JAPAN’S UNKNOWABLE AVANT-ROCK ENIGMAS LES RALLIZES DÉNUDÉS BREAK COVER!
The Rolling Stone kneels at the altar of The Best Of Little Walter (Chess, 1958).
IN 2019, Tokyo musician/producer Makoto Kubota received a call from Takashi Mizutani, Les Rallizes Dénudés’ mysterioso-in-black, a man whose extraordinary guitar-playing took up from where Hendrix’s demolition of Wild Thing left off.
During the band’s spasmodic lifetime, roughly 1967 to 1996, the ‘Rallies’, as he calls them, had appeared just once on record – an anachronistic, side-long howl of acid rock on a 1973 various artists album. In 1991, three Mizutani-authorised retro CDs, issued as grunge was breaking, spread the word. But by 2019, says Kubota, the band’s bassist between 1969 and 1973, the Rallies had become “famous in a strange way”.
Some 100 LRD recordings, mostly live, were in circulation.
Mizutani was miffed. But after several conversations, including talk of re-forming the band for a US tour, the calls stopped. “I wasn’t surprised,” says Kubota. “He’s that kind of guy.” Then, a call from Mizutani’s family in Kyoto. “They said he was gone.”
Mizutani was always a spectral figure – visually, sonically and in his refusal to turn his gift into ‘a career’. “He had a strong sense of beauty,” says Kubota of the man with the hollowed-out cheeks à la Edvard Munch’s The Scream. His lyrics, says Kubota, were “like avant-garde painting. But some words were very direct: ‘We’ll make love on the street!’”
Catalysed by psychedelia, radical theatre and Paris ’68, early Les Rallizes Dénudés (that’s corrupted French for ‘Naked Suitcases’) sometimes evoked Houston, Texas’s Fever Tree or LA’s Peanut Butter Conspiracy. Mostly, Mizutani was enthralled by fuzz, feedback and kiss-the-sky soloing. “I saw the first Rallies band and it was so loud,” Kubota recalls.
Over time, the legend grew. The much-feted ‘Japanoise’ scene owes much to the group. The dazzling Keiji Haino could be Mizutani’s double. But rumours that the band were ‘a rock/terrorist organisation’ – original bassist Moriaki Wakabayashi became a Red Army plane hijacker who ended up in North Korea – is misplaced. “Not political,” says Kubota of his old colleague.
“He was a pioneer, a very disciplined guy who never compromised,” Kubota continues. “All I knew about his family was that his father was an art dealer, a collector of scary paintings, like ghosts and horror stories. When he was young, he was surrounded by all kinds of strange art.”
This rare insight into Mizutani’s background might just begin to explain the ‘terrible beauty’ of so much of Les Rallizes Dénudés’ music. Now, with Kubota currently sifting through cassettes, reel-to-reels, even DATs for future, family-sanctioned releases, Mizutani’s work is destined for a wider audience. But what will that do to the myth? “I understand that, for some people, popularising the Rallies’ name means it won’t be hip any more,” he says. “But Mizutani was not a maniac. He was a unique, unworldly person, that’s all. If the world accepts him as he was, he’d love the idea.”
The two-LP set The Oz Tapes (Temporal Drift) will be premiered on April 21, 2022 at Shibuya WWW X, Tokyo, with a live mix by Makoto Kubota, films, lights and photos. www.lesrallizesdenudes-official. com/www.makotokubota.org
“Some words were very direct: ‘We’ll make love on the street!’” MAKOTO KUBOTA
LOOK, FUCKING favourites – it depends how you wake up in the morning. It could be Muddy Waters or fucking Mozart, hahaha! Let me throw this one out there – Little Walter Jacobs. If you look him up, you cannot go wrong, but I would suggest this album on Chess Records – available nowhere! It’s got Blues With A Feeling on, and all the rest. I had that same album in the early ’60s, black-and-white on the front, and he looks really bad.
The Chess guys were all individuals, and I would say that, as far as harp-playing goes, Walter was the Louis Armstrong of that damn thing. Mick [Jagger] is still in awe of him. We’re both in agreement on that, and Mick is a damn good harp player himself! We kind of studied all this stuff to a certain extent at the beginning, along with Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo, Eddie Taylor – I could go on.
Little Walter was an incredible singer, too. The feeling in his voice was unbelievable. The voice, man, the texture of the voice, and also the guitar players behind him, the Myers brothers, incredible stuff – let alone the sound of the studio, the texture of the sound.
We cut some tracks at Chess [in 1964-65, circa The Rolling Stones No. 2], and everything was done very simply, quite honestly. It was just like your little 2-track recording studio, with a little booth at the end, with a window. People will talk about the construction of the room, and I’m sure that studio people often don’t even know if they’ve got it right or wrong. But sometimes you just walk into a room, and you go, “Yup!” Other rooms you walk into, you have to fight the fucker for weeks. Chess was one of those rooms that said, “Hell-oooo!”, a room that resonates, and the minute you get in there and start playing, it’s already responding.
You can try the Muddy Waters records that were made there as well, and the Chuck Berry records that were made in the same damn room. If you really want to get into it, that was
the rock’n’roll room of all time, except maybe for Sun records down in Memphis, which was where the white boys hang.
Sadly, I never saw Little Walter perform. I would’ve loved to. [Pause] I’m doing my bit here – he’s not paying me for this, you know? He’s dead and gone! I’m just saying listen to the voice, listen to that band, and then you have an idea of what’s really going on.
Keith Richards’ second solo album, 1992’s Main Offender, is reissued on March 18 by BMG.
“The Stones? All four limbs are working. It talks!” KEEF