Three-part harmony
February 6, 2006 | 12:00am
After drowning you in 21st century gimmicks and gizmos all January, I’m going to take you down memory lane this week, realizing that three separate items I’d noted down all have something to do with taking a long, leisurely leap to the past. I know, I know – nostalgia’s a cheap emotion, an easy fix for today’s disquiets and tomorrow’s uncertainties, and it’s about as close to enlightenment as a witticism is to wisdom. But what the heck, I’m sure most of you will agree that we deserve a break, any break, from the present, such as it is.
For a few hours a couple of weekends ago, the average age in Cubao in and around the Araneta Coliseum must have been no lower than 40 – and that, only because many people pushing 55 had dragged their kids along to give them a glimpse into what their own vanished youth was like.
The immediate reason for this virtual seminar of seniors was the concert of The Lettermen – the "Backstreet Boys of the ’60s," by their own admission. Only one of the three original Lettermen (Tony Butala, Mike Barnett, and Talmadge Russell, who got together in 1958) remains – that’s Tony Butala, now accompanied by Donovan Tea, who came onboard in 1984, and Mark Preston, who joined up the same day as Donovan but who spent a few years outside the group before returning just this month.
(No, I didn’t go through my adult life knowing all these intimate details about three guys with falsetto voices and big, gelled hair. There’s actually a Lettermen website at www.thelettermen.com where you can get the whole history of exactly who the Lettermen were, exactly when. While you’re at it, you can join the New Millennium Lettermen Society Fan Club and get an 8"x10" autographed picture you can put next to your mom’s.)
I’m sure that our kids could write prizewinning essays about why The Lettermen are decidedly uncool in these days of Eminem. But you know what? That particular Saturday evening, there must have been 15,000 of us semi-arthritic baby boomers who didn’t care. Depending on which corner of the crowd you were looking at, it felt like a CMLI convention in 1969, or a Welcome Rotonda rally in 1971. It would’ve been perfect if I’d come in my purple oversized "Amboy" shirt, my slinkiest pants, white cotton socks, and Hush Puppies (an outfit that readers like Auggie Surtida and Peewee Leynes – who, predictably, was there – can surely relate to). We’d flocked to the Big Dome (I got towed along by Beng and her UPHS ’67 barkada) to relive high-school, pang-swit staples like Warm, Put Your Head on My Shoulder, and Shangri-La; but I suspect the girls remembered the misty romance and the boys something a little more concrete.
It may be a mystery to many why a song like The Seventh Dawn – which made hardly a ripple on the music scene anywhere else – could be almost an anthem to Filipinos, its iconic status confirmed by the fact that it was the penultimate song on the program (just before Dahil Sa Iyo and the encore pieces, MacArthur’s Park, You’ll Never Walk Alone, and I Believe). But a good time was had by all, thanks to the trio’s superb showmanship and our own fevered memories. The show ended with the velvet darkness spangled by a thousand points of light (a.k.a. cell phones) swaying in the kind of Kumbaya-inspired arc that would make my rocker-friend Fidel (who might similarly wax nostalgic over Metallica) positively gag.
But again, did we care? The Lettermen brought us back to a time when songs could be sung – not just by your lonesome, but with your shing-a-ling-loving posse, in three-part harmony.
Last Saturday afternoon, a very unusual march would have taken place around the Academic Oval in UP Diliman. (I’m uncertain, as of this writing, if I can be there as I dearly wish to.) The march was to mark the 35th anniversary of the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK) – which, along with the Kabataang Makabayan (KM), figured prominently in the First Quarter Storm as something the military routinely denounced as a "communist front organization." Some ex-SDK members will soon be coming out with a commemorative book, to which I contributed the following memoir:
I joined the SDK almost as soon as I entered UP in 1970, through what I later realized was the normal recruitment route – first, membership in the more innocuous Nationalist Corps, then integration into SDK itself. Rightly or wrongly (wrongly, as it turned out), SDK appealed to me as being somehow just as militant but groovier, to use a word from that time, than the fire-breathing, roughshod KM.
