In a sense created by a record executive, Speed, Glue & Shinki was more or less Japan's first successful super session, and a particularly visually alarming one full of 6-foot plus Eurasians. Journeyman guitarist Shinki Chen, often hailed as Japan's Jimi Hendrix was a mainstay of Japanese sessions, but had failed to make any great music on his own. Vice-heavy bassist Masayoshi "Glue" Kabe had been a founding member of the naturally most cracked-out Groups Sounds band the Golden Cups. The only exception was drummer/vocalist/songwriter Joey "Speed" Smith a virtually unknown half-American Filipino national who at the time was fronting an R&B band playing department stores. With a loud, messy blues concotion that would have sounded msot at home in Detroit only years earlier, the three recorded perhaps the most drugged-out music of all time.
This debut album ranked by Julian Cope as the greatest Japrock album (tied with the Flower Travellin' Band's Satori) is a thirty-five minute tribute to drugs and the futen lifestyle. Immediately in "Mr. Walking Drugstore Man," the band shows that while they are excellent musicians, their life truly does revolve around getting high. While the stringed section's command of English may not have been near that of Smith's, it is doubtful they, especially Kabe would object to their content. While the love of drugs is explicit, so is everything else. "Big Headed Woman" is the rock 'n' roll suicide suggestion the PMRC spent most of the eighties searching for, and a funny one at that. The group's assertion of the futen lifestyle runs rampant especially in the anthemic "Ode to the Bad People" to which we all should relate to.
Tempo changes, the instruments run wild, it's a loud mess, but probably the tightest, most deliberate one you will ever hear. This is punk rock.
Speed, Glue & Shinki - Eve (1971)
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