A NU rock reunion

MANILA, Philippines - It’s been two years and a half since NU107 signed off the airwaves. And it’s staying that way whether we like it or not. After some time spent in denial, wishing and hoping some new radio station would take NU’s place, we have finally come to terms with the fact that there’s no such thing as re-runs on radio. NU was a glorious aberration, one of life’s rare springs, and for some, it was where they spent the time of their lives.

With hundreds rallying on Emerald corner Garnet streets in Ortigas, and with thousands listening here and abroad, NU107 bade a tearful goodbye to 22 years of hosting a home for rock stars, dreamers, wannabes, and the everyday rock listener. NU’s passing was the closest thing we could get to a Jim Morrison memorial with people lighting up candles, drinking on the curbside, and laying flowers beside NU’s tall glass windows.

It was strange that we all came together for something we could barely see or touch. Unlike a celebrity whom you could tear apart and sell limb per limb, NU was real for most of us only through our ears. But it made listening such a complete experience that NU’s demise was comparable to the loss of a loved one or a good friend.

‘It was home’

Except, perhaps, for the ones working behind the scenes, NU could not have been more real for anyone other than the station’s DJs. “It was really a home for us,” Trish says, an NU DJ from 2003 until its last days, “we would fight and make up there, some of us have slept there, some of us have stayed there to pass the time.”

And life after NU for Russ Davis has been “miserable!” While he was kidding, it somehow held water. “Basically, nothing has approximated the cool that was before,” Russ continues.

Some of NU’s DJs have since surfed jobs as band managers (which Cyrus the Virus jokes as the “worst idea ever”), writers for Yahoo!, voice over talents, ad firm accounts executives, event hosts, and, of course, musicians.

“It’s something that you can’t get out of your system,” says Francis Brew Reyes, one of the most veteran of NU’s DJs. In his show “In the Raw,” he was known to be NU’s resident KJ — telling it as it is to aspiring bands trying to make their marks in the music scene.

Francis himself juggles his life as a MYX VJ, a writer, and a freelance score composer. He now prides himself as the one who penned the notes for MTRCB’s stinger. One way or another, he says that they’re all still involved in the music industry.

When the mics are off

What we have to understand, most of us never setting foot in NU’s tiny booth, is that much more happens when the mics are off. But we’ve more or less had an idea what they were up to with all the noise the CD cases make, crashing on the floor or hitting the dashboard. Sometimes, these guys were just horsing around.

Contrary to popular belief, NU had a set of house rules that Francis Brew tried to enforce. One of them was a “strictly no drinking in the booth” policy that was bound to be violated.

Kim and Monica in Two Girls, One Show were one of its more notorious culprits and they recall slurring their words, sounding nowhere near sober, a few hours into their shift. Russ Davis remembers seeing Kevin Roy and the rest of Razorback from inside the booth, carrying a whole case of beer into the studio at three in the morning. They said they noticed that Russ was “lonely” on air so they decided to keep him company.

Pepe Smith

And they all recall Pepe Smith, being godlike and untouchable, saying on live radio, “I’ll answer that question, but give me more of that beer first.” They were as good as dead; nobody was allowed to go on live drinking sessions on air.

It was because of these many blunders that even in the Rock Awards, beer had to be kept away from the DJs until the show was over. Of course, that, too, didn’t go as planned. “And that is how and why NU closed down,” Francis jests.

While the station had quite a number of beer blunders, there were also moments that pulled their heartstrings. Diego Castillo, once a DJ in NU’s earlier days and currently one of Sandwich’s guitarists, considers the day he interviewed The Eraserheads for Alternativity in 1994 his fondest memory in NU. He says that they brought an old copy of song hits with them to perform a song they didn’t know the chords to. That was a time, he says, when the Heads were nowhere near anyone’s radars.

NU’S last day

A lot of the DJs, however, still remember the station’s last day as their most memorable one. It’s common knowledge that NU closed down due to “financial reasons,” but coming from a fan, it’s still tough to accept that in everything — even in the good stuff — it was money that did the talking. And it must’ve been strange for the DJs, who never really earned a decent amount from the whole gig, to hear that even with their measly wages, the station wasn’t profiting enough.

But, perhaps, that was the best part for them — they never really saw it as a job. Instead, they saw it as a kind of service for others and themselves, doing us all a favor and letting us hear music that bent rules and convention.

Without the need for me to ask questions, seeing those guys talk for hours, recounting snippets of their lives as NU jocks, delivered a powerful message to me. NU’s greatest legacy lies not only in the fact that it played rock music but that it was the home of NU rock. There can be no repeats or substitutes for NU simply because it ran on passion, camaraderie, and a whole lot of rock n’ roll.

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