HOLY F**K I ♥ GUITAR WOLF!

It's a firm belief of mine that music can change your life and make you a better person, especially if the music is rock n' roll. I can remember the exact moment of my life when I first heard Elvis, Link Wray, The Stooges, The Ramones, and I can tell you where I was when Guitar Wolf nearly destroyed my stereo speakers. It was a life-changing musical moment up there with the best of them.



Guitar Wolf is the insane bastard step-child of all the names mentioned above, a band who's trademark is loud and quick bursts of "jet rock n' roll" distilled into it's most powerful package. The band's first recording line-up consisted of Toru (Drum Wolf, although there was an earlier drummer named Narita), Billy (Bass Wolf) and a bringing it all together, the ear-ringingly awesome axe-master, Seiji, a man we simply call Guitar Wolf.


Before the days of widely accessible internet, (It was around, but you usually had to go to school and deal with dial-up) we had to rely on self-published amateur zines to find out about music happenings in far away places. At the time, Guitar Wolf was this god-like rock n' roll mystery man, unattainable and fascinating. In Matt Kaufman's seminal Japanese noise/punk/garage zine, Exile Osaka, he reported the following….

"Singer Seiji special R&R ritual revealed… He has a big glass case in his apartment in which he keeps his guitar and leather jacket. The night before a performance, he enters the glass case and gets charged with Rock & Roll energy.

Also, Seiji never takes off his sunglasses. When King Joe crashed at his house, he saw him sleeping in his sunglasses. He even took a shower with his sunglasses! Believe it or not…"

And so the legend of Guitar Wolf grew. The band eventually graduated from homemade basement demos and got signed. They appeared on television, and before long, film. They played "Men in Black" in the little-seen flick The Sore Losers, and zombie fighting defenders of Earth in the drive-in classic Wild Zero, which as I've said before, just might be the the greatest film you will ever lay your eyes upon...



Here's Seiji's Oscar clip while we're at it. In a perfect world, he would've been chosen as best actor of 2000...



Guitar Wolf's rise to new rock n' roll heights continued. Seiji and his Joan Jett autographed jacket made a cameo in Puffy's Teen Titans theme-song video (he shows up at 2:07), and landed a much-deserved signature guitar from Epiphone. And oh yeah, don't forget the designer jeans...


But tragedy struck in 2005 when Billy "Bass" Wolf passed away shortly after returning from a US tour. The band went through a spell of soul-searching before choosing "U-G" as their new bassist. Shortly later, Seiji's intensely physical stage presence took it's toll when he seriously injured his hip jumping from a 6-meter high stack of amps.


Guitar Wolf would be silent for a year and a half, far too long for this world to be without them. On April 4th of 2009 they triumphantly played their comeback show, and all was right with the world again. It feels good to know that Guitar Wolf is truly here to stay.



Seiji, aka "Guitar Wolf", I salute you. Thank you for spreading the message of rock n' roll, and here's to the rock to come….


This post is also my entry in the January 2010 Japan Blog Matsuri, “Famous Japanese People”....