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turtleations · 9 months

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Pink Couldy Sky, Chapter 07 – Letter (Summarized) - Part 2

Chapter 00 - 01 Chapter 02 Chapter 03 Chapter 04 Part 1, Part 2 Chapter 05 Chapter 06 Part 1, Part 2 Chapter 07 Part 1

July 1997. REM, Jimmy, and Kosuke finalized their decision to remake SAVER TIGER. It had been ten years since the break-up.

“One day, definitely…” The idea that had existed within him all this time finally took shake the year REM turned thirty-four.

It had been a long decade. But those ten years had been necessary for REM to overcome various obstacles and reach the point where this step was possible.

The former members of the band had kept doing casual lives at parties every year. After the dissolution, REM had stayed in contact with Jimmy and Kosuke, and they finally agreed to get serious about their wish to perform together as SAVER TIGER again.

They started rehearsing and writing songs again. Afterwards, they wanted to get the opinion of hide, as SAVER TIGER’s birth parent. By then, it was October.

When hide returned to Japan after a long absence and at long last they met again in Tokyo, REM had thought long and hard about how to tell him about their activities and plans, taking the advantage of the clarity of late nights. However, any worry he had on the matter was blown away the moment hide took one look at REM’s hair that had returned to the length of days past and exclaimed, “Amazing! You grew out your hair! Just like in the old days!” He seemed excited like a child, and so REM relaxed a little and said, “I have been thinking about making music once again,” while watching for hide’s reaction.

The moment hide heard his words, he beamed. Then he asked, “To what degree are you planning to?”

And REM said with a serious face, “To the degree that I’ll rent a room in the neighborhood of your apartment in L.A.”

Hide broke into laughter and said, “Thank God! I’m so happy!”, emitting joy from his entire body. REM also felt happiness from the depth of his bowls and the two of them toasted to this development over and over.

After a while, as if suddenly thinking of it, hide asked, “Do you have a second guitarist? What about the vocals?” and started pushing out his ideas like a machine gun, all the while smiling with his whole face.

REM, infected by his laughter, asked him, “Is it okay if we use the name SAVER TIGER?”

SAVER TIGER had been hide’s band after all.

Now hide looked at him like he couldn’t believe he even asked and said, “By all means! SAVER was a cool band!”

Then, “Since we don’t have our own songs yet, may we play the old band’s songs?” and hide said, “Do it! I’ll come to listen to you!” with unbridled joy, and REM started to get nervous.

“For now, there’s just Jimmy and Kosuke, so let’s see what comes of it,” he said to put on the breaks a little.

Looking at that innocent, defenseless smile, REM confirmed to himself in his heart over and over, “Really, I am glad that we are reviving SAVER TIGER.”

At the same time, he thought with a feeling of tension, “After this, we cannot be careless about it.”

During autumn and winter that year, as well as spring of the next, SAVER TIGER dedicated their time to practice and the creation of new songs. By and by the realized the sound they were going for in their new music. The feedback of all the bandmembers was positive.

At the same time, they were kept auditioning for a vocalist. But luck was not with them in this regard.

During this time hide, dealing with the break-up of X Japan on New Year’s Day, threw himself into his solo activities with full force. Aside from “hide with Spread Beaver” he also started his band “Zilch” aboard, their innovative sound and artistical promotion shots going through the rock scene like a whirlwind. It was plain for everyone to see that hide was getting to a whole new area of activity. In order to realize his dream, he once again stepped forward and put everything into it.

The year 1998 passed as if in an instant.

Fall and winter ended and turned into spring, the cherry trees blossomed, and before long, everything was covered in petals. Soon, the seasons changed, and early summer blew in on a cool breeze.

Eventually, even without a vocalist, the new band finished a number of songs they had enough confidence in to let people listen to them. Immediately, they called hide to invite him to come watch their rehearsal.

REM looked forward to that day with anticipation, and so did Jimmy and Kosuke.

But hide was certainly the most excited one of them all. Somehow, at that time, REM was convinced of this.

Shizuoka-ken, XX-town, XX-district, XX number

H.M.-sama

How are you doing? This is REM.

I am terribly sorry for my reply being so very late.

