X NO SEI TO SHI: STEP 1
1. hide to no Deai
[When I First Met hide]

I first met hide at the Kagurazaka "Explosion" livehouse. I was only 17 at the time, and playing in the band "Dementia." One side of hide could be seen as the leader of the legendary band "Saver Tiger" at the time. For quite some time before, I had said, "I'd like try to be on the same stage with Saver Tiger," and I pleaded with the store manager, and he promised to make it a reality.

The band lead by hide, Saver Tiger, had come to my attention formerly, and of course I wanted to play on the same stage as them, because even when I was just a member of the audience, I would watch them with rapt attention. At the time of the event, I remember the television stations coming to collect footage.

After the performance was over, hide said to me, "Your hair is really freaking awesome."

At that time, my hair stuck up everywhere like a hedgehog. It was a very radical hairstyle. When hide said that to me, I felt so great about the overwhelming power in Saver Tiger's show that to not say this would have been wrong:

"It was a good stage. We could beat any other band like this anywhere."

To tell the truth, I felt that we'd as Dementia and Saver Tiger had eaten up everyone else with our powerful performance.

This time, I'd only talked a bit with hide, so we parted without getting each other's phone numbers or anything.

Unexpectedly I met hide again about two years afterwards. I was participating in the launch of the band of Yoshiki's friend, and hide was there.

Furthermore, Yoshiki and Toshi had started X activities. Though of course hide and I hadn't joined yet, X was becoming pretty famous in the indies world. At any rate, their performance on stage was so overwhelming and fiery that it became a topic of discussion.

Though I had thought "he's a reticent person," from the first time we met, at this band launch, hide just sat there in silence and drank. So I could do nothing but sit and drink too. Even so, we somehow started talking about the artists we liked.

"What bands do you like?" I asked.

hide said, "Really old bands."

Having said that, he proceeded to give examples: T-Rex, Steppin Wolf, Doobie Brothers. As it turned out, those were bands I liked too, so the conversation turned to their styles of playing.

For example, Led Zeppelin.

"I think Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones rocks."

"No way, John Bonham is great."

When hide and I met again then, I felt that our conversation was so sharp and lively, and that hide was a very sensitive person, very in control of himself.

For example, when we were talking about Zeppelin, he didn't just stay on the topic of the band, but instead he thought of talking about if John Bonham or John Paul Jones was good. Furthermore, even if you say that "heta-uma" [1] is a bad thing, his thinking was that it was all right if the things he wanted to convey were said in a clumsy way. Philosophically, hide made you feel an anti-Establishmentarian atmosphere around him.

If I can say this, he was a very punkish person. A cool theorist, smart, good at making people laugh. However, because he never got close to people who didn't suit his taste, he never got involved in anything.

This time too, we didn't give each other our addresses. To think about it, we went through Yoshiki to get to really meet.

Speaking of which, Yoshiki, Toshi, and hide went out to eat. Close to the studio in Ikebukuro, there was a cheap restaurant that served set meals, and they often went there.

He just never went out drinking, because he was a very violent drunk.

 
Translation notes:
[1] Apparently, "heta-uma" is an art term. From the Donald Judd page:
"Neo-Expressionists's 'poor' technique was called 'heta-uma' (unskillful- skillful manner) in Japan. That naming indicated that their unskillful manner of painting has become an effective skill of painting."