A lot of the people I knew and idolized were with SDK – Gary Olivar, Tony Tagamolila, Mario Taguiwalo, Rey Vea – writers and editors all of whom I, a couple of years their junior, wanted to follow. Some members were also fraternity brothers in Alpha Sigma – Benny Tiamzon and Joey Calderon, most notably. I felt I was in the best company; these guys (and some very nice gals) couldn’t possible go wrong. I was small fry then (and remained small fry), too young to be in on the big discussions, but it impressed me to overhear people like Vic David and Titus de Borja chat about the "18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte." I was good only for Mao and the Five Golden Rays.
I remember a blur of HQs – Scout Castor, Arayat, an apartment near Sulo Hotel – but our favorite hangout was the "Trialogue," a small room at the far left end of Vinzons Hall. At this time my family lived very close by – we were squatters on Old Balara – but I liked spending time at the Trialogue, watching Willie Tañedo draw figures for flyers and streamers (I recall being entranced – with horror and fascination – by Willie’s depiction of Francis Sontillano’s splattered brain).
I fancied myself a propagandist and had had some training in theater with PETA, so I signed up for what was then Dulaang Sadeka as soon as it was formed, and even joined a chorus that performed a piece from Brecht – can’t remember now which one it was, exactly – in whiteface at the ALEC. This was even before Gintong Silahis emerged as SDK’s cultural arm, and even before Brecht had be set aside for being too bourgeois in favor of more overt Peking-Opera-style tableaus.
It was exhilarating to be in as many rallies and demos as possible, to be right there in the thick of the Diliman Commune, to march with a thousand others from Los Baños to Manila, to actually carry a small Beretta in a hollowed-out Bible, Godfather-style, for Tony Tagamolila at the CEGP conference (not that I would have known what to do with it; I’d never fired a shot in my life, and still never have).
There were, of course, deaths and betrayals to contend with, especially as martial law approached and took over the landscape. The bloated face and mutilated body of my tocayo Butch Landrito has stayed with me all these years, and the last time I counted all the people I personally knew who died in the FQS, I came up with 21, and certainly there were more, too many more. There was this one time, early during martial law, when I found myself in a UG house with people who’ve all passed on – Tony Hilario (with his trademark way of holding a cigarette between the tip of his fingers), journalist Henry Romero (technically a desaparecido), and Jack Peña (ever the Ilonggo, railing against imperiali-sum and the o-well price hike). Ironically, I may have been saved by being arrested in January 1973 and spending the next seven months in Fort Bonifacio.
And so I live on, we live on, as the articulate survivors, a little yellow star imprinted in some imperishable corner of our graying minds.
My recent mention of photographer Ben Razon and his Malate restaurant hangout, the Oarhouse (I know; it rhymes with, uhm, "dormouse"), provoked this reverie from another regular reader, Freddie Santos:
Hi, Mr. D! Kung hei fat choy! You mentioned Oarhouse. Aaahhhh, at least in the late ’70s and early ’80s, this was my Macworld. Situated a door away from Hobbit House, this was the place to be when you couldn’t afford Cafe Adriatico.
Given that, most Repertory Theater people could be found there on any given weeknight (we performed weekends), and the main reasons were:
1) Carrie (the original co-owner) who was always, always, always happy to see you... which was really nice after a night of Zeneida Amador [I’m sure Freddie means that in the fondest way – BD];
2) Jan10, the bartender, so named because that was his birthday;
3) Eggplant lasagna, yummy, cheap and weird because ’til that time, we were only familiar with pasta layers;
4) The artists – people like Oscar Salita and Ibarra, who hung out there to gab about heart and art;
5) And most importantly, bumper pool!!! This was one of only two in existence in the country (how would I know that? I don’t but it sounds so good when said that way). In all my years of going there, there was but one tournament held. We all signed up. I won. For one night in my life, beating the more experienced Salita, I was Paul Newman.