The end of last year was busy, and while I kept thinking that I must write this reply, I am bad at writing letters, and I kept procrastinating. I am sorry.

Thank you for checking out the new SAVER TIGER homepage.

As you know, I started doing music again the year before last – precisely, in August 1997 (Actually, for myself, I made the decision to return to music in May of the same year, exactly one year before hide went beyond the sky.) and in the beginning we used the old songs, the songs hide and I made together.

We started making new songs as “NEW SAER TIGER” the winter before last, this year we resumed band meetings to discuss the wishes of the band members, and around the time we finally figured out the direction of the band, on “the second of May”…

That day, I was working at the clinic. (By the way, I was the only doctor there. Even though I was an employee, I was also the temporary director.)

Friends with connection to the band often came there for treatment, and that day, too, three friends were waiting in my room (the director’s office).

They were waiting for me to be done with work so we could go drinking together. Then, sad news came in from the hospital.

They consoled me when I fell into a panic and decided that, never mind anything else, for now, we should go to see hide…

Finding out where to go from my constantly ringing cell phone, that day, somehow, I met hide.

He was lying in a long, rectangular box and looked just like he always had, but from now on, no matter how often I said, “Let’s go for a drink together,” he would never answer again.

Thinking about it now, I can’t help but feel like this second of May was the first time since he was born that he slept completely at ease in mind and body, without any thought or worry.

Regarding H-san’s question, I don’t know if I can answer truthfully, but I’ll tell you what I think.

Just like the live information put on the homepage at the end of last year reveals, my life is determined by the preparations for lives and recordings, the creation of new songs, and later also things like promotion methods.

To be honest, one and a half years after reviving SAVER TIGER, I still can’t sleep at night. The terrible time is at about three hours, when I lie on my bed in the dark room with all sorts of things going through my head.

Is the arrangement before the guitar solo of the new song okay that way, would it be a mistake to move around parts of that song etc. How should we handle the promotion? How to organize the live? What about the contents of the homepage? The guitar sound?

If I sleep now, I’ll forget. Oh, I wanna do it! I want to do that…

hide… hide… hide…

Because my body is exhausted, my nerves are in overdrive and I can’t sleep.

I did not have such problems when I did SAVER TIGER with hide thirteen years ago.

Even though we made songs together and I was always with him, hide was the one who did all these projects, and because he made so many amazingly original and extraordinary things, he always surprised me.

In fact, making music with that guy was so thrilling that I felt like anything was possible.

Even though I don’t have a hundredth, not even a thousandth of the hide of that time, I now have to handle SAVER TIGER as the leader.

Even at this time that would usually be considered late, I think about music, write into my notebook any phrase or project idea that comes to my mind, practice until the middle of the night, and when I am completely exhausted and ought to sleep, I have to think about what’s after the next live, in a month, in half a year, in a year from now…

I live a life of little sleep, even if I don’t think about bad things, and once I wake up, I go about realizing my plans.

But, hide had always been at the top and had aimed for even higher.

Therefore, he certainly never got to relax, neither in sleep nor in waking.

With things being as they were, he couldn’t simply sleep soundly. Lying in bed was painful, I believe.

I wonder if the only time he could relax and let go of all these memories was when he was drinking.

But I also think that was probably not the only reason…

[The rest of the letter is omitted.]

Final Chapter

#hide #pink cloudy sky #REM #summary #saver tiger #this was quicker than expected #only the epilogue and the afterword left now

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turtleations · 1 year

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Pink Couldy Sky, Chapter 04 – Howl (Summarized) - Part 2

Chapter 00 - 01

Chapter 02

Chapter 03

Chapter 04 Part 1

At that time, practice was always at the “Pentastudio” in Yokohama. They always went there in bassist Jimmy’s worn out white Fair Lady Z 2-by-2 T-bar roof, much like the model REM’s university friend was also driving. Except Jimmy’s model was lowered and had wings and was extremely flashy. Also, the classmate’s car was new and shiny and Jimmy’s car was old and on the verge of scrapping.

Those who know something about cars would know this, but the car was originally meant to be a two-seat sports car. Jimmy’s car, being a 2-by-2, had four seats, but the backseats were originally meant for children, presumably. They were hellishly narrow.

