Listening to the Rocky Fellers!

Finally able to get this record by this 1960s Fil-American vocal group... the Rocky Fellers. They scored two Billboard Top 100 hits prior to the British Invasion of 1964 after which they disappeared from the charts!

The Unheard of Music: The Shore

September 2004. I was at Kim’s Video and Music (in St. Mark’s) as I went once a week. Kim’s was known to cater to indie and underground bands. You wouldn’t find too much mainstream music here. This was where I lucked out the previous year bumping into the members of Billy Corgan’s old band, Zwan. In many stores like Kim’s in the US and UK, there are oft free cd samplers, stickers, zines and other stuff by the entrance or the counter.

This time, a dude came over and handed over a cd sampler. He asked if I was into bands like the Verve and Oasis. I said yes to which he offered, Then give this band a try handing me a cd sampler (the cd on the right).

He played his copy on a discman. And I liked it. It was heavily influenced by the Verve all right. I bought the album on cd as well.

It turned out this band, the Shore, were signed by Madonna’s label, Maverick Records. And they had all these junior account execs going around Manhattan giving free listens. The Shore was to play in NYC in a week.

They recorded two more albums but I haven’t been able to get them. I think they are still around. They just didn’t hit the big time as by 2004, Brit Rock bands had run their course. In fact, around that time, the Verve’s lead singer Richard Ashcroft had embarked on a solo album that didn’t do well either.

Nicole Asensio: On Razorback and shapeshifting

Nicole Asensio: On Razorback and shapeshifting

by rick olivares

The cat is out of the bag.

Hard rock band Razorback is out to record a new album… without their longtime vocalist, Kevin Roy, and instead feature a variety of singers. One of who is the alluring and multi-talented Nicole Laurel Asensio who has on occasion subbed the hard rock act.

We sat down with Asensio last Saturday, June 23 at Promenade, Greenhills; on a humid morning yet the skies threatening a downpour. Nicole, in a sleeveless shirt, jeans, and her long beautiful hair bouncing around walked towards the coffee shop for the interview. She smiled and at once, she was like that ray of sunshine on this otherwise dreary day.

Pleasantries exchanged and a necessary compliment on her beauty out of the way, we get down to business.

I have to ask, if she is concerned that people view her only as a pretty face talent de damned. “Not at all,” she dispels with nary a tinge of incredulity. In fact, she shows she ornery. “I cannot go on stage and wonder how people will wonder about my singing. I just focus on my job and I love my job.”

But what is her job?

When Nicole was in school, she dreamt of being a writer of non-fiction. Instead, she became a singer; one first trained in the classical style. But since then, she’s dabbled with rock with her former crew, General Luna, and big band jazz; something she does to this day. And there’s singing with Razorback.

It doesn’t end there. She also designs rings and jewelry. Suddenly, I think of Galadriel from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and her quote to Frodo: “Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn.”

Fortunately, megalomania isn’t on Nicole’s mind. She laughs rather mischievously. “I’m just an ordinary person with many an interest,” she simply said.

She is wearing one of her designed rings and while I am not an authority on jewelry design, I am still impressed.

Nicole takes a step back. She first got into jewelry design as a means to remember her father who passed away last year. “I had all these physical bits and pieces of my relationship with my father – a bracelet, a necklace, and other things. I melted them down and created something that I could wear all the time and make me remember him,” she shared.

And that’s the crux of her designs – something with meaning.

“I am lucky because most of my clients are people I know,” she said. “I design something that fits in their budget range. I design it for their lifestyle – is it for daily use, or for special occasions? What stones matter to you? What colors do you gravitate towards? And I try to be sustainable with materials. I also do a “witness ring” as it is called. Say you have someone who wants to propose to their significant other. Instead of spending a huge amount on a new ring and big diamond. Maybe they can go to people who mean those most to them such as their parents, their aunts and uncles, or a best friend and get the little pieces the broken clasp or things and melt them down and include them in the ring’s composition.”

Asensio hasn’t gone to school for this. It’s a passion project and when she gets into something such as jazz, she looks into it and learns it with all her heart and soul.

“I do need to go to a proper school for this and to get certification,” she conceded. “So for now, I only go to friends. I enjoy it because it is something I am busy with among others when I am not performing.”

“Maybe when I am done performing, this is something I will get into full time. One day, I guess.”

However, for now, her days are mostly filled with music.