Carrie and her dear American husband had to move to the States and sold the place to Jun Medina. His son took over the bar and a new treat was added to the menu, callos. Por dios, por santo, que rico!
I’m not sure who owns it now but I hope that when you go, you will still find vestiges of a Malate that was not so out and out as it is now but bohemian enough to harbor and hide lost thoughts in an artistic storm.
Many thanks as ever, Freddie, for your own callos-flavored memories.
E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html.
For a few hours a couple of weekends ago, the average age in Cubao in and around the Araneta Coliseum must have been no lower than 40 – and that, only because many people pushing 55 had dragged their kids along to give them a glimpse into what their own vanished youth was like.
The immediate reason for this virtual seminar of seniors was the concert of The Lettermen – the "Backstreet Boys of the ’60s," by their own admission. Only one of the three original Lettermen (Tony Butala, Mike Barnett, and Talmadge Russell, who got together in 1958) remains – that’s Tony Butala, now accompanied by Donovan Tea, who came onboard in 1984, and Mark Preston, who joined up the same day as Donovan but who spent a few years outside the group before returning just this month.
(No, I didn’t go through my adult life knowing all these intimate details about three guys with falsetto voices and big, gelled hair. There’s actually a Lettermen website at www.thelettermen.com where you can get the whole history of exactly who the Lettermen were, exactly when. While you’re at it, you can join the New Millennium Lettermen Society Fan Club and get an 8"x10" autographed picture you can put next to your mom’s.)
I’m sure that our kids could write prizewinning essays about why The Lettermen are decidedly uncool in these days of Eminem. But you know what? That particular Saturday evening, there must have been 15,000 of us semi-arthritic baby boomers who didn’t care. Depending on which corner of the crowd you were looking at, it felt like a CMLI convention in 1969, or a Welcome Rotonda rally in 1971. It would’ve been perfect if I’d come in my purple oversized "Amboy" shirt, my slinkiest pants, white cotton socks, and Hush Puppies (an outfit that readers like Auggie Surtida and Peewee Leynes – who, predictably, was there – can surely relate to). We’d flocked to the Big Dome (I got towed along by Beng and her UPHS ’67 barkada) to relive high-school, pang-swit staples like Warm, Put Your Head on My Shoulder, and Shangri-La; but I suspect the girls remembered the misty romance and the boys something a little more concrete.
It may be a mystery to many why a song like The Seventh Dawn – which made hardly a ripple on the music scene anywhere else – could be almost an anthem to Filipinos, its iconic status confirmed by the fact that it was the penultimate song on the program (just before Dahil Sa Iyo and the encore pieces, MacArthur’s Park, You’ll Never Walk Alone, and I Believe). But a good time was had by all, thanks to the trio’s superb showmanship and our own fevered memories. The show ended with the velvet darkness spangled by a thousand points of light (a.k.a. cell phones) swaying in the kind of Kumbaya-inspired arc that would make my rocker-friend Fidel (who might similarly wax nostalgic over Metallica) positively gag.
But again, did we care? The Lettermen brought us back to a time when songs could be sung – not just by your lonesome, but with your shing-a-ling-loving posse, in three-part harmony.
I joined the SDK almost as soon as I entered UP in 1970, through what I later realized was the normal recruitment route – first, membership in the more innocuous Nationalist Corps, then integration into SDK itself. Rightly or wrongly (wrongly, as it turned out), SDK appealed to me as being somehow just as militant but groovier, to use a word from that time, than the fire-breathing, roughshod KM.
