Over 37 years have passed in between the Flower Travellin’ Band’s concert appearances in Toronto. Let’s hope that this week’s show will not be as rudely interrupted as the last major one, which took place in a since-demolished stadium in Stanley Park in August of 1971.

“That was with Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Bob Seger and the Blues Project,” says bassist Jun Kobayashi in an interview last week. “The show was good but we got really angry. We were performing and the audience was excited and then a roadie of ELP pulled the plug. I don’t know why — maybe they were jealous or thought we played too long.”

Potentially troublesome roadies will be presumably refused admission when the Flower Travellin’ Band makes an unexpected but very welcome return. Indeed, Toronto plays a pivotal role in the strange history of the most thunderous act to emerge from rock’s first flowering in the Far East.

This history was exposed in Japrocksampler, a 2007 book by psych-rock guru Julian Cope that has inspired noise-crazed freaks from all over the planet to investigate Japan’s turbulent music scene of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Many musicians who cut their teeth during the Group Sounds craze covering Beatles and Ventures tunes were eager to brave new frontiers. The long-haired likes of Les Rallizes Denudes and Speed, Glue & Shinki rapidly transcended the influence of Zep, Hendrix and Cream to fashion their own brands of heaviosity.

By Cope’s estimation, the era’s definitive recording was the Flower Travellin’ Band’s Satori, a thoroughly gonzo 1971 disc that somehow combines the swagger of Led Zeppelin II with the exploratory freakitude of Can’s Ege Bamyasi. Such was the level of weirdness in our own country at the time that one of the album’s songs (all named “Satori”) hit the Top Ten.

The Flower Travellin’ Band’s unlikely run of Canuck success was the result of a fateful meeting at Expo 70 in Osaka with Lighthouse. Though their own music was far more mild-mannered, the jazz-rockers were sufficiently impressed to invite their new Japanese friends to play the first-ever rock show at Ontario Place. Remembers Kobayashi, “I guess the audience didn’t know what to expect so they were quiet after we finished. Then all of a sudden we got applause.”

Lighthouse keyboardist Paul Hoffert would also produce their third album, the deceptively titled Made in Japan. But as many musical acts have learned over the decades, being (almost) big in Canada may not make you a living. Though signed to Atlantic, the band couldn’t get the musician’s union cards they needed to play the States. After heading home in the spring of 1972, they suffered a cruelly ironic blow with the cancellation of a Rolling Stones tour for which they were the opening act, the Japanese government having denied the Limeys permission to play due to their drug convictions.

The Japanese scene had also changed in their absence, with milquetoast folkies being the latest flavour. “There were lots of folk musicians making lots of money and getting attention and we were not,” says Kobayashi. “It’s still the case in Japan — rock music is a secondary thing. For some reason they think rock musicians are too wild, like we’re all these bad boys.”

After one last gig in Kyoto in ’73, the band ceased to be. Having met his future wife during the band’s time here, Kobayashi returned to Toronto, where he now has a business designing watches and accessories. He hadn’t touched a bass guitar for decades when his old bandmates got in touch with him last year and floated the idea of a reunion. The Flower Travellin’ Band’s return was big news in Japan, partially because singer Akira “Joe” Yamanaka became a solo star after his time in the group but also due to the renewed interest in the original wave of Japanese acid-rock. The upcoming Revival show will even be recorded by Fuji TV for the New Year World Rock Festival, an annual special hosted by Yuya Ichida, the producer who put the Flower Travellin’ Band together in the first place.

A new album recorded in Toronto last summer with the help of Kobayashi’s son Ben (whose band The Action Mob are also on the bill), We Are Here is clearly the work of men much older than the hairy maniacs who made Satori. Yet the best of the disc’s bluesy rock numbers possess the same fire that animated them back in the day. Says Kobayashi, “The minute we got together in the studio in Tokyo in January, we felt, ‘Yeah, we’re back. We’re rusty but we’re back.’

“And we don’t look too bad,” he adds with a laugh. “Nobody’s really fat — we’re in shape!”

ELP roadies: you have been warned.