Caught between rock ‘n’ roll and a hard place
I will not die today,” whispered mortified me inside a small aircraft wobbling over a farm in Scotland, clutching my bag of peanuts.
This was not how I am supposed to end my freaky, faulty tenure on earth. I imagine my grand exit to be with Black Sabbath and a girl named Ameri in Hitler’s secret bunker, buffeting on happy chemicals and “Vol. 4” on Japanese-pressed ’70s vinyl in ungodly, practically illegal volumes, ready as ever to meet my maker or, well, un-maker. Yes, meeting the Grim Reaper with a daffy un-sober smile on my snow-blinded face. Not on a plane bound for Edinburgh. Not with pop star Pink!
So many weird, wonky yet oftentimes wonderful things have happened to me in the course of my travels for The STAR. (If not for my editor and this paper, I’d probably be working as a biramaki or a DJ for a KTV joint on Nakpil or Bocobo Street, cueing epic, tempo-shifting Korean ballads, doing “Zounds… deejay!” spiels. And definitely wishing I was a writer. Well, I still wish that, lots of times.)
See, I’ve been such a lucky Snow, er, bastard. I was chauffeured in a black Benz around New York City by a Cuban named Marcos (2007) who had driven J. Lo before to an event (as J. Lo drove him nuts); walked into the lobby of Blakemore Hotel in Morrissey’s London straight into a gathering presided by Imelda and her court (2004); went with a tall, ex-soldier named Dimitri to a club on the seamy side of Moscow called Karma hounded by drug pushers (2009); got serenaded by a fat, mustachioed man near a bratwurst stand in Vienna who thought I was an Asian woman (2009); went to the spots in Las Vegas described by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing — first stop was Circus Circus which HST called the “site of the Sixth Reich” — and ran into an Ethiopian fellow who bellowed, “Vegas is built like Ancient Rome — albeit with slot machines and Celine Dion…” (2007).
Oh, and I met an entire photo album of crazy diamonds along the way.
Such as…
The writer from another newspaper who disappeared on the second day of our assignment in the Lion City to cover the Singapore Art Festival, only to reappear on the day of our flight back to Manila carrying 11 shopping bags. The bitch wanted to distribute her bags so she wouldn’t have to pay for excess baggage. Computer said, “No!”
An Indian reporter who did a No. 2 in the toilet during a tech tour of Japan. Our entire group walked in and he was stuck in the cubicle, not knowing how the high-tech seat works. (This one had a censor: just walk away and it does its job automatically.) Another reporter, a prankster from Hong Kong, told him it was “voice-activated.” A few minutes later, we could hear the man inside the cubicle intoning, “Flush, flush... flush!”
An official from the Philippine Department of Tourism who stood before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin as our tour guide talked about its rich history — how Napoleon marched to the city and appropriated the Quadriga as a spoil of war, how the Nazis used the Gate as a party symbol, how the place has become emblematic of both division and reunification, etc. Our government official was silent for while, as if contemplating the weight of history and the sublime power of architecture, and then she spoke while looking around: “Wala bang Starbucks dito?”
I love these people. They make me look sane. 
But the rockers, of course, get the highlight. Watching gigs, going to press conferences, interviewing musicians as arranged by record labels — you would surely get an epiphany or a chuckle or both. And maybe, just maybe, you’d catch a glimpse of Beyoncé’s majestic thighs and Christina Aguilera’s luscious butt from the front row of your delirium.
Be here now
“You’re the guys who’re late,” Noel Gallagher told me at one of the function rooms of Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong in 2006. I was with Nigel Gamalong, then-station manager of the old K-Lite, and we had scurried like rats from the Hong Kong to Kowloon sides to get to the roundtable interview — with our flight delayed, the Tsim Sha Tsui trains full and other horrors. The Oasis guitarist looked dismayed (imagine having to answer the same questions all over again), but he granted us a five-minute interview.
I didn’t want to ask him about his quarrels with his brother and Oasis lead singer Liam Gallagher and all that tabloid fodder. That would piss him off even more.
So I asked him about his first guitar. The man’s face lit up.
“I bought my first electric in a shop called Johnny’s Roadhouse, and I still have it,” Noel said. “I wouldn’t consider myself a great guitarist. (In terms of guitar solos,) the good ones are spontaneous, not the ones you have to work at.”
The rest of the afternoon glory was spent just chatting about guitars. Big red Gibsons, shiny pink Telecasters, all kinds.
The lesson: forget the master plan and just roll with it.
A night like this
Robert Smith and The Cure did a concert at the Asia World Expo Arena in Hong Kong in 2007. The band — Smith and Porl Thompson on guitars, Simon Gallup on bass and Jason Cooper on drums — played for three hours, doing one encore (Let’s Go To Bed, Close To Me) and then another (A Forest, Boys Don’t Cry).
“This is the longest set we’ve ever played in our f*cking lives,” Smith told the audience. No lessons here: sometimes all you need to do is listen to a man sing about dust on the lips of a vision of hell and a few of his favorite things from the edge of a deep green sea. The damned singing for the doomed. Oh, what a happy night it was.
Heartache tonight
“Do you want to watch the Eagles perform at the Nokia Theater in LA?” asked a record label executive in 2007.
“Do I have to sign in blood? Well, of course!”
The Eagles had a reputation for decadence and assorted devilry. Lore has it that it’s Anton Szandor LaVey peering through the window of the Beverly Hills Hotel on the “Hotel California” album cover. Bollocks, maybe. But these things fueled the myths surrounding the band in the ’70s — all pink champagne on ice and beasts on your back — before the breakup and word wars (“hell freezing over” and such), and then the mighty return in a more corporate form.
At the gig itself it helped that I listened beforehand thoroughly to the album being promoted at that time, “Long Road Out of Eden.” Well, it’s not “The Long Run” or “Desperado,” but I found it mildly enjoyable listening to the new Eagles songs, as opposed to the other concertgoers zoning out in between Life in the Fast Lane and One of These Nights.
I checked out of Nokia Theater with some songs to remember and some songs to never forget.
MY LOVELY LADY LUMPS
When Apl.de.ap (Allen Pineda), Will.I.Am (Will Adams), Taboo (Jaime Gomez) and Fergie (Stacy Ferguson) of the Black Eyed Peas entered the pressroom for the 2004 MTV Music Awards in Singapore, the reporters looked intimidated. No one wanted to pop a question at first. But one local journo mustered enough courage, stood up and asked a fateful query.???
Singaporean reporter: This question is for Apl. Hi, Apl! What do you think of Singaporean guys????
APL: (Stunned) Uh…????
SINGAPOREAN REPORTER: You must have met some last night. What can you say about them????
APL: (Still stunned) Uh…????
SINGAPOREAN REPORTER: (Looking strangely at Fergie, and not Apl) Well, Apl. What can you say????
FERGIE: Oh no, my name is Fergie. He is Apl (laughing while pointing at Pineda).???
SINGAPOREAN REPORTER: Oh… Oh!????
Everyone in that pressroom started guffawing. Talk about getting your Peas all mixed up.
Now your animal’s gone
A year before that, also in Singapore, Suede singer Brett Anderson was asked how come Suede doesn’t sound like the band that recorded anarchical, sexually ambivalent tunes like Animal Nitrate or Metal Mickey. Brett answered something like this: I am not a young punk anymore, so you’re not going to hear a young punk on the record.
“Now, I’m trying to express myself as a 35-year-old man,” he explained.?”There are fluctuations of mind. As an artist, you have a duty to express that. I want to be a member of the human race — and not fit myself in a coffin.”
Brett added that he has no choice but to sing his age, his temperament, whoever he is at the moment. No more cross-dressing, androgynous yawps about pantomime horses. That’s what he Suede.
HOLIDAY IN THE SUN
In August 2008, I watched the Sex Pistols reunite in Japan. And it wasn’t just a rock ‘n’ roll show. The Sex Pistols and a thousand trembling lambs was what it was.
The legendary Johnny Rotten had gotten portly, but he still sang menacingly like the Hunchback of Finsbury Park of old. (“The king is gone but he’s not forgotten,” as Neil Young once sang. “This is the story of Johnny Rotten.”) Johnny grinned, he grimaced and he made clownish faces. “Nippon boys and girls very quiet, very shy,” he noticed at one point, wondering why they were afraid of Uncle Johnny. He told them to loosen up. “We cannot hear you for we are very old men.”
God Save the Queen made the moment more golden. The venue became a huge karaoke joint as punks from Japan and the rest of the world sang, “No future, no future, no future for you!” All together! I haven’t experienced anything — in any concert or with any other band — like it since.
So, what does the future hold for the concertgoers, I asked myself. Some boarded their respective planes, trains and automobiles to go back to their dead-end jobs and dead-end relationships, and continued that mad parade called life. But each one of us could always revisit that magical night at the Summer Sonic Festival with the Sex Pistols. We could always go back to “Never Mind The Bollocks” and know how it is to be a poison in the human machine, a flower in the dustbin. Listen closely, that’s the sound of England dreaming. God save the Sex Pistols, God save the… My reverie was cut short when a massive man bumped into me and I bore the full frontal brunt of his anarchic body odor.
Punk’s not dead; it just smelled funny.
Yeah! yeah! yeah!
When I came back from Japan, my head was as a big as a beach ball. I being the bearer of bragging rights.
I was in a bar in Quezon City with two other guys: a gallery owner and a record collector. I said, “Name the greatest band you’ve ever seen live. For me it’s the Pistols!”
Sari the gallery owner answered, “I saw the Allman Brothers at the Cow Palace, Bay Area, I think in 1973.”
Much as I love Duane and Gregg Allman, for me the Pistols are the most exciting misfits and mercenaries ever to play rock ‘n’ roll. That band created a hell of a revolution.
The other guy was silent. I asked, “So, Allen, what’s the best concert you’ve ever seen?”
The man smiled and said, “I saw The Beatles with my mom at the Rizal Memorial Stadium in 1966.”
Ding, ding, ding… we have a winner.
You do it to yourself
In one of the rooms of the Okura Hotel in Tokyo in 2003, I was able to interview the Greenwood Brothers (guitarist Jonny and bassist Collin) of Radiohead. A reporter from Malaysia famously asked them, “What equipment are you bringing in?”
D’oh!
Collin answered, sarcastically, “About two small suitcases. (They’re) all miniaturized, so when we get to the venue, we get to inflate them (laughs).”
“We can take a piano around now,” added Jonny. “We’ll take what we can.”
Collin delivers the punch line. “And it only takes two to three lorries to do so.”
Downstairs, at the hotel lobby, would be Thom Yorke. And we would get into a conversation about washing shirts. No alarms, less detergent.
No distance left to run
In the same year, the boys from Blur are holding a press conference to promote “Think Tank” at the Hotel New Otani also in Tokyo. Graham Coxon had just left the band for nebulous reasons. (Damon Albarn, Alex James and Dave Rowntree would later reunite with Graham — but that was five years into the future.) So, the record label reps told us journalists that one cardinal rule to rule ‘em all: “There will be no Graham Coxon questions in this press conference.”
The first question posed by a reporter from Hong Kong, “During festival time, do you miss Graham Coxon?”
This is spinal tap lite
The guys from The Darkness entered the pressroom — Edinburgh, 2003. Bassist Frankie Poullain asked the press, “Why are you guys sitting down and taking notes?” Somebody quietly told him that he’s in a press conference.
“A press conference?” he snickered. “I thought it was a modesty panel.”
In the same event, Chemical Brothers’ Ed Simons was reminded that the Bros lost the Best Dance Award to Punjabi MC at the MTV Europe Music Awards.
Ed confessed, “I feel f*ckin’ pissed off.”
Tom Rowlands tried to diffuse his partner’s anger. “It’s a good song, though.”
Ed blurted out, “One good song doesn’t make a songer.”
In Barcelona in 2002, a reporter in Goth getup rose to ask Marilyn Manson a question. “By the way,” answered Manson. “I am not your father.”
The weirdest moment of all in that gig in Spain? Two words: Las Ketchup.
Just another manic medley
There will be other encounters, of course.
I ran into Chick Corea outside the Hong Kong Cultural Centre after watching him and John McLaughlin in the Five Peace Band concert. Local guitar hero Francis Reyes and his then-girlfriend pointed out the legendary pianist/keyboardist/band leader as I was about to go to the 7-Eleven across the street.
I listened to Norah Jones play a baby grand piano in a small bar in Hong Kong called JJ’s and Norah covered Gram Parsons’ She. She was 23 years old at that time. Tsingtao beer never tasted better.
I saw Marilyn Manson in a natty suit in Barcelona, waited in vain for the Rolling Stones in Bangkok, went inside Abbey Road Studios and touched the piano that Paul must’ve played in A Day In The Life, listened to Michael Stipe talk about the future of music, got on a plane with Pink…
And lived, dammit. Lived to tell these tales.
* * *
Thank you: Twinky Lagdameo, Nigel Gamalong, Ali Yu, Christine Yu, Rod Nepomuceno, Lizette Claudio, Charley Bautista, Dickey Aracama, Roslyn Reyes, Ramon Jacinto Jr., Wilson Cruz, Ricky Ilacad, Anne Poblador, Grace Foronda, Tanya Taguba, JV Colayco, Chris Sy, Jesmond Chua, Jelly Fujita, Francis Reyes, RFL, MMM, and the man in the mac who said I’ve got to go back.
