Taking "Small World" seriously

[filmgal]

Calgrad:  Do the setlists look the same in Japan as in the US?

[calgrad]

She lost another pair of pants.  :)

Hee!  No, actually I did good!  Law school must be well behind me now because I did manage to bring over everything I intended.  Of course, whether I'll manage to bring it all BACK is an open question...

[calgrad]

It's now Tuesday morning for me.  Monday was a concert-less day, although it still had a little HLN-ness squeezed in at the end.

I'm staying with my friend who lives in a town called Yamato.  I'd been here once before, but I was under the weather then and had found it hard to orient myself in it.  This time he's been under the weather, so we mostly spent the day at home, although I snuck out on my own for lunch.  He drew me a nice map and gave me instructions for how to catch the bus to the train station where the lunch places are.  I then walked back afterwards, maybe about a mile.  The neighborhood is interesting - not touristy in the slightest.  It's also strangely zoned, with retail, industry, and housing all kind of interspersed.  (In fact there's even a bit of agriculture.)  In one way it's sort of a fascinating place to be, like it's REAL Japan where real people live and work and not someplace with a false front designed to lure visitors.  Unfortunately it's also kind of bland and unremarkable.  But it is very clean, with lots of very Japanese details.  Like the manhole covers, whose metal is decorated with pictures of flowers.  (In some parts of Japan I think the manhole covers are even painted.)

Once at the train station I sought out the tempura shop I ate at the last time I was here.  Unfortunately it was closed.  So instead I went to the next door KFC instead.  I don't think it's necessarily wrong to eat fast food when abroad.  It's its own cultural experience, as all the chains vary from country to country.  McDonalds is probably the most consistent, but even it adds regional items to its menus.  And KFCs can vary widely, both in terms of taste (e.g., in China it's very spicy) and, sadly, also quality (although this is true even in the US).  I doubt what I ate yesterday was the Colonel's secret formula, although it wasn't too bad.  Interestingly when they serve drumsticks (helpfully the clerk actually knew the English word "drumstick," since unhelpfully I knew no Japanese words at all) they leave the feet on (the part below the lower joint) and fry it up all together.

For dessert I wandered across the hall to a convenience store where I found some chocolate-covered macadamia nuts and a packet of what looks to be chocolate-flavored potato sticks.  Haven't quite worked up the nerve to try the latter yet, but I'm mentioning all this because Japan is absolutely my favorite place in the world to eat.  You can get ANYTHING there.  Last time when I was unwell all I really wanted was some raspberry sherbet.  And voila - there in the mall was a Haagen-Daas selling it.  There's lots of western food available all over (e.g., American, French, Italian, although not so much in the way of Mexican), Asian food from all parts, and then of course lots of native cuisine too. 

And even then, the Japanese palate is amazingly broad.  It uses a much larger vocabulary of ingredients and flavors than just about anywhere else I can think of.  And it's always served as appetizingly as possible, impeccably-plated even in the most simple of restaurants.  Or department stores, which, like many other countries except the US, all have grocery stores and food stalls in them.  (I don't want to say food courts, because what I'm describing is a lot less tacky than the typical American food court.)  Or even convenience stores, for that matter, where you can get all kinds of yummy and fresh pre-packaged and prepared foods.

[calgrad]

In fact the convenience stores are an interesting phenomenon, although one that might be true to Asia generally and not just Japan.  In one sense they're like American convenience stores - they even have 7-11s over here - but they're cleaner and much less cheesy and under-serviced.  While in the US they're often the overpriced after-thoughts of grocery retail, in Japan they serve a much broader niche, being ubiquitous and helpful and seemingly full of anything you could want.  For instance, the other day before the Tokyo concert I decided I wanted chocolate and vanilla softserve ice cream.  Sure enough, the Circle-K below the Four Seasons sold it, and one of the many friendly clerks used a special machine to make it for me on the spot. 

(My compliments to Japanese cuisine stand generally, but the way the country has so ably met all my ice cream needs is really truly impressive...)

