There was a drizzle falling when the taxi arrived outside the network’s gates near the art gallery-cum-café owned by Ces and Rock Drilon, and as we scrambled for change to break a bill to pay the fare, the band was playing one of Yano’s hits that helped define a decade, Esem.
Pan’s core are Dong Abay and Onie Badiang, vocalist/songwriter and bassist, respectively, of Yano. After the riveting show, which was the first time we saw Pan live, Badiang told us during a customary usap-usap that the third member of Yano, guitarist Eric Gancio, has returned to Davao and has formed a new band with the same name.
Badiang himself is from Davao, and before Yano was part of Joey Ayala’s band Bagong Lumad. We met him for the first time in 1988 during the total solar eclipse in Davao, where he and Lumad drummer Noe Tio were starting a cottage industry of tastefully designed T-shirts in the backyard of the Ayala home.
Abay we recall running into in Quezon City, in the UP Village apartment of the Lumads on Mahusay St., when Onie was starting to play session bass for Yano.
We had interviewed Dong just before the band was to perform at the nearby ’70s Bistro, where they did a rousing version of one of their more enduring songs, Beta Pyucha.
That same punk mindset and take-no-prisoners stance are still very much in evidence many years later, when Pan this time courtesy of Abay and Badiang and two new faces on the rhythm section punk up the book launch crowd and take no hostages as the band ripped through songs from the debut "Parnaso ng Payaso" as well as samples from the old Yano repertoire.
Among others, there are some songs we’d already heard over the radio, as well as one that made our hair or whatever’s left of it stand on end, Gusto, which could well capture the nadir of an affair, any affair.
As a songwriter, Abay has the sensibility to capture a particular moment in our bohemian existence, as had already been amply demonstrated in a verse or two of Esem, where the protagonist has only enough spare change to buy a couple of cigarettes.
In Gusto, Abay cannot be any less effective in describing a parting of ways: "Ayaw mo sa gusto ko/ gusto ko sa ayaw mo/ Ikaw ay hindi ako/ Ako ay hindi sa ’yo." Still, one could say that it is an authentic Muse poem because as per the experts’ criteria, it passes the A.E. Housman test: Does it make the hair bristle?
After the show too we reminisce about the old days in UP Village, and learn that Onie the last holdout on Mahusay has in fact moved to a new digs along Visayas Ave. And yes, that was his toddler child we saw he was walking with on the road to Claret Church some months ago.
As for Dong, no he hasn’t seen much of Mercy of late, the very same Larraine Onassis who considered anyone within spitting distance a prostitute, political or otherwise. Dong has also married Ninj (short for Ninja?) and has a kid, but as his spiel between songs goes, he still commutes by tricycle and jeep because he doesn’t have three cars like the Parokya ni Edgar vocalist does.
I admit having made a mistake in commenting to Onie that "mas gamay mo ang bass," to which he replied, "oo naghahanap nga ako ng gitarista, e." Because after hearing the complimentary copy of "Parnaso," which Dong refused to sign because the ink would run on the glossy surface, it was evident that Onie could play a mean guitar as well, with the lines strongly rhythmic, like Elvis Costello.
Huling Hiling is an appropriate anthem for anyone on death row or whoever feels condemned or whose sad sack days are numbered. "Punk" and "pang-artist" is how Onie described Pan’s music, and powered by so many beers on the way out, we mentioned the possible title for the article we had in mind: "The band that never sold out."
Another band not likely to compromise is Radioactive Sago Project led by the poet and cineaste Lourd de Veyra, who himself must be a father by now. Sago, which shot to prominence with its no-nonsense melding of jazz, beat and hip-hop and hard rock elements, launched earlier this year at Green Papaya on Maginhawa St. an EP disc of five songs, "Before Monkey Jump, Give Him Banana."
The EP, in the tradition of potentially great EPs where the songs alternately lunge at you, do headstands and somersaults and assorted acrobatic adlibs, proves that nothing is sacred for Sago and there is life after baboy.
The band is hardly a one-hit wonder, though they are best known by that oft-requested song from the debut CD, Gusto ko ng Baboy, already generating a cult of vegetarians rolling in their cups.
We have more where that came from in "Before Monkey Jump," with the curiously narrative Astro – a send-up of ad spots and other seamy commercial breaks – as well as the wondrously sarcastic Huwag Kang Maingay May Naglalaba.
"Is that Jose Pidal? You know, money laundering?" we asked Lourd during a screening of a movie where we were both part of the non-paying audience.
The guy was as usual non-committal, and I don’t know if I’m inventing this but he may have said something in sly reference to Gloria Labandera, but really the song is open to the wildest interpretations. Sago, for anyone’s wildly depreciated currency, is easily the most literary rock band around, if it can be called a rock band in the first place. They seem to laugh at all labels because we had better keep quiet as someone does the laundry, any kind of laundry. Mabuhay si Jose Pidal!