Stylistics: Thank you for making me feel brand-new

The songs remain the same. I listen to them over and over again in the past three decades or so, but thank heavens for The Stylistics who make the songs sound brand-new so that listening to them feels, just like having sex with somebody you love, everytime is like the first time.

The jokes remain crispy even if they have been cracked several times in concerts here and abroad – yes, by the evergreen Makati Councilor Rico J. Puno – but everytime you hear them, they sound like brand-new, making you blush a bit in the darkened venue when Rico J, responding to somebody – anybody! – in the audience shouting "I love you, Rico!", makes his standard three very naughty, suggestive jerks of the pelvis, much to the amusement of everybody (adults only, please!), including Rico’s fellow "Greatest Hits" colleagues Marco Sison, Hajji Alejandro and Rey Valera.

Put The Stylistics and the, ehem, "Fab Four" (with on-bended-knees apologies to The Beatles) together and you get pyrotechnics much more pleasant and pleasing to the ears than all the bawang and the sawa and the Super Lolos and the Judas Belts you can explode on New Year’s Eve.

It was a nostalgic way of bidding 2005 goodbye, so Friday night (Dec. 30) my friends and I braved the horrendous traffic (due to the World Pyro Olympics championship), never mind if it took us more than an hour to navigate the short stretch from Roxas Boulevard to the PICC where the second of two shows (produced by Viva Concerts, Inc.) was mounted and more than two hours to get out of the mess. It was well worth it.

The show kicked off about an hour late but so what? If Stylistics fans waited years for the group to come back, what’s about an hour?

But first, an hour of "warm up" with the, ehem, "Fab Four" (but where oh where was fifth member Nonoy Zuniga?) who, I should add, wasn’t doing a mere "front act" (as Rey jokingly referred to their stint) but, as advertised, a "back-to-back" performance. Yes, Rey sang two of his old hits (plus a medley), and so did Hajji, and then Marco, and then Rico who once again proved to the the group’s livewire with his sex-oriented jokes, with Erap cracks thrown in for good measure. I loved it when, requesting ther audience to clap, Rico would interrupt his song and say, "Respect, please!" and the audience responded with gusto – "respect" for elders, you know!

And finally, The Stylistics!

Two of the foursome are "old" and two are "new," but who cares and who minds if, as I was saying, the songs remain the same, if the legendary Stylistics sound brings you back to the good old days when the world was younger and more peaceful, when love was young and the heart was eager to explore uncharted territories, when you and I were 30 years younger and had less problems and cares and were concerned not with making a living but, sob and sigh, making love?

At that time, when somebody your heart was beating for hinted at dropping you like a hot potato, you kinda scare him/her, "You’ll never get to heaven if you break my heart!" And, betcha by golly wow, you remind tell him/her "I’m stone in love with you" and then you "stop, look and listen" for a (positive preferably) response before you say, okay, "let’s put it all together again!" because "I can’t give you anything but love," baby! After all, "people (in love) make the world go round," don’t they?

Excuse me while I’m engrossed in tripping down memory lane, thanks to the tallest Stylistic who was warmly greeting the audience and asking everyone before the quartet launched into yet another song, "So where were you when we were singing the following song?"

If memory serves me right, back in the early ’70s when The Stylistics (formed in Philadelphia in the late ’60s) were lording it over the airlanes, I was fresh out of job (from the old Manila Times), rendered so by the imposition of Martial Law. So I spent by jobless days nursing my rudely-interrupted dream to be a journalist by playing the album (the vinyl type) of, besides those of my eternal favorite The Beatles, The Stylistics. My spirit would be lifted and I’d go for a swim and smile at the future beckoning again before me, with a promise of good things to come.

Yes, I was in that state of mind and life when The Stylistics were singing "those songs" which, that Friday night at the PICC Plenary Hall, brought me back to a time that’s now only part of beautiful memory. Ah, as Rico sings in Kapalaran (Tagalog version of The Way We Were), "alaala nang tayo’y..."

Thank you, "Fab Four," for your well-loved OPMs and for Rico’s recycled jokes that never fail to tickle everybody’s funnybone.

And, most especially, thank you, Stylistics. You are everything, indeed! Thank you ever so much for the old familiar songs that, God bless you, make me feel brand-new. (E-mail reactions at [email protected])