I finally met the Wolves themselves at Harajuku station and took them on a RnR tour of the town, the usual spots like Rockin' Jelly Bean's shop Erostika, Attractions rockers shop & Jack's for vintage rockabilly addicts where we met Jim Jams' Milky who modeled with their new 7" "The Wolves are Coming!" for us! This is the usual tour you'll get from me if I ever get the chance to take you around Tokyo.
We met up at Poor Cow for the first show on Friday October 10th at Poor Cow, the RnR meeting place in Shimo-kitazawa for the first gig. It's a small bar run by Fifi, best known for his part in Teengenerate but now plays with Firestarter. Taka-Rock, one half of The Runaway Brothers, and waited for Fifi to open the doors. The show started around 9pm while a small audience dripped in which included Mikico of The Yumberries and Detroit Jack. WolfWolf started to play grabbed, shook and strangulized the small crowd there was. They won over Fifi taking pics of their show and I felt vindicated I had brought them over. As an encore they did their slow and ghostly version of the Ramones' "Pet Sematary!"
HOUSE of MYSTERY returned for its 10th volume, a milestone of it's own! With Wolf Wolf growling and ready to go! I made it a Halloween party to kick off the season and had werewolf B-movies playing on a drop-down screen throughout the show. Straight from Yokosuka, the d/i/s/c/o/s dropped their garage punk bomb. Then Beaver Patrol dug thru the grave to expose some 60's punk unknowns! Female-fronted psychobilly startlers VILLAINZ bewitched us with eerie tunes fueled by rapping double bass and haunting organ. Somewhere in there Miss Rita Goldie gave a stunning burlesque performance to make the dead feel like they were 21! She got the wolf boys howling! With silhouetted back-drops of woods, WolfWolf appeared on stage... flashlight attached to Reto's plastic guitar like a searchlight in the Black Forest and Marcel's growling vocals! They let everyone in a 4-kilometre radius know The Wolves Are Coming! With every twang of his guitar, Reto's flashlight hit on every little Heidi girl that was there... then Rita came back on stage to do a little shimmy shimmy to one of their songs! Howling indeed! To wrap it all up, the inimitable gorefest ED WOODS really brought on Halloween with there trash rock 'n' roll, slippin' 'n' slidin' wildness and a monster beach party encore that included a ghoulish "Surfin' Bird!" Halloween had come not a moment too soon! Fiendish and sleazy, DJ duo Yukkum Yukkum provided twisted hits throughout the night along with Yours Truly, The Stately Wayne Manor.
The final night of WolfWolf was for the brave souls who went out to Sex & Fury & RnR Vol. 18 at Orange County Brothers, a hop, skip & a jump away in Yokohama where raucous Aussies BUNT were also on the bill. Another great night that included the Stompin' Riffraffs doing a wild set of frat hop and psycho-instru-mental-ists Bobby's Bar already getting ready for Halloween with a cover The Dickies "Killer Clowns!" WolfWolf, once again set up their home terrain spooky woods back-drops and growled the audience into submission with humorous anecdotes about Swiss girls named Heidi, bedtime stories of werewolves and their favorite food... MEAT! Everybody MEAT! But I have to say the alpha-males of the night were BUNT, who were so hot they blistered the crowd with an electrifying leather jacket moment of pure confrontation that brought back the memory of real garage punk!
WolfWolf's first trip to Japan was a trashy, trapping endeavor which left me thrashing about like a man bitten and turning into some rabid beast every time I look at their color vinyl 7" record! The wolves are coming.... back?!?