Anyway, the topic of convenience stores brings me to the HLN part of the day, because in the evening on the way to dinner my friend and I went to one to buy tonight's ticket.  (I decided to suck it up and go.)  All these stores have a machine where you can apparently buy tickets for anything anywhere in Japan.  First there's a touch screen where you look up what you want (fortunately I had my friend to help because it was all in Japanese), and then you buy it.  Only you're not done yet.  It prints out a special receipt that you take to the counter and present to the clerk.  He then scans the bar code and charges you for it (I used my American credit card).  You end up signing both the credit card receipt and the original ticketing receipt, and then he hands you the ticket that has just printed out on a special printer behind the counter.  The downside to all this is that you can't seem to pick your seat.  On the other hand, Japanese audiences seem to be a lot less neurotic about seat location than most Americans (and, um, me...).  They seem to comfortably accept being wherever their ticket put them.

I guess I'm glad I got the ticket because afterwards I had that nice feeling of anticipatory excitement.  Well, it's either that or a pervasive sense of doom...

Either way, though, onwards to Yokohama...

[pwtmet]

Calgrad you are a lucky girl!! Have fun and I wish I was there.

[Yoshiko]

Hi Calgrad,
Enjoying your thread... see you in Yokohama!
(I'm not sure if you are still reading... anyway I am wearing "We're not here for a long time..."
T-shirt, seat row A23 no.33)

Hi Everyone,
Maybe I can contribute a bit with the setlist.

Day1: Hiroshima
01. THE HEART OF ROCK & ROLL
02. SO LITTLE KINDNESS
03. I WANT A NEW DRUG/SMALL WORLD
04. DOIN' IT (ALL FOR MY BABY)
05. POWER OF LOVE
06. JACOB’S LADDER
07. PERFECT WORLD
08. IT'S ALL RIGHT
09. UNDER THE BROADWALK
10. HEART & SOUL
11. BUT IT’S ALLRIGHT
12. WE’RE NOT HERE FOR A LONG TIME

13. BACK IN TIME (GUEST CHICAGO KEITH HOWLAND)
14. BAD IS BAD (GUEST CHICAGO BILL CHAMPLIN ,TRIS IMBODEN)
15. WORKIN’ FOR LIVIN’

Day2: Osaka (only the differences from Day1 are mentioned)
02. MY OTHER WOMAN
07. (TOO) HIP TO BE SQUARE
08. SO MUCH IN LOVE
09. UM, UM, UM, UM, UM, UM

Day3: Nagoya (only the differences from Day1 are mentioned)
* Time was limited this day (80 min. instead of 90 min.) 
02. YOU HURT ME
07. none...
08. IT'S ALL RIGHT
09. none...

Day4: Tokyo-1 (only the differences from Day1 are mentioned)
02. YOU HURT ME
07. (TOO) HIP TO BE SQUARE
08. IT'S ALL RIGHT
09. UM, UM, UM, UM, UM, UM

Day5: Tokyo-2 (only the differences from Day1 are mentioned)
02. YOU HURT ME
07. DO YOU BELIEVE IN LOVE
08. SO MUCH IN LOVE
09. UM, UM, UM, UM, UM, UM

My friends and I would love to hear "If this is it" and "The Rythm Ranch",
but I guess that won't happen tonight...

[debP]

calgrad; enjoying yours posts!  thanks for spending time writing of the sights and sounds of your travels, and generally keeping this forum up to date; (esp. when there are other things you could be doing.) 

Yoshiko; thanks for the setlists! they've already been added to the gigography for posterity. 

[Art Vandelay]

Welcome Yoshiko!

[Burty]

expensive, more than financial?  Do tell.

She lost another pair of pants.  :)

Okay, thanks Joe, perhaps I shouldn't have asked!  And the US dollar against the Yen?  I'm guessing exchange rates are tight too.

Losing pants?  Reminds me of one of our former prime ministers.

[Yoshiko]

I just came back from the Yokohama show...

debP: that was a very quick action! 
Art: Thanks

Day6: Yokohama
Same as Day5, but add PERFECT WORLD between 07 and 08.

