Heartbreak

Zoo Freaks, the Crew just dropped the needle on "Heartbreak," and this one comes off the 1993 album Raid by the Atsushi Yokozeki Project. The record came out of Japan on April 25 of that year, on the Imager label through Nippon Phonogram, and it was built like a West Coast summit meeting. Tokyo guitarist Atsushi Yokozeki, the man they call Jet Finger, brought in a roomful of American hard rock names, sang everything in English, and handed the vocal tracks to producer and arranger Joey Carbone. Reviewers who finally got their hands on the disc years later kept pointing at two songs, "More Than Enough" and this one, as the killers. "Heartbreak" is the straight-ahead rocker of the pair, written by Jeff Carruthers, and it rides on Chuck Wright's bass, Ken Mary's drums, Carbone's keyboards, and a stack of backing voices that includes David Glen Eisley and Joseph Williams. Yokozeki's guitar sits right in the middle of it, fast and clean, the way he always played.

The voice out front belongs to Ray Gillen, and that is the part of the story that still stops people cold. Gillen had already sung with Black Sabbath, cut the first two Badlands albums with Jake E. Lee, and left demo tracks behind with Blue Murder. By the time Raid showed up he was still cutting sessions around Los Angeles, and "Heartbreak" landed as one of the last studio leads he put on tape. He passed that December, only a few months after the album reached the shops in Japan. Folks who have lived with the record call the vocal effortless, the kind of performance that lifts a hard rock song without ever sounding like he is working at it. The original Japanese pressing barely traveled, which is why so many Zoo Freaks are hearing this for the first time. A European reissue on Krescendo in 2010 finally put Raid back in circulation, and the cult around it has been steady ever since.

Yokozeki himself came up in Tokyo, born there on September 27, 1962. He started out in 1983 as a support guitarist for singers Misako Honjo and Megumi Hayakawa, then signed with Public Image and formed the band Bronx in 1985. That same year he put out a solo mini-album called Jet Finger, and the nickname stuck because of the speed in his right hand. Bronx ran until 1987. After that he turned up as a support player with Kinniku Shojo Tai, cut a run of instrumental albums, and in 1992 formed Lance of Thrill. Raid was the 1993 detour, the project where he sat down with players from Quiet Riot, Dokken, Ratt, Quiet Riot's circle, Vanilla Fudge, and the rest of that Los Angeles bench. He kept going after it, through the Slut Banks and a 2001 record with Loudness members Masayoshi Yamashita and Munetaka Higuchi under the name Blood Circus, and he is still out there teaching and playing under the Jet Finger handle.

If you want to follow the man, his official word goes out on X at 横関敦【公式】, and there is a Facebook page for him at Atsushi Yokozeki. His management page at Our Songs Creative sits at oursongs-creative.jp. We did not turn up a working Instagram for him. Fans keep the old records alive over at the Encyclopaedia Metallum artist page and on the Japanese indie archive at japan-metal-indies.com. Stay with the Crew. There is more where this came from.