Every year, DJ Dan goes to Japan to visit friends and extended family. This year, I asked him to be our Barflies.net correspondent:
"Everybody always asks me what I do every time I visit Japan. This being my 5th visit, I decided to make an effort to write down as much as I could of the things I did when I was there this time.
Here are some of the highlights of this trip:
December 25th - Exchanging Christmas gifts with my Japanese friends. I never thought this would ever happen, completely blew my mind. Who says you canít have Christmas in Japan?
December 26th - Ratholic at Gabi Gabi in Harajuku. Ratholic is an instrumental Surf band from Yokohama featuring all girls except for the guitar player. The girls wore matching dresses and we gave the guitar player a hard time for not having a matching dress. They played a mix of originals and covers. They had a perfect sound with keyboards, and saxophone to round it all out. This was an all night event and they went on at 12:30pm. The place was a small pub owned by the singer on the Japanese Rockabilly band The Rizlas. The Heineken on tap was good, but it cost 900 yen, which is about 9 dollars per glass! We didnít stay for the other bands; we were told that they werenít very good, so we left early. On the way home it snowed!
December 30th - ìGarage Rockin Crazeî, Shinjuku Loft. This was another all night event that started at 12am. We arrived at 12am and the first band Jet Boys started around 12:30. Jet Boys were a punk rock trio with a 40 year old singer/guitar player who gets completely naked when he performs. Thankfully they only played 4 songs. Then there was Taka who used to play keyboards for the surf band Jackie & the Cedrics. I had no idea he was a DJ as well as an excellent keyboard player. He did an amazing DJ set full of scratching his records, doing hand stands on top of his keyboards, and proceeded to light his keyboards on fire at the end of his set! Next were the 5,6,7,8ís, this show was to feature the original line up from the early 80ís. They just came out with a new CD of material from this line up, so they were only going to do a couple of shows to promote the CD. I was quite surprised when they hit the stage wearing 80ís clothing and whipped cream all over their faces. Their set was about 25 minutes long with them doing a very rocking version of the Go Goís ìWe Got The Beatî. I love this band, check out their performance in Quentin Tarantinoís latest movie ìKill Bill Vol. 1. The best band of the evening was the Young Parisians. A Japanese glam band with every member of the band dressed up in glam garb. They looked absolutely fantastic, and they sounded great! I was a bit disappointed that they only played 7 songs, but ended with ìAll The Young Dudesî. After their set, we decided to leave at 4am. We wanted to see our friends Jackie and Enocky play, but they were scheduled to go around 6:30 and there were 3 other bands scheduled before their set. It was a great show even though we left a few hours early.
