Joe Strummer is all but dieified in the minds of many fans (even stronger among Fujirockers), and the new documentary about his life and career, The Future is Unwritten, will likely draw large crowds. And damn well it should.

I saw a little sneak preview of it the other night and was blown away. There are many Strummer disciples here in Japan, and I’m not one of them, but the guy deserves praise more than most rock stars, for sure (reasons could fill many more posts). And as a document of the punk movement, it’s jaw-droppingly great: amazing footage and editing, but always cutting back to friends and old bandmates sitting around a fire relaying their experiences with the guy. Joe himself does most of the voice over. Was afraid this would turn into a petition for sainthood (there are moments), but overall, director Julien Temple (the guy that did Galstonbury, The Movie) shows Strummer as a real person.

There are too many people and great quotes here to choose from, but for some reason a very stoned Johnny Depp shows up and sounds like a putz:

I keep waiting for him to shout “AAARGH!”

A few highlights so far:

The boys from !!! turning a few thousand people into frothing lunatics

The Cure playing 2 hours and bringing back a thousand high-school memories

A steel drum orchestra covering the Jackson 5

Deerhoof playing a muddy side stage the size of my living room

Iggy Pop nearly breaking his neck only to get up and wail some more

Omar Rodriguez Lopez touching the moons of Saturn

Kaiser Chiefs vocalist leaping the stage gates to lead a fan-chase onto an unsuspecting Pocari Sweat stand

A didgireedoo and three drummers making kickass techno/trance

A crowd for the Lily Allen show that you couldn’t wedge an icepick into

Alien mummies on bamboo stilts.

Cavemen with sharpened sticks rolling a boulder down footpaths

and that’s just off the top of my head…

back to work. No time to upload any vid clips now, but my reports (under “jinki”) and many, many others HERE

The promoters at Smash have always had a soft spot for both Latin Rock and local talent, so I’m surprised we haven’t seen Copa Salvo on the FujiRock lineup, but I guess it isn’t too late.

Here they are rocking Quattro:

That’s the saxophonist from Ego Wrappin’ back there:

And the piano player’s a banger:

Mitsuyoshi Azuma is a bigwig at NTV (Nippon Telebi), one of Japan’s top broadcasters. He and his band, the Swinging Boppers, are entertainers in the classic sense, and possibly the country’s best purveyors of old-school rock n’ roll and R&B.

Their site

I mean, the guy is just a geezer salaryman having a blast, right? But he connects with young Tokyo hipsters in a way rarely seen. Too bad he performs only a few times a year. Their last performance sold out a month beforehand, but I was able to see Azuma-san perform with a trio at Club Quattro’s Orbit Blender event a few weeks ago. The only vid I caught was of Azuma breaking and fixing a string, but even this relays why people flock to his shows. Here he is playing jazz standards, his string breaking just as the vid ends:

Handclaps and the upright bassist take over during repair:

The crowd, unprompted, stays with him, keeping the beat:

String fixed (sort of), and Azuma plays it for laughs: