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By Dan Grunebaum
Meltone
The Grateful Dead never made it to Japan, but that hasn’t
stopped the growth of a domestic jam band movement
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| “Everyone was saying,
‘You’d better get back, this isn’t the
time to be worrying about a gig’”—Shinichiro
Tomita (right) |
This is one band for whom the old chestnut “the show
must go on” isn’t just a platitude. Even with his
wife going into labor, frontman Shinichiro Tomita was determined
to proceed with a set at August’s Utage outdoor festival
in Niigata. “Everyone was saying, ‘You’d better
get back, this isn’t the time to be worrying about a
gig,’” he says in an interview. “I ran on stage,
rushed off after a short show, and made it back to Tokyo just
in time.”
The happy result for Tomita (he says his wife was understanding)
was the birth of his first daughter. But that wasn’t
the only feather in his cap this summer. Meltone—who
look more to the simpler, sing-along sounds of the Grateful
Dead’s early days than the progressive leanings of today’s
jam bands—recently released their second album, Wonderful
View, and capped their career with an appearance at California’s
major jam-band fest, the High Sierra Festival.
“It was completely different than Japanese festivals,”
the lanky Tomita enthuses. “Japanese festivals can be
fun, but at High Sierra the audience really cut loose. In
Japan, it’s up to us to move the audience, but there
it was the audience that lifted us up and pushed us to a higher
level.”
Despite the fact that the Dead never visited Japan (Bob Weir
told Metropolis last year that the drug issue and the expense
of bringing their own sound system were major impediments),
the country has seen its jam-band scene burgeon of late. Utage,
for instance, for the first time had its own dedicated jam-band
stage, while Weir has visited twice in recent years and American
jam-band leaders like String Cheese Incident are regular visitors.
A decade ago, all this was only a glint in the eyes of Tomita
and a few others. “I went to see the Dead in ’94
and ’95, just before Jerry Garcia died, and that was
when I first thought that I wanted to start this kind of band,”
he says. “This was around the time I graduated high school.
The term ‘jam band’ didn’t even exist then,
and there weren’t many fans of the Dead in my age range.
The Dead didn’t tour Japan, so going to their concerts
really influenced me.”
Tomita says he’s gladdened by the growth of a domestic
circuit, which is what he and his fellow travelers had in
mind when they started their bands. “I’m surprised
by the growth of the jam-band scene in Japan, but at the same
time one of the reasons I started Meltone was to grow the
scene. It wasn’t so much that I wanted Meltone to become
famous, but that I wanted to strengthen the jam-band community.”
Arriving at their current lineup three years ago, Meltone
jelled to the point where their jams have reached takeoff
point. Tomita’s guitar playing recalls the free-ranging
work of Garcia’s early days rather than the more complicated
and precise approach of the Dead’s later material. Also
like the Dead’s early-’60s albums, Meltone take
a simpler approach to songwriting than you find with many
of today’s jazz-schooled jam bands—a fact attested
to by the name of the group’s debut album, Pop.
“We’re basically making pop music—something
that’s easy to sing along with and remember,” he
sums up. “Within the jam-band scene, it’s easy for
people to get too ‘maniac’ about the music, and
then it can lose a broad appeal. We want to appeal to people
who don’t necessarily listen to improvised music.”
Meltone play Club 251 in Shimokitazawa
Oct 7. See concert listings for details.
Would
you like to comment on this article? Send a letter to the
editor at letters@metropolis.co.jp.
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