This week’s Heck Record of the Week comes courtesy of author/musician/Youtuber Brady Snow.
The 1970s is the best decade for rock music. There are a dozen reasons why – I could, and maybe will write thousands of words on it – but today we’re going to focus on one: globalization.
If there’s any upside to the deadliest war in human history, World War II, it’s that it drew everyone closer together. The telephone, international air travel, television, and, quite frankly, the threat of thermonuclear extermination forced us to accept that we all live on this rock together and should try to enjoy each other’s company.
In the decades following the war, we tried each other’s cuisine, read each other’s books, and watched each other’s movies. Soon after we began fusing them together. Kurosawa turned Shakespeare characters into samurai, The Beatles started wearing Indian paisley, and Gabriel García Márquez pioneered magical realism by merging modernist literature and Cuban avant-gardism.
Art and culture have no borders, and nowhere is that more obvious than in music. I mean, it literally floats in the air. Although the classical Western canon might have you believe musical progression is a linear line of German composers building on each other’s works, the truth is that it’s more a series of cultural collisions. The foundations of jazz, for instance, are a heady stew of blues, ragtime, and African rhythmic spirituals – with an added dash of marching band music. You got your chocolate in my peanut butter…and his carmel…and her nougat. Music isn’t about refining, it’s about expanding.
This brings us to today’s album, The Travellin’ Flower Band’s Satori. Musician Yuya Uchida formed The Travellin’ Flower Band after returning home to Japan after having his mind blown by Jimi Hendrix and Cream in London. You know who he was visiting in London? John Lennon. Small world, huh?
Initially TFB covered the songs of Hendrix, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company as a way to sell the psychedelic counterculture to Japanese audiences. However, at the first ever world’s fair held in Asia, Expo ‘70, they met the Canadian band Lifehouse, who suggested they tour Canada. Uchida saw this as an opportunity to retool and sell a specifically Japanese brand of heavy music to international audiences. Before leaving the band recorded the five-track Satori.
Satori is an eastern counterpart to Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut, which was released a year earlier. Both embrace the heavy guitar sound of the era to create songs that are by turns atmospheric and crushing. Both write around riffs and drums, but the scales are slightly different. Where Sabbath favors the flat five, TFB prefers the flat first. The Flowers’ guitarist, Hideki Ishima, had an affinity for Indian music, and his choice of notes gives Satori a flavor that western ears would’ve found exotic, while couching it in blues scales and amplifier distortion that they already knew and loved.
While Webster’s Dictionary defines “satori” as “sudden enlightenment,” I’m not sure the album captures that feeling. In fact, when it’s not sounding like sleazy blooze (as it does in “Satori Parts III and IV,”) it sounds sinister (“Satori Part I”) or anxious (“Satori Part V”). Joe Yamanaka’s wailing voice rarely sounds contented. Today, Satori, with its heavy guitars, sidelong jams and ambling tempo, is recognized as a precursor to doom metal. Every time a band adds a “weird” note to magma-slow pentatonic grooves, they’re knowingly or unknowingly biting Satori.
Unfortunately, The Travellin’ Flower Band never reached the heights they envisioned. They released two more albums – Made in Japan which includes their signature song “Hiroshima,” a reworking of “Satori Part III,” and Make Up – before the members moved onto other projects, but Satori’s reputation grew, especially after musician/author Julian Cope listed it as the #1 album in his book Japrocksampler: How the Post-war Japanese Blew Their Minds on Rock ‘n’ Roll.
TFB weren’t the only non-English speakers hipping themselves to rock and roll in the late 1960s and early 1970s and recreating it in their own vision. In Brazil, musicians like Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Gal Costa were fusing The Beatles to bossa nova to create Tropicália. In German, Amon Düül II and Ash Ra Tempel took Jimi Hendrix and smashed him into Stockhausen to create Krautrock. And in Nigeria, Fela Kuti combined West African music with James Brown to create Afrobeat. Because we could all hear each other, the world became an immeasurably more colorful and funky place.
If you would like us to check out an album for Heck Record of the week, leave a suggestion below or hit us up on the socials or whatever.