Yuji Tojo 

One has to wonder how many times in his life Yuji Tojo has heard the following phrase: “Hey man, do you want to join our band?” Born in Japan, Tojo joined a rock band in high school, which, by the time he was in college in Tokyo during the ’70s, was getting pretty famous. “We played everywhere,” Tojo says. “We did some TV shows, big concert stuff. I was making money.” But after about three years, Tojo opted out. “I got too crazy,” he says, and escaped to India for awhile to travel with a Buddhist monk/friend and clear his head. Since then it seems, his life strategy has been a highly effective, but entirely serendipitous piecing together of a wherever-the-wind-takes-me philosophy and six degrees of separation. Tojo tells me of a recording project in Maui that begat a club romp in Laguna Beach that would eventually deliver him to SC. “The people here are more free, especially back then,” Tojo laughs. “Laguna Beach got to be too Hollywood … so I stayed here.” But not before he spent a couple of years touring internationally as the guitarist in Lacy J. Dalton’s band. “The only music I had never played was country ... I wanted to master it.” It doesn’t take a genius to solve Tojo’s appeal—he’s genuine (a characteristic that comes through so admirably in his gentle baritone) and easygoing, he’s got a sense of humor and most enticingly, he can lay down a set of most any genre, from flamenco to Japanese rock. These days, you can catch him playing guitar and looping rhythm and bass tracks with drummer Mike Shannon. Ever vigilant of the crowd’s needs, Tojo can scale it down to background ambiance when he needs too, but “if they want to have a party,” he warns, he and Shannon can wreak all-out, dance-ready havoc. “We never have a set list,” he says. “That’s our style…Let’s just jam, I tell Mike, and he says ‘okay.’ ”

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