The 'Jingle' interviews
The chordbook magazine of our long-lost youth began in San Juan, but it was at its second home on Annapolis Street, Cubao where I first met the Guillermo family that ran the bi-monthly publication. In late 1976 or early ’77 I joined an essay-writing contest of the magazine, “How much has rock changed your life,” the prize for which was a year’s free subscription and publication of the winning essay, even if only on the flyleaf along with the chords and special offers and a photo of the muse Myra.
It was several years into martial law, and people needed an outlet, a release valve for all the creative, quasi revolutionary ferment brewing inside, and Jingle magazine provided one, though it was to be later renamed Twinkle for reasons of re-registration under the new regime. Only much later, when things seemed to have settled down on the surface and the disiplina-ang-kailangan mindset was already perhaps well ingrained, did the chordbook reclaim its original name. But whether Twinkle or Jingle, it was how the generation of that decade learned to play guitar, which was in a way a sort of long firearm, even for the sake of metaphor, though some did take up real M16s and go to the mountains.
Annapolis is a side street perpendicular to Aurora Boulevard, just before the trilogy of movie theaters Diamond, Remar, and Coronet going east, and the chordbook offices were so nondescript you could walk past it, the façade of printing machines blending well with the jeepney terminals and turo-turo stands, and the general hubbub of Cubao at the height of vertigo.
When I went to claim my prize one morning late did I first get to meet Gilbert, the magazine’s big boss and eldest son of the Guillermo clan, and we talked for sometime in his, at the time, makeshift office, and before I knew it he had assigned me my next piece, a personal essay on the Beatles to be used for a special edition they were putting out of all the Beatles songs with chords, from Please Please Me to Let It Be.
As the saying goes, one thing led to another, and soon I was writing more or less regularly for the chordbook, one of the first interviews being with guitarist Johnny Alegre in the apartment of Mike Jamir, on Arayat Street fronting the old Farmer’s Market across the highway, and for which I had to borrow a trusty cassette recorder of a high school buddy, as I was forewarned I would need it to keep up with Johnny’s machinegun prattle.
By late 1977 the magazine was preparing to move a few blocks south off P. Tuazon, still in Cubao on 7th Avenue, but closer to SM and Ali Mall. One of the last sessions on Annapolis was a despedida for record reviewer Benjie Umayam before he and his twin sister Ruthie migrated to New York, and over endless rounds of beer with the racket of the printing machines in the background, Gilbert was telling Benjie that if ever he got to write for Rolling Stone he should change his name to Filipino Umayam.
The move to 7th Avenue was a welcome morale booster for the Jingleclan, as employees of the magazine were known, as a full-fledged editorial department was being set up with its own room on the second floor. Gilbert assigned the nitty-gritty of the editorial work — i.e., assigning record reviews, interviews, feature articles and editing them — to two young women, Ces Rodriguez (now with Yahoo Philippines) and Pennie Azarcon de la Cruz (now executive editor of Sunday Inquirer Magazine). In that second floor office I also ran into Rina Jimenez David, the columnist, Pennie’s best friend from UST days and both of them newly married. A dropout from the pontifical university and also a clan regular was Eric Gamalinda, who I first read in the chordbook’s special section “These pages tell a story” long before I joined the magazine’s life-changing rock contest, whose prose antedated Morrissey years before the Prufrock ‘n’ roll band the Smiths were conceived.
It was at Eric’s house on Matimyas Street in Sampaloc, with his many brothers and sisters, that we listened to records we had recently procured for review, sometimes over alcohol and stuff, and their old yaya who was a deadringer for Mrs. Wormwood in Calvin and Hobbes also seemed to take a liking to Rod Stewart’s You Keep Me Hanging On or Fleetwood Mac’s Secondhand News or the Doobie Brothers’ Echoes of Love.
On 7th Avenue a quiet walk from the editorial offices was a carinderia cum beer garden — the only thing lacking was a jukebox, but there were already too many songs playing in our head anyway — where many of the artists, layout, grin page or otherwise, hung out. Roxlee with his drafts of Cesar Asar, Ludwig Ilio with his strips of Richie Yu and the Heavenly Kwang Chow Beef Band and their gigs in Tan Lung’s House of Ill Repute, both of them the one-two punch of the NU College of Architecture. The forays of Ludwig and Rox with main layout supervisor Ogie Tupas into the mean streets of Chinatown were the stuff of literature, Henry Miller-style deep in the tropics, complete with X-rated, humorous scenes. And right about before Ogie left for Los Angeles never to return to the home country, his father went hunting for printing press toughies (not Lud and Rox) who had beaten up his son in a drinking binge the night before, a gun tucked conspicuously in his waist.
Of course we were hardly aware that the clan was making history at the time, how could we when things and the semblance of things moved about in a blur and a haze, sometimes purple indeed, the long bus ride to interview Maria Cafra in Olongapo, or swigging a lapad of ESQ rum in Burnham Park to build up courage to interview Sampaguita.
A friend drowned in Vigan, and her brother got busted with a joint in the second New Moon concert at Araneta Coliseum, and many years later the chordbook is mentioned in a song by Sandwich, nostalgic for the days of Betamax. The magazine would also make it to the NU Rock Awards Hall of Fame, the now defunct radio station that deserves a place in the same hall.
One night in Oarhouse in Malate, the cinematographer Nap Jamir says that, yes, that would be a good idea, if you’re going to make a documentary on Jingle, count me in. On the ides of March who should come to the apartment but Chuck Escasa, filmmaker of lost groups, and could he interview us for a documentary film on the chordbook that changed our rock and roll lives?