This car was filled with four grown guys and the trunk with their equipment. [Note: Since the band had five members, I can only assume that either REM meant “four guys in addition to the driver” or that they tied one person to the roof.] The people on the back seat always had to sit slouched over. Hide, who was weak to moving vehicles, always went onto the backseat first for some reason, only to groan that he wasn’t feeling well the moment they took off. One time they were on the way back from a live in Tokyo, when hide suddenly opened the window with a pale face and puked onto the express way. Another time they went to have a barbeque on Sarushima, an island in the bay of Yokosuka. The ferry ride only took seven minutes, yet hide turned white as a sheet and complained about feeling ill.

That same hide absolutely loved Jimmy’s crappy car.

He would say something about how one day he, too, would ride up to the livehouses in a Jaguar or a Ferrari, abandoning his guitar, but for now, the Z is it! And then he would climb into the narrow backseat.

That said, it was a pretty awesome car for a musician with no family. They called it the “White Demon”.

At some point, they figured that the maximum speed of the Z was 120 km/h, provided you still wanted the breaks to be effective. And that you shouldn’t drive it if you couldn’t estimate how long it would take you to stop if you didn’t want to tailgate the car in front of you. One time, Jimmy drove all the way back from Chiba using only the engine break, because the break-pedal was broken.

Jimmy, who calmly drove that “Demon Z”, was perhaps a genius driver who put Ayrton Senna to shame.

In that white Z, they did a lot of tours to haunted places, or to Mount Fuji in the middle of the night. Usually, those were hide’s idea. He loved planning stuff like that.

Three o’clock in the morning. Dobuita-Street. Hide: “Let’s got to the Fuji!” or “Don’t you want to go to the sea?” or, “I learned about a haunted place we absolutely must check out!”

So of course their rowdy bunch, including REM, piled into their “Demon Z” near daybreak, and went to the foot of Mount Fuji, the sea at Shônan, or haunted locations in Kamakura or Kannonzaki. By the time they arrived, the sun would come up, but they were all cheerful as if infected by hide’s energy and fooling around.

One day, they were on a haunted tour with a group of about 15 people. As usual, hide was the one who suggested going to a popular “Monster Mansion” in Kamakura. Between SAVER TIGER, another band, and some female fans, there was an entire army on the move. It was a cold winter’s night with heavy snowfall, and they did not care one bit as they got into several cars and drove from Yokosuka to Kamakura.

When they arrived, they found the ruin of an old house inside a Shinto shrine. The tin roof was rusted, the walls full of holes. It was the kind of place that made you feel like you should leave. As they timidly moved closer, someone in the group suddenly screamed, “Something came out!” and they all ran away, screaming “WAAAH!”

REM got taken by surprise, lost his orientation, slipped and fell. Seeing his miserable appearance, covered in snow and mud, everyone freaked out and one person even fainted, apparently. REM spend the drive home in a mood of “I should quit this band already.”

Eventually, car-loving hide got them their own equipment van. Up to that point, they used the wagon car of the student council of REM’s university to get all their stuff to the livehouses when they did a show. They could rent it for 3000 Yen every time, which was fortunate. Less fortunate was that the vehicle had the words “Kanagawa Dental College Student Council” written on the side. SAVER TIGER used to cover the words with camouflage tape and wrote their band name over it.

The pattern of events was the same every time: After the live, they returned to Yokosuka for the afterparty, which lasted until six or seven in the morning. REM and hide would then return the van to the campus, and REM would bring hide home on his bike.

Their bodies were exhausted, the heads heavy with fatigue and alcohol, their hair fluttering in the wind. But REM still vividly remembers him and hide riding the bike together along the coastal road, the sea glittering in the morning sun: The light of hope that knew nothing of shame.

As the number of lives increased and this method became increasingly impractical, the topic of getting their own van came up. But everyone in the band was poor, so there was absolutely no money for that kind of thing. In the end, their brainstorming on this problem resulted in hide getting a Hiace Long with money he gradually paid back to his parents.

