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If you didn't know any better, you might think Yamamoto Seiichi was a middle-aged father of two on his way home from a double-header at Koshien Stadium. His hair is short and black and topped with a baseball cap. His clothes are tasteful, the product of some well-known sportswear manufacturer, as are his tennis shoes. In truth, as a member of the Boredoms and the manager of the Bears live house, Yamamoto has had a hand in making some of the most original and influential music of the last decade and fostering any number of musicians in the fertile Osaka underground music scene.

As a vehicle for the shamanic howls and otherworldly screeches of Yamatsuka (nee Yamantaka) Eye, the early Boredoms were a twisted marriage of the speed and energy of California hardcore bands like Black Flag, the cosmic and sartorial designs of Sun Ra's Arkestra and the silliness and ragged ethos of the Butthole Surfers. Yamamoto has long been an essential component in the band's sound, but strictly speaking wasn't an original member, "We found each other through a mutual acquaintance who worked at Play Guide Journal, which was the predecessor to event information magazines like Pia. She knew Eye, [Boredoms' bassist] Hilah and me. And she was the one who said, 'Let's start a band.' So you might say she was the founder of the Boredoms, but her musical tastes were very different from ours. At the same time, Eye had already been doing Hanatarashi and had started to do rock jam sessions with a new group of people. But all of them quit after about five months. And that was about the time that we joined."

This wasn't at all the way Yamamoto had planned it. As a youth in Amagasaki, Yamamoto wanted nothing more than to be a banker, "Becoming a musician was never something I aspired to, it just happened. I had started learning guitar when I was 11. But at the time, rock musicians didn't strike me as being at all cool; they looked like a bunch of idiots to me. Part of it was the lyrics. The words in rock songs were so dumb. Folk lyrics weren't quite so bad. The first time I sensed that rock might be cool was when I saw Marc Bolan on TV, in maybe 1972. It was a news story on NHK talking about how a new type of music called 'glam' was the big thing in England. As soon as I saw that, I decided to stop playing folk guitar (for a while anyway) and went and bought some bell bottoms and London boots [platform shoes]."

Like all of the Boredoms, Yamamoto suffers from a form of attention deficit disorder that prevents him from standing still, "When I joined [in 1986], I had ideas for a bunch of other bands in my head. So from the very start, I told the other members I didn't want to be confined to one band. The whole premise of the Boredoms was that each of us would be active in other projects at the same time."

At the moment, Yamamoto is a part of nine bands, including the Boredoms, who despite rumors of their demise seem to be evolving out of their most recent phase as a groove-based cult of sun worshipers into yet another lifeform; Omoide Hatoba, whose only other confirmed member is Tsuyama Atsushi, a bassist known to disable amplifiers with the might of his fingers; and Novo Tono, a song-oriented venture with Kobe-born chanteuse Phew and turntablist/minimalist composer, Otomo Yoshihide.

The songs decide the direction Yamamoto takes, "First, I write a song. Then I start thinking about which band it would work best with. It's like each of the nine bands is one aspect of my character. Live Under the Sky is my improvisational side. Rashinban is my folk side. Omoide Hatoba is my abstract side. Then there is my rock side, my noise side, my techno side. To me, it always seems amazing that other people don't do more different things. Why is it necessary to constantly do the same thing? Look at the Beatles' music and you can find every kind of music there is. What I do is the same, except that I do each kind of music with a separate band."

Parallel to his career in music, for the last 13 years Yamamoto has been running Bears, the club that is to Osaka what CBGB is to New York. Located behind the former site of Namba Stadium, almost anything is possible in the small unmarked, underground room, "Basically, Bears is a place with no policy at all. If you want to bring your bento in and eat it, fine. Whatever you want to do inside, fine. We have no interest in preserving the place as a historical artifact. The minute a club starts to take on an air of authority and the people working there become overly conscious of its importance, it's finished."

The beginnings of the club are rather more complicated, "The original owner was from Hokkaido and he had a lover in Osaka who he was planning to marry. As a present, he gave her son, who was still in high school at the time, this club. At the beginning, it was called Black Bears because the guy was built like a bear and that was his nickname. But within the first year, he suddenly died. I happened to have been friends with a teacher at the son's school and through him, I was asked to help out as the booking manager. It wasn't long before the kid got tired of the whole thing and quit. In a normal situation, the club would have closed at that point, but the owner of the building said that as long as there was someone willing to take charge, Bears could stay open. I was the one who took charge."

As in business, so too in life. In 1999, Yamamoto published his first book. He regularly contributes liner notes to other bands' albums and music to countless others. He is preparing to show his drawings at a multi-media exhibition. And he has found a new avocation in photography. At the suggestion that there might be something even slightly superhuman about any of this, Yamamoto balks, "I've never been good at applying myself. The way I do things seems normal to me. There's nothing at all odd about it. Not a thing."