ROCK 'N' ROLL Japanese bands gain fans by altering classics

The groups are gaining popularity in the United States.
By PETER LARSEN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"I can't get no -- "
The Japanese teenager tuned in to a Tokyo radio station listens more closely.
"-- satis ... faction!"
The boy, Hiro, turns the volume up.
"I can't get me no -- "
Eyes widen, he smiles.
"-- satis...faction!"
"Oh, my God, this is rock music!" he thinks.
And I try -- and I try -- and I try t-t-t-t-try try!
And by that point, really -- what else could the kid do but start a rock 'n' roll band?
"That song changed my life," said Hiro, who modeled his band, POLYSICS, not on the Rolling Stones, who wrote that song on his radio, but on Devo, the quirky new-wave icons whose cover version he heard.
POLYSICS plays wildly energetic pop-punk rock in matching red jumpsuits.
On its own, it's an exotic import, an eye-opening blend of the Ramones and Kraftwerk, to name a few more influences.
But look beyond and you'll see an ever-increasing wave of Japanese bands on tour in the United States -- signing record deals with labels here, playing concert tours, winning over more fans to their unique twist on the American art of rock.
Listen and you'll hear heavy-metal bands, glam-meets-kabuki bands, bubblegum pop queens and leather-clad garage punks -- all of them absorbing Western influences, throwing it in the mixer with their Japanese style and sending it echoing back across the ocean like a gigantic power chord from the East.
"Maybe they can figure out a way to mix Link Wray with Devo with Van Halen," said Mike LaVella, owner of Gearhead Records, trying to explain the appeal of Japanese bands such as his own label's Electric Eel Shock.
"And by the time you get it back, it's something you've never heard," he said.
"That's the genius. It's familiar. But it's different."
Pioneer band
One of the first Japanese bands to cross over to hip music fans here was Shonen Knife, three young women whose infectious poppy punk delighted American alt-rock stars such as Kurt Cobain, who invited them to open shows for Nirvana.
Two decades later, Shonen Knife is still playing here and winning over new fans with each tour.
"The first time, most of all fans are young people, but now not only young, but middle-aged and kids, too," said singer-guitarist Naoko Yamano by e-mail from Japan. "I wrote a song for the Powerpuff Girls -- that's why kid fans were increased."
She said she believes the huge popularity of anime -- Japanese animation -- has helped bands from Japan find fans here.
"It is one reason that Americans became more receptive to Japanese pop culture," Yamano said.
For Aki Rogers, 23, a Cerritos College, Calif., student, an eighth-grade Japanese language teacher introduced her to boy bands Tokio and Smap. Soon, through anime, she discovered her favorite band, L'Arc~en~Ciel.
"For me, mostly, it's the music," Rogers said. "Not all of it is so radically different from American music, but I don't hear it on the radio at all, so I don't get the feeling that the songs are overplayed."
"First time, when we played in Memphis, just four or five people came to our show," said Seiji, the singer-guitarist of Guitar Wolf, a garage punk band that models itself after black-leather rockers from Elvis Presley to Johnny Thunders and Joan Jett.
Twelve years and 20 trips to the United States later, Guitar Wolf has many more fans, though Seiji jokes that they're all men -- "cute girls seldom come to our show."
"Now they are infected, so they have to come back to the show," he said of how his band built its audience gig by gig.
Mega hits ahead?
So is the day approaching when a Japanese rock band makes it big here?
Yaz Noya, executive vice president of Tofu Records in Santa Monica, Calif., says the label believes it is, noting that college radio already has embraced bands like POLYSICS.
"Those people are trendsetters and like the new stuff, and they all loved the Japanese music," Noya said.
LaVella, who signed the Hives in the United States shortly before the Swedish band became a buzz band here, believes Electric Eel Shock can do just as well.
"I would just hope that it's not a fad," he said of the attention Japanese bands are winning now. "Because so many bands work and work and work to be here."
That's Hiro's dream now, too: "I really like fans to feel we are POLYSICS, not that we're from Japan or we play J-pop," he said.
"I want people to come to a show because we play rock."