B'z -- Bad Communication

Back in 1989, just a couple of months after the start of my 2-year stint on the JET Programme in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture, I didn't just wake up to a commercial on TV Tokyo....I WOKE UP to THIS commercial: the fetching young IT girl of the time, Rie Miyazawa（宮沢りえ）, shimmying around, improbably selling a Fujitsu computer called FM TOWNS. But the song was the thing that got my heart doing a couple of laps around the block (well, Rie did her part, too). Imagine waking up between 7 and 7:30 to a Tak Matsumoto guitar riff and a Koshi Inaba scream....OJ to the ears!

"Bad Communication" was released as an EP in October 1989. For those contemporary B'z fans who have been accustomed to the band as rock gods, listening to Inaba and Matsumoto back then must be a bit of a surprise since there were more synth sounds incorporated into their music back then.

As for the EP, it never broke the Top 10 on the Oricon weeklies (peaking at No. 12), but it had staying power: it came in at the 29th position for the yearly rankings of 1990, it even went up to No. 26 in 1991 for the same rankings and the year after, it was still hanging in there at No. 87.

As for how B'z got together, as early as 1987, guitarist Takahiro Matsumoto（松本孝弘）, who had been supporting various tours such as that for the pop/rock band TM Network, decided that he wanted to create a band that would allow him to express his own musical sound. A year later, he was presented with a demo tape of a university student made a few years previously by the name of Koshi Inaba（稲葉浩志）. On the tape, Inaba sang T-Bone Walker, Led Zeppelin and even Billy Joel. Matsumoto would later say that after hearing him and seeing him, he made up his mind that Inaba was the one...even before they met. Later in 1988, B'z was launched and their 1st single was released in September of that year. Of course, the rest is history: 46 consecutive No. 1 singles, 24 No. 1 albums, and more than 80 million records sold in Japan alone. (Wikipedia entry on the group)

I'm also throwing in the extended version from the EP. Set that to your alarm clock and play it!