A lot of the people I knew and idolized were with SDK – Gary Olivar, Tony Tagamolila, Mario Taguiwalo, Rey Vea – writers and editors all of whom I, a couple of years their junior, wanted to follow. Some members were also fraternity brothers in Alpha Sigma – Benny Tiamzon and Joey Calderon, most notably. I felt I was in the best company; these guys (and some very nice gals) couldn’t possible go wrong. I was small fry then (and remained small fry), too young to be in on the big discussions, but it impressed me to overhear people like Vic David and Titus de Borja chat about the "18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte." I was good only for Mao and the Five Golden Rays.
I remember a blur of HQs – Scout Castor, Arayat, an apartment near Sulo Hotel – but our favorite hangout was the "Trialogue," a small room at the far left end of Vinzons Hall. At this time my family lived very close by – we were squatters on Old Balara – but I liked spending time at the Trialogue, watching Willie Tañedo draw figures for flyers and streamers (I recall being entranced – with horror and fascination – by Willie’s depiction of Francis Sontillano’s splattered brain).
I fancied myself a propagandist and had had some training in theater with PETA, so I signed up for what was then Dulaang Sadeka as soon as it was formed, and even joined a chorus that performed a piece from Brecht – can’t remember now which one it was, exactly – in whiteface at the ALEC. This was even before Gintong Silahis emerged as SDK’s cultural arm, and even before Brecht had be set aside for being too bourgeois in favor of more overt Peking-Opera-style tableaus.
It was exhilarating to be in as many rallies and demos as possible, to be right there in the thick of the Diliman Commune, to march with a thousand others from Los Baños to Manila, to actually carry a small Beretta in a hollowed-out Bible, Godfather-style, for Tony Tagamolila at the CEGP conference (not that I would have known what to do with it; I’d never fired a shot in my life, and still never have).
There were, of course, deaths and betrayals to contend with, especially as martial law approached and took over the landscape. The bloated face and mutilated body of my tocayo Butch Landrito has stayed with me all these years, and the last time I counted all the people I personally knew who died in the FQS, I came up with 21, and certainly there were more, too many more. There was this one time, early during martial law, when I found myself in a UG house with people who’ve all passed on – Tony Hilario (with his trademark way of holding a cigarette between the tip of his fingers), journalist Henry Romero (technically a desaparecido), and Jack Peña (ever the Ilonggo, railing against imperiali-sum and the o-well price hike). Ironically, I may have been saved by being arrested in January 1973 and spending the next seven months in Fort Bonifacio.
And so I live on, we live on, as the articulate survivors, a little yellow star imprinted in some imperishable corner of our graying minds.
Hi, Mr. D! Kung hei fat choy! You mentioned Oarhouse. Aaahhhh, at least in the late ’70s and early ’80s, this was my Macworld. Situated a door away from Hobbit House, this was the place to be when you couldn’t afford Cafe Adriatico.
Given that, most Repertory Theater people could be found there on any given weeknight (we performed weekends), and the main reasons were:
1) Carrie (the original co-owner) who was always, always, always happy to see you... which was really nice after a night of Zeneida Amador [I’m sure Freddie means that in the fondest way – BD];
2) Jan10, the bartender, so named because that was his birthday;
3) Eggplant lasagna, yummy, cheap and weird because ’til that time, we were only familiar with pasta layers;
4) The artists – people like Oscar Salita and Ibarra, who hung out there to gab about heart and art;
5) And most importantly, bumper pool!!! This was one of only two in existence in the country (how would I know that? I don’t but it sounds so good when said that way). In all my years of going there, there was but one tournament held. We all signed up. I won. For one night in my life, beating the more experienced Salita, I was Paul Newman.
Carrie and her dear American husband had to move to the States and sold the place to Jun Medina. His son took over the bar and a new treat was added to the menu, callos. Por dios, por santo, que rico!
I’m not sure who owns it now but I hope that when you go, you will still find vestiges of a Malate that was not so out and out as it is now but bohemian enough to harbor and hide lost thoughts in an artistic storm.
Many thanks as ever, Freddie, for your own callos-flavored memories.
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