Tatsuro Yamashita and (a) Link Between Yacht Rock and City Pop

Today, we will take a slight detour from the annals of Tokyocht to discuss a figure monumental in the city pop movement, Tatsuro Yamashita, and his connection to yacht rock. Ostensibly, the two musical genres began evolving at roughly the same time in the mid-70s, but if one were to go read the Wikipedia article on yacht rock, you would find this awful piece of historical misinformation in the “Inspired Music” section:

Yuck.

Let’s take today to remedy this completely incorrect statement. And to do that, we will have to jump back to the early 1960s.

The Beach Boys, whom Yamashita loved so much he covered their songs on two different albums during his career, were founding members of the “California Sound,” the music that set the scene (for the rest of America) of the California myth: sun, surf, hot rods, and girls. The musical arrangements that the Beach Boys (largely through Brian Wilson) created were all inspired by Phil Spector and the Brill Building music coming out of New York City in the early 60s (songwriting duos like Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Hal David and Burt Bacharach, and Carole King and Gerry Goffin). Brian Wilson still today discusses, with maddening repetition, how Spector’s Wall-of-Sound masterpiece “Be My Baby” is his favorite record of all time.

The use of “Wall of Sound” orchestral arrangements, the Beach Boys’ internal penchant for complex stacked harmonies, and the use of the Los Angeles-based Wrecking Crew as musicians for their landmark album Pet Sounds directly influenced a larger musical movement towards what we now know as “sunshine pop,” heard in the music of groups like the Turtles, the Mamas and the Papas, the Association, and many others.

Sunshine pop is, possibly, the direct antecedent of and largest influence to the creation of what we now call city pop. This is the sound that a number of Japanese artists, including Tatsuro Yamashita, ventured to America looking to capture on their albums. This is, of course, a much larger and complex birth of a genre than just Yamashita, so the larger story of how city pop came to be will be left for another essay, at another time, and when I can find sources in a language I can read. For now, let’s get back to Yamashita.

Tatsuro Yamashita, born in 1953, grew up in a post-war Japan where Western music imports outgrossed the sale of Japanese-language records every year until 1966. Yamashita’s first musical loves were American doo-wop, surf music, and Brill Building pop. All of these genres combined in the music of the Beach Boys, and in 1972 (i.e. 12 years before Big Wave), Yamashita’s first band, made up of high school classmates, recorded Add Some Music To Your Day, an album of Western pop covers, half of which were Beach Boys songs.

Clearly, this album doesn’t in any way resemble yacht rock. Outside of the fact that we have non-native English speakers attempting to meticulously re-create complex, English-language, stacked harmonies (and to be fair, they do a pretty decent job), the musical arrangements are simple: they are just a bunch of teenagers at this point. Add to that the extremely audible hiss on the recording equipment, and you get an album that’s about as nyacht as you can get. Of course, it doesn’t help that the Beach Boys themselves don’t come anywhere close to the boat (CAB: “Sail On, Sailor,” 43.50, and I’d bet that the word “Sail” is doing a lot of the heavy-lifting there).

From 1975, with the release of Songs, by Yamashita’s second band Sugar Babe, a blend of early 70s Funk/R&B begins to creep in alongside the sunshine pop sound that Yamashita is attempting to recreate in Japan. Sugar Babe released just the one album before breaking up, but it is seen as an essential stepping stone for Yamashita for its launching of his own career as well as the careers of a number of his bandmates (some of whom we will cover on this blog at some point).

What Yamashita does next is head to the United States for the recording of his debut solo effort. Circus Town, one-half recorded in New York City, one-half recorded in Los Angeles – is the culmination of his attempts at quantifying an American sound for his albums.

Our New Yorkers are percussionist Jimmy Maelen, drummer Allan Schwartzberg, guitarists John Tropea and Jeff Mironov, bassist Will Lee, keyboardist Pat Rebillot, and arranger Charlie Callelo, with a smattering of horn players and a vibraphonist. Most of these guys were first-rate session musicians in NYC, and were not only diverse in styles they played, but pretty damn expert at their instruments, a first for Yamashita in his career. Charlie Callelo, one-time member of the Four Seasons and well-known pop arranger proved to be an important influence in Yamashita’s own knowledge and ability in musical arrangement, as we’ll see later.

The Los Angeles side consists of, as you might guess by now, session musicians who had worked with sunshine pop and California sound bands in the late 60s and early 70s. John Seiter, one-time drummer for the Turtles, and his brother Jim Seiter, who started off as a touring member of the Byrds, co-produced the albums and played drums and percussion on the Los Angeles recordings. Kenny Altman, frequent collaborator with John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful, played guitars, and John Hobbs, former member of Kenny Rogers and the First Edition – who actually does have a yacht credit, playing piano on Lionel Richie’s “Running With the Night,” 80.75 – played keyboards. Jerry Yester, whose brother Jim founded the Association, and who himself was a frequent arranger for the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Turtles, did the arrangements for the L.A. recordings. Billy Walker, in one of his first credits, plays guitar on the L.A. side as well.

It is in songs like “Windy Lady,” from the NYC Side, and “City Way” and “Lost in the City,” from the L.A. Side, that one can begin to see the essence of city pop turning towards the urban feel that so dominates the genre throughout the late 70s and early 80s. This, in many ways, is a refutation of that unfounded remark on Wikipedia that “the link between yacht rock and city pop was made explicit in 1984.” Circus Town was released on Christmas Day 1976. It is not the first example of this kind of cross-Pacific collaboration (certainly a few more articles may be needed to discuss all those!), but it is important in the formation of city pop in the mind of the man commonly cited as one of the “kings of city pop.”

What Yamashita did after recording Circus Town clearly resembles a maturation from Songs, and it is difficult not to understand the circumstances surrounding the recording of Circus Town as having had a great effect on Yamashita’s direction in musical arrangement. Yamashita’s former Sugar Babe bandmate Taeko Ohnuki tapped Tatsuro Yamashita as the producer and arranger for her first two albums: 1976’s Grey Skies and 1977 album Sunshower – Grey Skies predated Circus Town’s recording by a few months, and one can see the change in arrangement palpably.