Review

Tokyo, Japan

Zepp Tokyo

March 23, 2010


[Bob Edwards]

Review by Bob Edwards



My wife Kate and I just got back to San Diego after spending two weeks in Japan where 
we had the pleasure of seeing Dylan do a couple shows in Tokyo.  We had planned a visit 
there for later this year hoping to indulge in our several travel passions:  hiking, food, and 
live music.  We were just waiting for one of  the artists we like to announce a Japan tour 
and Lo and Behold, our favorite performer, Mr. Dylan, announced that he‘d be playing there.  
Scoring concert tickets was the biggest challenge.  Memories of the time I ordered 
Amsterdam tix online in 2003 and ended up purchasing twice as many as I needed came 
back to me.  Then there was the Buenos Aires incident of two years ago.  Show was 
announced, I found the promoter and nearly fell to the floor:  They wouldn’t accept my 
brand of credit card.  Having to apply for and receive the correct credit card delayed my 
ticket purchase by 10 days, putting me many rows further back than I would have liked.  
With our Japan trip, we decided to see only two or three shows as the tickets were 
expensive (12,000 yen or $126 dollars US each for general admission floor tickets).  We also 
didn’t want to spend too much of our vacation time in any of the cities Zimmy was playing.  
Been to Nagoya and Osaka and seen enough.  Tokyo is interesting but I wanted to see 
other parts of the country. I ended up contacting Ed, a jam band/jazz fan who I had met 
while seeing moe. play in Japan in 2005.  Even though he had no interest in seeing Dylan, 
Ed was kind enough to get us tickets for a couple of the Tokyo shows, Tuesday and 
Wednesday, March 23rd and 24th, 

We flew in on Saturday and after a few hours at Ueno Park and the Tokyo National Museum 
and a quick dinner of some great sushi, went to check out one of the re-sale shops near 
Shimbashi Station to see if we could get tickets for the next night’s show.  They had tickets 
for dozens of  concerts, the sumo tournament, baseball games, etc.  The actual tickets were 
individually displayed on glass shelves inside rows and rows of display cases with handwritten 
descriptions and price tags.   Dylan tickets were going for 2 to 4 times face value, depending 
on the ticket number, which determined entry time to the general admission show. It was 
hard, but we passed.  

Killed a couple days with a local hike to a mountain called Mt. Takao with a great view of 
Fuji-san, a long walk, and some unbelievable meals.
Went to the Shinjuku Pit Inn on Monday night.  This is a popular jazz club near Shinjuku 
Station, the busiest train station in the world.  There was a sax player scheduled for there 
named Umetzu Kazutoki.  I had seen him on YouTube playing some funky blues-based jazz 
with wailing sax and electric guitar and that sounded fun.  The Pit Inn is a jazz connoisseur 
hangout.  No talking at all during the music, all seats face the stage to discourage conversation 
and optimize the listening experience.   It seats maybe fifty people.  Out comes Kazutoki-san 
with his saxes and his band: a violinist, tuba player, accordion player, and drummer.  They 
proceed to lay down a set of authentic sounding Klezmer music including Japanese-accented 
Yiddish vocals.  Oh mein papa!  I dug it but Kate did not.

Tuesday, March 23:  After a killer tempura lunch (perfectly breaded and fried lotus root and 
other vegetables, fish and shrimp with sides of  rice and Japanese pickles), we packed up and 
headed to LaLa Port, a bayside restaurant/bar/shop complex near Odaiba, the "entertainment 
island" where the Dylan show was scheduled.  Found Steve who I had met online at 
rec.music.gdead.  Steve is an expatriate American journalist working for a Japanese paper, who 
is a Dylan fan and Deadhead who put together a small pre-show meet up.  Joining us was 
Andrew, also an ex-pat journalist, though from the UK, not the US.  We met at a Belgian brew 
pub and had some interesting conversation about Japan, cultural differences between the 
West and Japan, politics, our kids, and, of course, Bob Dylan.  Steve’s last show was at Wolf 
Trap in Virginia, about 1997.  Andrew went to several shows in Japan in 2001, the last time 
Dylan played there, and was seeing much of the current tour.  Andrew said there were only 
about 400 people at the Sendai show back in 2001 and that afterwards he and his wife met 
Dylan on the street.  Dylan was wearing his classic pulled up hoodie.  Dylan was friendly and 
said that he was traveling solo on the bullet train between shows.  I don’t think that was the 
case this time as there was a big tour bus outside the venue when we got there.

