A fruitcake for everybody

Many things have happened in a year since Mother died. A score of that more since the release of the Eraserheads’ first album “Ultraelectromagneticpop” in 1993, the first songs of which were heard over a bootleg radio station with dubious signal, LA 105. Including the single, Pare Ko, which Mom may or may not have heard playing on a battered cassette in the now intensely renovated old homestead, where even the golden shower could not stand such changes.

“’Di ba ‘t*ng ina/Nagmukha akong tanga/Pinaasa nya lang ako/Lecheng pag-ibig ‘to” in the original was watered down in the recorded version, to “’Di ba nanghiya/nagmukha akong tanga…”, possibly a record executive’s decision to minimize cuss words so as not to upset mothers including the Virgin Mary, though when was the last time you heard an unrequited love song with three swear words in a single verse? In that aspect alone the E-heads broke ground.

We’d listen for it on the radio mornings on Conchu Street off Vito Cruz while doing chores, and the babies in the house one after another learned how to walk, one while holding a balloon’s plastic handle, the kid more than a year old by then. A neighbor, guitarist Nitoy Adriano, formerly of The Jerks, would stroll past the house on the way to market on Dian Street close to noon. He lived a couple of blocks down closer to Salome Tan Pre-School, where our daughters first learned the alphabet.

I wrote a letter to the E-heads frontman Ely Buendia once, sort of to shoot the crap in my column in a weekly women’s magazine in the ’90s, something like 20 questions, and to my surprise he answered, point for point, in a special magazine the band came out with at the height of their popularity. It was the time of Overdrive, and both of us were learning how to drive, he in a newly purchased vehicle the fruit of royalties, me in my father’s battered old Beetle.

Nights after closing the magazine on Roces Avenue, Quezon City, we’d somehow amble on down to Scout Tobias corner lower Timog, where the original Red Rocks stood like a hole in the tantric wall, and there among the habitués of drinkers downstairs by the Mediterranean kebabs the members of E-heads must have occasionally huddled, too, Raymund and Buddy and Marcus with all the sweaty brethren, and if we got lucky we could hear Karen Kunawicz blowing our mind wishing she were Jimi Hendrix’s guitar.

Poetry readings were a fixture, too, at Red Rocks, which later became Club Dredd, and the Eraserheads graduated from UP’s Narra dormitory and onto the hardboiled recording world. After “Ultraelectro” came that album with the jellyfish-like cover, and a song like Alapaap inspired a congressional investigation by our honorable lawmakers at the time not yet known as lawbreakers, and Magasin and Ang Huling El Bimbo completely rearranged the pop landscape short of getting us to look a bit closer at the covers and layout of magazines on sidewalks in Baclaran, where on a quick moving bus you could perhaps catch a glimpse of a girl who resembled Paraluman.

Then one Christmas what should come crawling to the shelves of bookstores but Fruitcake, both the book and the album, which made for a perfect gift for the hip and cool, ages seven to 70. Probably Jessica Zafra was managing them then, which only highlighted the band’s already literary bent. There’s an extensive essay out on that album in the mostly online publication Manila Review, a word of which I could barely understand, short of making me dust off the mothballed cassettes in search of Fruitcake, likely now all moldy and sticky stuck-up tape, the best was still to Google it, to YouTube it.

“There’s a fruitcake for everybody/there’s a fruitcake for everyone…” words that are a tribute to the simple joy of eating the holiday cake and spreading cheer around, for what gift most passes different hands during the season, and lasts longest in the refrigerator? The way the E-heads sing it, it’s like the old story about the loaves and fishes, although more on the metaphysical, B-side of it.

At the annual Cine-Manila, members of the E-heads sometimes hung out, they had designs to make films of their own, well at least Ely and Marcus did, fingering the pika-pika at premiers in their hats and leather, while nearby the mother-and-daughter tandem Isabel and Mara Lopez turned heads 361 degrees à la Exorcist, the film fest presenting big boobs or a big boost to fledgling careers. Tikoy, needless to say, was smiling behind his moustache.

But you’d never hear Ely mouthing the inane phrase “Career muna” in talk shows for the dumb and dumbed down; for him it was always the music, the Mongols, Pupil, and lately the Oktaves, where Nitoy joins him after buying fish and veggies at the talipapa, Pare Ko playing as usual the song in our collective heads. How can you translate “’Di ba ‘t*ng ina nagmukha akong tanga”? It’s like saying my love for her was such that even if it were requited, it would remain unrequited (Ruis). Let them eat fruitcake, and the Virgin Mary weep at the thousands perished in the storm, like wood of golden showers in the storm.

Ultra, electro, magnetic, alrighty.