Yoshiki and Toshi in July of 2010 after a press conference in Paris.

It was the winter of 2006 and the blistering cold stabbed right through my coat even after I walked into Shin-Osaka station. I’d just witnessed my first Yo La Tengo concert with a good friend of mine and, in an attempt to get to know him a bit better, I delved a bit deeper into his musical leanings. His favorite band, he explained to me as we climbed the escalator to the train platform, is the Beatles, but not because they wrote Sgt. Pepper or sold more albums than Jesus. No, he prefers the Beatles because of the wealth of bootlegs treasured and fawned over by music aficionados while the rest of the public remains content knowing what they know about the Beatles: Please Please Me through Let It Be.

Ah, the bootleg. A not entirely legal, yet time-honored tradition in music fandom that sets the truly dedicated apart even if only in their own minds. Still, legit or not, it can’t be argued that these scratchy recordings often taped by smuggled audio equipment can provide some insight into how the band so meticulously edited and polished on their official albums came to be.

At least that’s what I hoped when I began listening to some long-forgotten bootlegs from X Japan’s past. I’ve known them only as the sold-out Tokyo Dome kings of Visual Kei that they were in their heyday. What, I wondered, could they have possibly sounded like without a full stage crew or a legion of fans screaming their lyrics back at them. What did they sound like at say, their high school festival in 1983? I was about to find out. Read More »