The day their shiny new vehicle arrived, REM and hide got emotional and spend the entire day driving around pointlessly. That night, hide said, as usual: “Let’s go to Disneyland!” So the two of them drove to Uruyasu. However, Disneyland is a harsh place for two musicians who love alcohol and didn’t bring any. They hung out with their “My Fair Hiace” on the gigantic parking lot under the light of the mercury lamps, then drove back to Yokosuka and – as goes without saying – got determinately drunk on Dobuita Street.

Before they got the van, hide and Jimmy once got into a fight on the way back from a live in Tokyo. For some reason, hide really wanted to drive the Z that day. Jimmy, being Jimmy, wanted to drive it himself. Neither wanted to give in. In the end, Jimmy was the one who did the driving, since it was his car.

That day, they had a live at the livehouse “Rokumeikan” in Meguro, and since they had no money, they endlessly tracked along the country road instead of taking the expressway. The entire way until Kawasaki, hide and Jimmy sulked and didn’t even look at each other. Then, near Oppama, where they planned to stop for a drink, hide said, “Sorry, Jimmy, it wasn’t a big deal,” and just like that, they were friends again.

Going from sour faces to everything being alright from one moment to the next was typical for hide.

The next car-related story happened after SAVER TIGER’s rhythm section changed and Kyo joined them as their new vocalist. At that point, hide and drummer Kosuke were the only ones with a driver’s license, so it was always them who had to drive the band to lives or to rehearsals. In order to help them out, REM and new bassist Tokihiko decided to get their driver’s license as well.

The place they chose for this endeavor was a training camp in a town called Kobuchisawa at the foot of the Yatsugatake mountains in Yamanashi prefecture. [Note: The town was merged into the city of Hokuto in 2006.] They had the plan to practice guitar and bass and create music at night after the driving lessons, hugging their instruments on the train ride to the camp. They should be able to combine lessons and practice in one go, and moreover, it would be a change of air and a separation from their usual, unhealthy lifestyle. However, their plans were shattered soon after they arrived.

Because their friends arrived shortly after. Led by hide, a group of people otherwise consisting of Kyo, REM’s former LAFERIA-bandmate Shiomi, as well as hide’s childhood friend Yoko, leader of the band UNITED [Note: Yokoyama Akihiro, bassist, 10 September 1964 – 13 May 2014] came to visit them in their isolation. In the end, they were hardly ever at the camp at night.

Hide and the others stayed for quite a while. They slept in the car while REM and Tokihiko had their lessons and enthusiastically dragged them across the area at night. They got chased by spirits on the local cemetery, went down haunted roads facing certain death… And then went to the picturesque town of Kiyosato for the next trip. Off to Shinshû! From all they had heard about it, Kiyosato seemed like paradise to them, and they were excited about going. Kiyosato was famous, but none of them had ever been there and so they were not prepared for how much of a fairy-tale village it really was, completely unsuited for the likes of them.

Having explored the mountains far from human habitation for a while, they were eager to get to a place full of people. What they found, though, was a pastel-colored nightmare of a cityscape, were girls were floating around with fluttering lace in their hair…

The guys all had long hair, were dressed in black leather pants and boots. Just a bunch of rockers from Yokosuka walking down the candy-sweet, picturesque main street, floating around sadly. Feeling uncomfortable and dazed, they even forgot to call out to the girls, who seemed like they didn’t even come from the same planet as them.

Then, suddenly, they couldn’t believe their ears:

In this unlikeliest of places, they heard a familiar rock-beat: Their own song DEAD ANGLE, blasting from the radio of a random car. So they went and enthusiastically shook hands with the owner of the car. Kiyosato is a magical place, after all. Not long after, their training was over and they triumphantly returned to Yokosuka with hide and the others who had stayed in their “Car Hotel” until the end.

In any case, hide’s power to create events was different from that of an average guy. And his love for mischief received a power-up when he was drunk. That wasn’t always a good thing. His usual energy and drive towards random trips got raised by several levels.

An example: One night, they were once again drinking with several people at REM’s place, when he carelessly showed hide the Calpis in his refrigerator. It was the classic, undiluted stuff that had to be diluted and refrigerated. By the time they all noticed that hide was suspiciously quiet, it was too late: hide had mobilized every glass in the room and used up the entire bottle of Calpis, which they had been drinking cluelessly until everyone got heartburn.