People lined up in order, based on the number printed on their tickets.  I’d heard that the 
venue, Zepp Tokyo, has a capacity of about 3,000 and we had tix in the high 800s.  Doors 
opened at 6 PM and we were all inside by 6:30.  We ended up about 30 feet from the stage, 
dead center near Andrew and his wife Nobuko.  The floor was divided by rails that ran parallel 
to the stage every ten feet or so. A reserved seat balcony was at the rear of the venue. 
People were packed in but body contact was pretty much avoided, so there was a little room 
for dancing. While waiting for the show to start, people talked quietly.  The pre-show "music"  
was a tape of someone reading from the first few chapters of Kerouac’s "On The Road".  Every 
time a roadie came out, there was applause.  At 7:08 the full "voice of the counter culture" 
intro started up.  Band tuning over the intro was distracting.  Opener was "Cat’s In The Well", 
which I had called pre-show.  It rocked.  Sound was crisp and clear.  The audience members 
were all dancing or shaking it.  Baby Blue was well-received.  Great phrasing, jazz-like vocals that 
played with melody and rhythm (as they did throughout the show).  Forgetful Heart had Zimmy 
making Sinatra-like hand/arm gestures.  Bowed bass, exquisite ensemble playing during Forgetful 
Heart.  Stuck Inside of Mobile elicited the first whole-audience roar of song recognition.  John 
Brown was the show’s high point for me.  Best version I’ve ever heard.  Some will listen to the 
tapes and yawn and kvetch, probably, but to me it’s about the performance and the historical 
context.  And the context here was Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/ death marches/the rape of Nanking, 
etc.  Militarism here killed millions and ultimately ended up with the US bringing down atomic 
hard rain.  Thoughts of Hiroshima were inescapable for me:  Japanese folks glorifying the warrior 
code in WW II, marching proudly off to war and then ending up with maimed and emotionally 
scarred soldiers, women, and children like the son and mom in John Brown.  Then it was time for 
Under The Red Sky, no thoughts of war, just family, children playing, bakin’ pies, and no more 
evil or destruction:  Under the red rising sun sky, peaceful Japan, no nukes for war here.  Then 
surrender to good natured lust--Honest With Me.  Tossing a baseball bat into the air, indeed, in 
the land of the Tokyo Giants and Hiroshima Carps.  Masters Of War returned to the theme of 
war, this time not the intimate portrayal of a woman getting smacked with the folly of her 
romanticism of war but instead the hatred of the already converted peacenik for corporate 
war-profiting slime.  Hope my country and the world are able to abandon the warrior path some 
day, too. The audience loved MOW.  Highway 61 had people shaking their booties big time.  
Interesting to think about what a country where less than ½ per cent of the population is 
Christian makes of the biblical references.  They like a rocker though!  I love the new Shelter 
From The Storm arrangement.  I’d read it was a "rap version" and had avoided listening to it 
before this show.  It was a pleasant surprise;  not a rap song but funky music and dramatic 
recitation and cool solos.

Fans seemed quite knowledgeable and familiar with the whole range of Zimmy’s catalogue. The 
classics were welcomed with cheers, but so were the new songs.  People around me were 
particularly stoked with Thin Man and the encore numbers.  Those of us who see a few or many 
shows a year sometimes get jaded and lose appreciation for songs like LARS and Watchtower.  
Old fans in Japan, who haven’t seen Dylan for many years, and the younger fans who’ve never 
seen him, really appreciated hearing the classics.  It’s all fresh and exciting to them.

Japan is a great place to hear live music.  The audience was attentive and quiet, but enthusiastic.  
No yelling out song requests except by some of the westerners in the crowd.  No talking during 
the new or unfamiliar songs.  No bores or obnoxious drunks around where I was standing.  Brief 
applause after each song and then near silence waiting for the next song to start.  An, on-average, 
shorter crowd than in the West which makes for better lines of sight for gringos like me and Kate.  
After the encore and the lights came up, everyone I saw had a big smile.  We filed out past the 
orderly lineup at the merch table.  Strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hands.  A 
wonderful scene, a wonderful time.

If you’ve read this far, thanks.  I’m going to take a nap now to recover from my jet lag and will 
try to post my review of the next night‘s show, March 24th, as well as a report on a couple of 
visits we made to Polka Dots, the Tokyo Dylan-themed bar, tomorrow.

Bob Edwards
San Diego

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