Some highlights (I bet calgrad can fill in the rest)
- In "Bad is Bad", Huey said "all you can eat for four-thousand nine-hundred some yen" instead of "$4.99"
but it was still "$2 worth" that he could spare...
- In "I'm a Man" (joint with Chicago) the boys were wearing "yukata" (casual Japanese kimono which you can find
in most of the Japanese hotels... in this case, people here wear them as pajamas). 
They really know how to entertain the audience!

I can't believe tonight's their last show in Japan; I have to get back to "reality" from tomorrow (sigh)
I sincerely appreciate that the band could come all the way to Japan and performed six shows
(ten years ago in Japan it was only one show...)
I hope they'll come back soon (or I save enough money to travel to the States... whichever comes first)!

[hueyfan1]

Interesting thread ...

[calgrad]

Do you know how hard it is to throw anything out in Japan?  The people here seem to have decided, reasonably, that they don't want to turn their island nation into an island landfill, so they take refuse disposal very seriously, separating as much as they can into burnable and recyclable categories.  But not just those two categories, or even necessarily the few categories you see in the US (e.g., metal, glass, plastic, paper, and other).  No, in Yamato for instance they require that you split up your garbage into bottle plastic, other plastic, plastic that isn't officially plastic and is therefore burnable, paper, paperboard, cardboard, non-burnable garbage, and I'm sure there's even more, given that the city's recycling manual is a multi-page illustrated booklet filled with instructions...

In any case, woe be the foreign traveler who can't find a public garbage can to throw out the remains of her supermarket sushi.

I'm sure my friend could have helped, but Tuesday, you see, was a "Calgrad takes on Japan all by herself day," and so I was on my own.  And yet here I am, posting, so you know I must have survived...

Monday's lunch excursion turned out to have been good practice, getting me used to the bus and ordering food in public.  Tuesday I added to my skillset how to ride the train, which involved several transfers on the way to Yokohama, where I spent the day.

Fortunately I was properly equipped.  My friend had drawn for me very detailed maps of the train network, and also of Yokohama.  He dutifully also highlighted on it, per my request, the show venue and every used record store in the city...  Unfortunately I didn't get to the really big one I remember from last time (it may have been in Tokyo, actually) but I did add to my collection a used Picture This to replace the one that disappeared on an earlier trip during my pre-iPod days.

I liked Yokohama, although I only saw a few pieces of it.  It's a port city, and it's redeveloped a lot of its waterfront in recent years to include parks, museums, promenades, etc.  The venue was in that area, although closer to where I was wandering than I had realized.  In fact, it's only because rounding the corner I happened upon a van covered with posters announcing this and other Udo Artist concerts that I realized I was in the right place.  It was actually very fortunate, because otherwise I was planning to have kept walking!

But yesterday was a day of lots of good things.  The city was nice, the weather was nice... and the concert was the best one yet.

[calgrad]

I wasn't entirely joking about the sense of dread I had before the concert.  I really didn't enjoy the shows at Tokyo - the first one because of the sound, and the second one for having complained about the sound.  There are consequences to publicly excoriating the sound at a HLN concert, and they aren't good for anyone.  I still stand by the opinion that there was something unusually wrong about it, though, and that it was most likely because of the venue (I mean, let's face it, any theater that immediately makes you think of every stadium you've ever sat in is going to have issues...).  I'm really not one to wantonly criticize, and I certainly never would have done so publicly if for a moment I had thought the fault was personal and not institutional, but nonetheless I sort of wish I'd never said anything and had spared everyone - myself included - the grief.

But Tuesday's show was a perfect reminder of what a HLN show could and should be.  Everything was better than in Tokyo.  The venue was better (you felt like you were in a large room, rather than in a gigantic box), the crowd was better (WAY more HLN fans this time), the sound was vastly better (warm and rounded, as usual), and even the band I think was better.  I remember an old quote of Huey's where he compared their gigs to baseball games, saying that some are like blow-outs, while for others they sort of squeak by 1-0.  By the second song, "You Hurt Me," which seemed to click even more cohesively than it had on the earlier nights, even the band seemed to realize that tonight's show was definitely not one of the just squeaking by variety.