Not long after that night, hide, who was worried about REM’s health because he put all of his allowance into alcohol, stuffed a bento-box full of his mother’s homemade food and brought it along when he visited. As usual, they spend the night drinking, and then slept in a pile. When REM got ready to rush out in the morning to get to his first university lecture of the day, hide, who had gotten up first and had been rustling about in the kitchen for a while, handed him a small package. It was a bento hide had made for REM from the leftovers of the food he brought before. He had gotten up early in the morning with a hangover just to make a bento for REM to take to class.

What to say… hide was a person who never forgot to be kind, and caring, and considerate. REM still has that bento box. It’s a small, scratched, and worn thing that has the characters 松本秀人 [Matsumoto Hideto] written on it in childish letters, so it probably dated back to hide’s elementary-school days. But to REM, it is an important treasure, stuffed tightly with the memory of what hide has really been like.

A little story about Dobuita-Street: There used to be a store called “Ichifuku” near the entrance to the shopping district, where REM and hide always went to eat (and drink). It was a rustic, cheap restaurant run by a lady of about 80 years. (REM sends his apologies in case she was, in fact, younger than that.) One day REM and hide were there once again, snacking on granny’s food while REM got drunk. (The darker the Japanese Sochû, the faster he got drunk, it seems.) For them, who had no money and were always hungry, this store was a paradise comparable to Disneyland or Hawaii.

Some of it remains even today, but back then Dobuita-Street was a wild and dangerous place where violent incidents were common. All it all, it was rather representative of a base-city like Yokosuka.

On that night, when the two of them were at Ichifuku once again, washing down their food with alcohol, they heard some commotion happening right outside, thought “Eh, another fight,” and continued drinking without thinking anything of it. About an hour later they went home, and on their way out they saw two figures stretched out on the ground in front of the building. They judged them for drinking themselves unconscious right there on the street and moved on. The next day, they were shocked to learn from the news that two people had been killed in a violent fight on Dobuita the night before…

Another time, REM went home early because he wasn’t feeling well. After he was gone, hide and the others went to a place called “Yoshino-ya” to get some Gyudon to eat. A guy by the store who looked like a hooligan sneered when he saw them and spat “Beggars!” in their direction. The next moment, hide threw his gyudon into his face, like the sensible person that he was. Another moment later, about ten of the guy’s friends came rushing over to hide and beat the shit out of him. The next morning, hide couldn’t remember the incident and was genuinely surprised at the state of his swollen and scarred face.

When he was drunk, the destructive impulses hidden deep in hide’s heart woke up more and more. REM thinks that everyone probably has such a part that they cannot control in certain moments.

Sometimes, when they drank until morning, they would sit on the rotary in front of Yokosuka Station and watch the people with normal jobs rush to work. Sitting on the cold concrete, they somehow enjoyed the sensation of going against the flow and being isolated and ill-fitting in the crowd.

Of course, they also drank in livehouses like PUMPKIN and ROCK CITY and other places that no longer exist. And when they drank, they drank all night. Getting thoroughly wasted has always been SAVER TIGER’s style, then as it is now.

After hide joined X and left Yokosuka, REM often went drinking on his own in a place called “99” near the city center, which later had a connection to the revived SAVER TIGER, and at POPPEYE’S on Dobuita Street.

POPPEYE’S was a bar with a strong American touch that belonged to a former nuclear engineer called Tak, who had a wild and dramatic personal history. The patrons were mostly American soldiers, sometimes accompanied by their Japanese girlfriends, and its interior décor was amazingly ugly and tasteless.

Sady, REM never got to take hide there. It was his favorite bar and he always promised hide to go there with him one day, but with hide’s busy schedule, the opportunity never came up.

It is something REM regrets even now.

Chapter 05

#hide #pink cloudy sky #REM #summary #saver tiger #today's episode: monsters mayhem motherhenning and murder #just your average day in #yokosuka #at this point I feel like the city deserves its own tag #also in this episode: trips to the country side and sleepy cuddling and shared bycicle rides along the coast in the morning sun #with purple prose and all #I swear those were REM's words not mine #I'm not making this up I'm just delivering it

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