Yoyogi Park on a Sunday Afternoon
The front gate was a warzone between guys dressed as Elvis, the rockabilly gang and then several rows of girls dressed in 1950’s dresses. The groups were set up right next to eachother, each with a massive amp blasting their tunes of choice. The amps were so close that the three songs merged into a general rock n’ roll cacophony that felt more like the soundtrack for a time travel montage than the backdrop for three separate albeit competing performances.
The Elvises were predictably all about the hip thrusting. They got some good lip snarls in there too. But of the three groups, they were the least inventive. You could tell they had choreographed the routines, and frankly this is exactly what you see every Sunday afternoon in Yoyogi Park. It makes for the perfect tourists snap shot or travel vid, but does not pay off repeat viewings. The best part of their show was seeing that they had a boombox powered by several car batteries plugged into their amp. It looked so ghetto it was incredible. Auto-mechanic Elvis.
The 1950’s dress girls were all about line dancing to Buddy Holly. There were hand claps at all the right moments and a general aura of ‘genki’ as the locals would say. All of the creepy old men with backpacks and gigantic telephoto lenses affixed to their Nikon cameras loitered here. Snapping off shots and trying to look secretive about it. The girls would twirl and kick their legs in unison, and it felt like they too were animatronic beings. We could have been watching some auto performance at Tokyo Disneyland for all I knew.
Then there were the scene stealers of this rock n’ roll revival ho down. The rockabilly dudes. With their perma-greased back hairdos, looking something like a cross between Richie Valens and a tsunami tidal wave. There was nothing robotic about these three leather panted homeboys. Their dual amps blasted some spare rock n’ roll that featured John Lennon screaming over the top of it. There were ample guitar solos, and this is when the real magic happened.
In a cross between Michael J. Fox’s signature solo at the end of Back to the Future and a New York breakdancer in 1987, these guys would literally shred the Yoyogi asphalt with their leather clad appendages. They would flail and gyrate so out of control that their bodies would be flung to the earth against their will. They lip synced along and they blazed holes through all our souls with their incendiary solos. They inched along the ground, ripping apart their leather jackets as an adoring tourist set throng screamed along.
It was the ultimate karaoke performance, without the actual singing. If Millie Vanillie had attacked their lip syncing with this level of ferocity, they would still be blaming it on the rain to packed stadiums to this very day.
German tourists laughed along and took video. Canadian tourists stood with eyebrows raised and smiles gleaming. British tourists clapped and busted moves along with them. American tourists ate 10 dollar trays of street yakisoba and chewed along with the rhythm of the music.
The two other groups of ‘dancers’ cranked up their music in an effort to compete. But the battle was over. There were nearly three hundred toe tapping fans gathered around the rockabillies. Only the creepy old men in backpacks stayed behind to watch the girls.
The gallons of hairspray and the leather jackets that were sacrificed in the name of the performance must have been surely justified by the winning over of a truly global audience.
Now I’m just waiting for the day these guys gather up enough gumption to take it to the streets like they apparently did in the 1970’s. And stop traffic with their brand of rock.
Really give us something to blog about…
