my head, and one of them would be Mio-chan's. We're just not that kind of band.
So maybe it was a bit much, but, I got us through the song, because... nothing can go wrong up here. You have to watch us and go, "Man, those girls were great, they rocked my world, their stuff was together - cool."