After she left, General Luna, Nicole embarked on a risky solo career and released a solo album that dabbled into all sorts of different genres. One of which is jazz and big band music (first with the AMP Big Band and lately with the Project 201 Big Band).

“A friend of mine, saxophonist Michael Guevarra, pushed me to get into big band and jazz,” she related. “He said, ‘you perform rock music, right? Well, bakit ka matatakot sa jazz? It has the discipline of classical and the freedom of rock and roll.’ I never thought it that way so I tried and now, I love it!”

And lately, there’s performing with Razorback; news that has made the wires following the news that the band parted ways with their longtime singer, Kevin Roy.

“I have been friends with the band for quite some time and have seen many of their shows. I never thought I’d be singing with them,” she gushed.

Following Roy’s footsteps hasn’t been easy. There has been some backlash to an extent. It has caused Asensio some consternation and she has answered her critics. Having done so, she says that she is just happy right now that the band has asked her to perform with them.  

Singing with Razorback isn’t easy. It requires the right amount of angst and moxie to pull off.  Asensio is firmly aware of that: “I cannot do what Kevin did. He is amazing and unique. I can only bring in my own stamp to Razorback’s style,” explained Nicole.

Apparently, the band loves it. They frequently invite her to front them and have asked her to perform vocal duties for an upcoming album. “Of course, I said ‘yes!’ They will have to pry away that opportunity from my cold dead fingers,” she laughed with excitement.

If necessity is the mother of invention, well, Nicole Asensio is the daughter of reinvention.

“When I perform – whether before with General Luna, as a solo artist, with the big bands, or with Razorback, I draw from my many experiences to pull out for those different performances. It isn’t easy but as a professional, you need to get it done Shapeshifting is not everyone’s book but in mine, it is.”

Aye, the shape shifter cometh.

And she’s looking forward to the opportunities laid out in front of her.

“And to think I was just a fan of Razorback…”

Voltes V theme on flexi disc!

When I was a kid, there was this album released featuring the theme songs of all these Japanese mech cartoons shown on local television. I had that including the cassette but that has been lost to time. So this is the closest I'll get to owning that again.

This was a pricey buy but I am a happy man.

Loving the recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong

Sifting through the Pepe Smith Rockfest debacle

Sifting through the Pepe Smith Rockfest debacle

by rick olivares

I arrived at the Amoranto Stadium, site of the Pepe Smith Rockfest around 5pm in the afternoon. I didn’t want to be bathed under the scorching sun so I opted to go late in the afternoon when the sun was setting. Much to my surprise there were less than 25 people outside the barrier. There were more inside the barrier (a mix of media and band members with a front row seat). By the time I left around 11:30pm, there were – and I counted the people outside the barrier – some 50 folks.

As a music fan who frequently goes to concerts and gigs and buys albums left and right, the performances were great. You have to give credit to the artists who performed because they still gave it their all despite the small number of people in attendance.

As a journalist, I thought the turnout was distressing. I immediately felt for the organizers.

It was surprising that for the sheer number of bands and superstars present that few people watched (I am told that a little over a hundred paying patrons made their way in). Was the pre-show publicity wanting? I can’t say.

I immediately thought back to the Pinoy Bands Superblast Concert of last year at the Cuneta Astrodome. While they had a bigger audience and organizers say ticket sales were very good, there were no-shows and well, large tracts of empty spaces in the venue. But attendance was much better than the Pepe Smith Rockfest. Way better.

There too was the GenWe concert at the UP Sunken Gardens earlier this year. I arrived around 5pm and stayed also until about 12 midnight. That show offered free entrance and as school was still in at UP, there was a captive audience. Yet at most, I’d say that were under a thousand people inside the concert area.

Are live shows dead? Not at all. But it is telling when foreign artists such as Coldplay and Katy Perry come over, the venues are packed. Other international acts such as Dream Theater and Slayer played to good crowds and the patrons forked over the cash for tickets and merch. If anything, it is telling that local artists don’t get much. But that isn’t true for all. The Pulp shows continue to do very well I am told. During the Urban Bandits’ reunion show of two years ago, the B-Side Collective was full to bursting with 500-plus paying patrons (eventually there were close to 700 people in such a small venue). And that is still pretty good because tickets were sold.

