On the day before Loud Park was to begin, Ace Frehley backed out. To fill in for his spot Loudness was added to the bill. I was so happy. I saw Ace before, and have seen Kiss with him. I’m not a fan of either his solo act or Kiss. Loudness, on the other hand, was one of my favorite bands in the 1980s. “Disillusion” and “Thunder in the East” are their best two CDs, IMO, and they played a few songs off of them.

Before a band hit the stage the giant screen between the two main stages flashed their name as seen in the above picture.

This was the scene a moment later before Loudness made their first public appearance in quite a while.

Loudness’s long-time drummer, Munetaka Higuchi, died in 2008. Their new drummer is Masayuki Suzuki. Minoru Niihara is the vocalist.

Akira Takasaki is the brilliant guitarist of Loudness. One of his guitars had glowing frets. You can see the glowing frets better in the video at the bottom.

These pics aren’t great, but given that I was more than 100 yards from the stage and the lighting was poor, they aren’t that bad.

The setlist (set list?) was something like this:
Fire Of Spirit
Hellrider
Crazy Nights
Heavy Chains
Crazy Doctor
In The Mirror
Are’s Lament
Like Hell
S.D.I.
Hit The Rails

There is another image of Loudness in this entry.

Finally, a video showing what the small, Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ7 (ZS3 in some countries) can do. The audio is very good given the size of the arena (absolutely HUGE) and the fact that it is indoors. The sound bounces around quite a bit, but the TZ7 captures the audio pretty well. When in focus (which the TZ7 sometimes had problems with given the low lighting and hands occasionally thrusting into view) the zoom on the TZ7 sometimes provides a clearer picture with video than stills shot with the same camera.

Posted on October 19th, 2009 under Japan • Tags: loudpark, metal, people, tz7 zs3, video. • RSS 2.0 feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed