Popular music is a major part of everyone's adolescence. I, along with high school classmates like Roy Abarquez, Gino Domingo, Ember Fernandez, Luis Mencias, and Gene Olivar, were not only avid music lovers, but record collectors as well. So when a class tipar or dance party was held, a combination of us would be provide records and act as “spinner” for the evening. Since we all lived in Quezon City, we knew what each collection had. This playlist replicates the contents of these record collections, and is arranged in a sequence which simulates the ebbs and flows of what would have actually been played through the night in one of our tipars. I began compiling this sometime in 2010, and have been adding to it ever since. I set down three rules for inclusion. First, all the songs here must have been released between January of 1970 (when I learned of my admission) and April 1974 (when we graduated). Second, I should have remembered each song actually being played in a tipar I attended. And third, each artist/group is limited to a maximum of 3 songs for the sake of diversity. By now, the playlist runs about 9 and a half hours long, contains 141 songs, and is still a work in progress. It begins with Led Zeppelin's call to "Rock and Roll", and it ends with the immortal Pinoy Rock anthem, "Himig Natin". That's enough to cover a typical Philippine Martial Law era "stay-in" party starting at 7pm and ending past 4am.
Some may wonder about the exclusions in this list. It may come as a surprise that many songs we associate with the 70s came either before or after our stay in high school. For example, one of my personal favorites, Chicago’s “Beginnings” was released in 1969 and was therefore axed. “Disco” songs are also conspicuously absent because we were in college by then. Besides dates, there are other reasons for exclusions. There were songs which were either too “baduy”, (ex. anything from Tony Orlando like “Tie A Yellow Ribbon”), too “naive” (Ray Steven’s “Everything Is Beautiful” or The Hillside Singers’ “I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing”), or too “old” (meaning the stuff our elder kin’s generation liked, like The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel and Tom Jones).
In spite of these exclusions, the playlist covers a lot of stylistic ground. Much was happening in the popular music scene, and it is reflected here. There’s a lot of rock music, since the evolution of “heavy” and “metal” rock was in full swing with bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. There’s also a healthy dose of the Motown and Philly soul with veterans like Stevie Wonder and Dianna Ross mixing it up with then-newbies like Michael Jackson. There was American Folk from C,S,N &Y and James Taylor. Plain “pop” music is also represented by The Carpenters and Elton John. Then there was the dawn of “Pinoy Rock” in our senior year with Juan De La Cruz and Anakbayan taking center stage. In general though, no tipar was complete without a generous helping of slow “sweet” ballads, regardless of genre. The longest is the legendary “Sparkling In The Sand”, a nine-minute Bay Area epic which we spinners used to break up a “bakod” in which one boy was unfairly monopolizing a particularly popular girl. There was also the equally legendary “The Stylistics” album, in which the entire nine-song album of slow songs could be played non-stop late in the evening when us DJs wanted to take to the floor too. Then there was Gladys Knight's "The Way We Were" / "Try to Remember" which was released a month before graduation, and the only copy we had was on a cassette recorded on the air from a local radio station. In spite of the exclusions and possibly some biases, I can guarantee that there’s something for everyone here, and that many of these songs will bring back specific memories.
One of the bizarre but wonderful things about these songs is that we somehow found ways of dancing to all of them. It’s clear that dancing, specially for the slow “sweet” ones, was just a convenient excuse to initiate physical contact and satisfy our raging hormones, much to the consternation of our more conservative teachers. On the other hand, the more energetically fast “rugged” songs found us moving our bodies in all sorts of strange ways like head-banging, stomping, air-guitar/air-drums, galloping, strutting, swaying, or whatever weird personal movements we invented on the spot. For example, I cannot for the life of me remember or understand how on earth we danced to Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” with all its syncopations and unexpected stops and starts. Structured dancing came very late, initially in 4th year social dance PE class, and then in the summer of 1974 just after graduation, where choreographed dances like the “12-step” and the “LA Walk” laid the foundation for the “disco” craze of our college years. In a way, we were the last of the maskipaps generation, when any body movement was possible, and everything was tried, no matter how awkward.
So you can either get up and go crazy or slow down and hold tight as we used to. Or, you can sit back, sing along, and grab a drink as we do more often now. To me, working on this playlist not only brought back mostly pleasant and a few not-so-pleasant memories, but also cataloged what our adolescence sounded, and moved like.
Enjoy,
robin
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