The follow up show, Eighties Enough, drew fewer folks at the same venue, but it should be noted that the weather that evening was terrible. With a part of the show area with no roof, it wasn’t fun for the other patrons to get wet so some opted to stay outside the performance area. For sure, some didn’t go there to watch but to hang out. And if you ask me, that’s another problem, you have these hangers-on or groupies who hope to get in for free and not pay for tickets! Nevertheless, the organizers still did well enough not to operate for a loss.

How will the scene grow when you have people unwilling to pay for tickets or even albums? I recall one popular artist asked multiple times by “fans” when will their vinyl release be available for free on Spotify? For the most part, there are few full-time musicians. Most need day jobs just to make ends meet. I do recall talking to a drummer for a popular band who said during their heyday, they all quit their day jobs because the money was very good. But that was then, is it still true today?

Times have certainly changed. As a kid, I went to the Loyola Jam, a huge concert held at the Ateneo de Manila grounds (around the time of the Juan Dela Cruz Band’s release of their last album Kahit Anong Mangyari in 1981) and featured Maria Cafra, Sampaguita, and many others. The venue was packed. I attended some of those concerts at the Ultra and the Araneta Coliseum featuring bands like the Dawn, Identity Crisis and others and they too drew huge crowds.

As for album sales, remember when the standard for local album sales was 20,000 for gold and 40,000 for platinum? Now, its half or even less than that.

Times have also changed because aside from downloads and streaming and changes in buying as well as listening habits, before there were fewer of events. So you can say that they were sort of like the only game in town and people packed them.

Yet in this day and age of the internet, streaming, and a multitude of events being staged, people have more choices for entertainment. What also recording artists also fail to understand is that the internet has made it harder to be noticed. There is just so much information out there that is now impossible to see everything.

Case in point, during the Pepe Smith Rockfest, Buddy Zabala, the former Eraserheads and the Dawn bassist who is now with Hilera saw me wearing a shirt of Canadian punk rockers, Metz, who performed the night before at Mow’s. “They were here?” he asked me. He didn’t know. Talking to the Darwin Soneja of Sleeping Boy Collective, the organizers of many an underground show, he said, “Obviously, social media isn’t enough.”

When Sleeping Boy Collective brought over Boston-based post-hardcore band, The Saddest Landscape, I missed the show. I didn’t know. And that’s me who always keeps a look out for these shows.

It is no longer enough that one has a music video and a launch. You need to sustain everything. As the old advertising adage is even more true than ever – out of sight; out of mind.

The Rockfest debacle also brings to the surface several nagging issues.

One other is the payment or lack thereof of the artists. While the organizer of the Pepe Smith Rockfest has finally surfaced after coming out of hiding to say he will pay the artists, it should be known that not all the artists were offered a talent fee. Only some.

And this begs the question, why is it this way? And to think that the local music scene is alive and well. There are more gigging places than ever. There are more bands putting out their own product nowadays.

During last year’s Fete dela Musique, some of the bands also raised the issue of non-fees. If you go around many of the different clubs and bars that offer live music, most bands aren’t even paid. You’re lucky if you’re a superstar artist (and there are only few) with a resume that is as long as Edsa because you know you will get something. But most do not.

The bars make money. Am not sure about the organizers. For sure some do and some don’t.

During a recent show at Centris, there were a number of bands present performing at the launch of this product but no one was paid. Not even for their food.

A longtime musician who has made Singapore his home in the last two decades (performing and teaching kids how to play the guitar), wondered about coming back to the Philippines. A few of his friends strongly advised against it. “You aren’t going to make the money you are making in Singapore over here,” cautioned one.

And there’s the matter of physical sales from albums. Some bands do well. I was there for the album launch of Ang Bandang Shirley’s third offering, Favorite. Easily, they sold over 500 compact discs; maybe even more. And at P500 a pop, that’s pretty good. Or is it?

In many an article for abs-cbnnews.com, we have written about many indie and underground artists going abroad for record deals. They sell more product abroad as opposed to domestically.

During the recent Sandwich 20^th Anniversary concert at the Metro Tent, there was a huge crowd that came to watch and pay good money to see this awesome band. And the SVIP crowd that paid P1,500 also got a seven-inch vinyl record. Post-show, many others wanted to get the record as well.

There aren’t concrete answers or even sure fire solutions to all the concerns sweeping through the local music scene. For sure the problems that plagued Pepe Smith Rockfest will be something any big future concert promoter (as well as the bands themselves) will have to think about.

Hopefully, this will be a turning point for the better.