Tunesmith 2

Before YouTube, there was Tunesmith, first on N. Domingo near corner Blumentritt in San Juan, then in its fadeout days along Aurora Blvd. between a girlie bar and a nondescript joint, in the shadow of LRT2. Before the click of the mouse, there was the request for a vinyl record to be played in the disc jockey’s dark booth, where owner Dennis Yee presided over his turntables and stacks of records accumulated through the years and numbering in the scores of thousands.

Whatever music chaser you fancied to go with your beer and pulutan, you name it and very likely Tunesmith had it. The swing years of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, the redoubtable Benny Goodman whose clarinet was playing through the pinewood trees; Frank Sinatra and the postwar years of reconstruction; Charles Mingus and the age of bebop; Coltrane, McLaughlin, Santana and the deep spirituality of fusion; the Grateful Dead’s Blues for Allah and Bruce Hornsby and the Range’s That’s Just the Way it Is, Blind Faith’s Had to Cry Today and Yes’ Roundabout, Traffic’s Shootout at the Fantasy Factory and Derek and the Dominoes Why Does Love Got to be So Sad live in concert.

Even the most obscure titles he had, but it was not always like that. Dennis Yee was a son of Chinese migrants from the mainland, and as per one of Tunesmith’s old regulars, the keyboardist Rinky Muñoz, the Yee patriarch was the lone sibling who wound up in the Philippines as the rest landed in the United States. “Wrong boat Yee,” Rinky teased Dennis about it, and they both had a good laugh.

Now even the isaw stands by the small tulay have disappeared, and the extensive record collection is nowhere to be found, perhaps to pay back debts for the prohibitive rent at the bar’s Aurora digs, long after Dennis himself passed on due to complications from Parkinson’s disease, the same that has ravaged the great boxer Muhammad Ali and the actor Michael J. Fox.

In the dark of the bar it wasn’t really noticeable, the disc jockey’s shaking hand, his face muscles twitching. The complications weren’t exactly that, but more in a manner of speaking: word had it that a month before he died Dennis tried to take his own life, and spent a month in hospital after drinking poison. Before the muriatic epilogue he had asked friends if they could lend him a gun, the pain was getting unbearable.

“I could not bring myself to visit him in UERM,” Rinky said over beers recently at PVL in Mandaluyong, off Boni Street near the houses that light up every Christmas time.

The keyboard player formerly of Elizabeth Reed and Honeyrush has too resurfaced out of the blue, hair now all white like the Winter brothers. Rinky, cousin of the children’s storybook writer Carla Pacis, has a new band, the 7644 Madhatters, and they have a video or two on, where else, YouTube, something about looking through the looking glass. The reference to Alice in the rabbit hole is perhaps providential.

Why 7644?

“Because when you type it on the phone’s keypad, it spells pogi.”

The Madhatters are one of the few bands with double keyboards, which almost makes them a period piece, yet it is an undeniable distinguishing feature, the same way the Allman Brothers Band sound practically patented the double drums. The Allmans were heavy on syncopation and the elusive downbeat in the rhythm section, the Madhatters in the one video seen posted so far have layers and swirls of keyboards and synthesizers pulling the song forward with its lead and bass. The bassist is also surnamed Muñoz, but without white hair and more shapely. As the video fades out camera pans to Rinky’s T-shirt, on which is written: “Tangna Morine.”

But back at PVL, whose clientele range from broadcasters to basketball players, talk returns to Tunesmith and how the vinyl makes its presence felt when we least expect it.

Is there a place in the cyber city for a Tunesmith 2? And what are your retirement plans by the way?

It may still be possible in a university town, in a city like Dumaguete with its traffic of students hopefully in touch with their analogue subconscious. Or in undiscovered Catbalogan far removed from the scandals of pirated, X-rated DVDs.

Meanwhile this is all just wishful thinking, at least until a new needle is purchased in the dusty maze that is Raon Street these days, whose new name is Gonzalo Puyat, likely a relation of the late basketball czar. But for Dennis we wouldn’t even get to start talking about a Tunesmith 2, a foil to YouTube and doffing the hat to the old days.

A handsome band, a wrong turn, how life changes with one hook of a guitar. Try haggling with the starfruit vendors in their rabbit holes of Sta. Cruz, before setting out in search of a needle in the haystack of Gonzalo Puyat nee Raon nee the memory of Wrong Boat Yee, may he rest and rock and roll.