I'm sure the crowd helped.  It was on its feet from the very beginning.  I don't think I sat all night.  And everyone was clapping and dancing the whole time too (whereas in Tokyo people largely seemed much more passive).  While I still would say that Japanese audiences are more polite and attentive than your typical American ones, I did notice that there seems to be an inverse relationship between obedience and exuberance, and this crowd was definitely tipping much more towards the latter... 

Like Yoshiko already wrote (Hi Yoshiko!  You had better seats than me! ), the setlist was different than either Tokyo night, but I really liked hearing "Perfect World" because I'm all about the Small/Perfect World motif...  And again "Jacob's Ladder" for the THIRD TIME, which is one of my all-time favorite HLN live songs.  I did think Huey's pricing choice in "Bad is Bad" was amusing: he didn't actually have enough time to quote the four-thousand-nine-hundred-and-something yen price for the "baddest sashimi in the land," but tried to shove it in anyway... 

I also want to correct what I earlier said about optimizing the HLN-Chicago shared songs, because this time they went above and beyond.  First of all, this time they also brought out the Chicago trumpet player to play the solo in "But It's Alright."  Then Huey kicked some more ass in "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is."  To try to explain what's sending me over the moon about it, it's not just that he's singing a song or singing it well - it's that it captures a particular resonance to his voice that we don't often hear.  It's kind of like he normally sings at a slightly higher pitch or something.  Whereas on this song the timbre was somewhat lower and... how shall I describe this? ... solid.  Which of course is not to say that his normal singing isn't as great and wonderful as we all know and love, but there's definitely a different shape to his vocal performance when he sings this song than we're used to hearing.  Actually, it just occurs to me in writing this: it's as close to Frank Sinatra as I've ever heard him sound, and it works.

[calgrad]

And then, of course, as Yoshiko already noted, there were the kimonos.  Oy, were there kimonos...  Can you close your eyes and picture what it's like to have a nine-piece band appear before you, rocking out all white-enrobed and posing?  No, I'm sure you can't.  The human brain has limits   Particularly given the bald heads, it was really quite the spectacle.  I'm still trying to come to terms with it - I'm so stunned I think I've been rendered mute...  But it was definitely quite the sight to behold, and I'm glad I was there to see it, all psychological scarring aside

In fact it seemed very odd after Sunday's show to have even entertained the thought of skipping another HLN concert.  That's not supposed to happen.  The most negative thought connected with a show that should ever occur is the one that stabs you right after the a capella, the one when you realize that it's inevitably going to end...  I'm not a perfectionist; I don't expect or want everything about a concert to be absolutely perfect - in fact that's the fun of a live show, enjoying all the ways it is live and different.  But I'm a fan, and this music has an enormous power over me.  All I want, or even need, is to ride that wave for a while.  And in Tokyo I couldn't.

But I could last night, which left me not only aghast at having thought about forgoing it but also immediately wanting to go find another one the very next day.  Sadly, like Yoshiko said, Japan has run out of concerts, but I'm now plotting how to see some of the others booked for later this year.  Even if they don't involve a foreign travel adventure I'm sure they'll still be fun.  Although it is interesting to reflect on the fact that in the last five years I've been to Asia five times - six if you count the Middle East - and for all but one there's been a HLN concert either right before, during, or right after my trip.  This is as it should be, I think...

So would I do this again?  Yep.  Even with this weekend's crankiness it was still worth it.  These faraway concerts are a great excuse for an adventure, to get out and away and enjoy everything the world has to offer, fabulous band included.

Although, Tokyo?  The fiendish theater at the Tokyo International Forum?  Er...  I'll have to get back to you on that.  In the meantime on the flight home today I will probably spend some time swearing at the Hemispheres magazine for leading people astray... 

[Joe]

It's now Tuesday morning for me. 

Truly you're a woman ahead of your time. :)