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By Rome Jorge, Lifestyle Editor
These are dysfunctional times. Today’s young
couples strive to be better parents by being nothing like their
fathers or their mothers. Work overseas sunders thousands of
families. Migration dislocates cultural identities. Yet countless
single parents raise exemplary children nonetheless.
The unattainable myth of the ideal Filipino
family—long kept artificially intact by church, family and society
through guilt and shame at the cost of unhappy spouses enduring
abuse, lies and lovelessness—no longer resonates with today’s
generation. Those whose stories now ring true are
antiheroes—unabashedly flawed and all-too-human. Welcome then for
Father’s Day the anti-dad—Joey Pepe Smith.
Known as the godfather of Pinoy rock to
today’s generation—thanks to a commercial for extra strong beer
and a decades-long rock revival that has youths exploring the
genre’s roots—Smith is currently enjoying a renaissance. But
what few realize is that the man is also a father who begot five
children from three different mothers and a son who survived the
abuses of his alcoholic old man.
He is both spawn and sire of rock n’ roll. He
had a dysfunctional childhood, just like his children and just like
many of us. We too are children of rock—the spiritual descendants
of Pepe Smith.
The man is the first to admit he is no poster
boy for parenthood: “I’m a loud far cry from being a
‘wholesome’ father. I’m a ‘rock-some’ father. You know,
‘rock-some n’ roll-some.’”
Much of his troubles are the legacy of his own
sweet dad.
A boy named Joseph
Smith recalls, “During the 50s and 60s, the
all-Filipino family was having its first experiences of broken
homes.”
Since time immemorial, there have always been
deadbeat dads, wife-beaters and lotharios. But spouses that had once
resigned themselves to maltreatment then began to rebel, experiment
and find their own ways to happiness. The rock n’ roll era had
arrived and it was more than just music. But it was a painful
transition and there were casualties. One of them was the young
Smith.
“I got teased in school. ‘You don’t have a
family cause mom and dad, they split and let you out in the rain,’
they said. All I could do was shrug it off. And one way to shrug it
off was to give them the finger,” says the prototypical punk.
Born Joseph William Smith on December 25, 1947
to an American military serviceman and a Filipino mother, he spent
his early years in US military bases in the Philippines.
His papa was a rolling stone. “We got to live
together for quite some time. He was a good father. But aside from
that, he was a drunkard. And he was really violent when he got
pissed—very violent. He beat up my mom. They’d get into terrible
fights.” It wasn’t just his mother who suffered at father’s
hands.
“I’d get a really bad beating every time I
did something. I would always get the bad end of a buckled belt. And
when he hit, it was bad. Sometimes he said, ‘Go to bed, no
supper.’ Our maid had to crawl to bring me food. Because, if by
chance, he went out of his room to get a bottle of whisky or beer
and saw her sneaking into my room, he’d kick her. ‘Didn’t you
hear what I said? My son doesn’t need any dinner,’ he’d say.
All I could do was stay in bed ‘til the morrow morning.”
“I thought it was normal. I was naďve then. I
was busy with my toys,” he says. Until today, Smith collects model
fighter jets. There’s a gleam in his eye when he talks about his
collection.
His parent separated when he was about eight
years of age. He recalls, “The only time I found out that they
were broken up was when my mom had to take me to my grandmother in
Kamuning, Quezon City.” Smith never was able to talk to his father
as an adult, who went back to the US after the breakup. Up to this
day, and despite many tours as musician all over the world through
the decades, Smith has never been to America.
“Through the years, as I grew up, sometimes my
friends’ dads would be my father figure. But, it’s funny though,
I never really missed having a dad,” he assesses. But then he
adds, “There are days I reminisce the good times.”
“He always brought me to the flight
line—that was in the airbase in Clark—and he’d bring me there
early morning before he went to work and me sit right up front and
enjoy all the jets that pass through all afternoon.” he recalls,
adding, “That’s what I wanted to be when I grew up—a jet
fighter pilot.” Smith’s father fought as naval aviator in the
Second World War piloting a F8F Bearcat or a F4U Corsair.
It was also his father who let the airwaves get
the better of Smith. “Around 1956-1957, I was already old enough
to listen to my first transistor radio that my dad bought me. The
first songs I was really were able to listen and groove to were by
Chuck Berry, Freddy King and Buddy Holly.”
The man has fond memories of walking to school
every morning with the sound of rock n’ roll deejay Johnny de Leon
wafting through the open windows of his neighbors’ houses. They
all listened to the same station, Far East Network of the US
military, thus forming a wall of sound on both sides of his
street—a stereophonic high for the young Smith as he walked the
line.
Smith bursts into song and as he distinctly
recalls the moment he first heard Chuck Berry’s “Reeling and
Rocking.” “There were times I was walking faster or skipping
along to the rock n’ roll beat. I didn’t even notice it at
first. I’d hit the end of the song just as I was in front of the
classroom,” remembers the man who would later famously sing
“Titser’s Enemi No. 1.” The cacophony of his childhood
memories continues to reverberate.
Scar tissue
Smith does not believe that his father’s
alcoholism had any bearing on his past bouts with chemical
dependency. “I was still too young. There were a few times he had
friends over drinking. But my mom would pick me up and bring me back
to bed. She didn’t want me to get entangled with all those
drunkards.” He adds, “I remember, whenever I got drunk. I never
seemed to remember him with that.”
In a recent performance in Malolos, Bulacan,
Smith is repeatedly offered brandy by an unruly fan who hugs him
onstage. He suffers the fool patiently and takes the glass. He
pretends to take a sip for the benefit of his fans—lips pursed and
dunked into the brandy but unopened—and puts the glass down behind
him with its load of alcohol unconsumed. Real or imagined, the sex,
drugs and rock n’ roll imagery is part of his lore and Smith does
nothing to diminish that. It’s part of the act.
Despite setting a precedent for substance abuse
and violence, Smith’s father receives incredulous credit from his
son: “One thing he really taught me clear was not to hurt
women.”
Today, wisened and weatherworn, Smith still
clearly remembers the beating he got during his Second Grade when he
stabbed with his pencil the palm of a neighbor’s incorrigible
four-year-old daughter nicknamed Ginger. “He yanked me and, bam,
he really tore me. I could feel his whole belt and that nasty buckle
wrapping around my legs,” he says with a chuckle, telling his
stories with animated gestures, onomatopoeic sound effects,
character voices and facial expressions.
“Whatever he did to me then, I always look
back and say, ‘Hey, that was my proper training from an American
GI.’ I was always joking to myself that I could take it all,” he
says.
However, the vividness with which he recalls the
past betrays wounds that never heal and beatings that still sting.
He admits, “The thing that really bothered me was when he spanked
or hit me. He really clobbered me.”
Father of mine
The names Smith gave his children hint at the
stages in his life. The eldest, 31-year-old Queenie, bears a typical
Filipino name befitting an oldest daughter. Twenty-three-year-old
Sanya—named after the Sanyasi, devotees of Hinduism—reflects her
dad’s flirtation with exotic spiritual movements such as Ananda
Marga and Hare Krishna. Born in 1989, Bebop—named after Gene
Vincent’s seminal rock hit “Be-Bop-A-Lula”—reveals one of
his father’s earliest musical influences. Born two years later,
Desiderata—named after the 1920s inspirational prose
poem—reflects her father’s effort at wisdom and maturity. The
youngest of his children, 16-year-old Delta—named after the
Mississippi River Delta, home of the blues—indicates a return to
the roots for the old man. “I look at them like a stairwell,” he
says. All his children carry the Smith surname.
Smith attests that he gets along with all his
children: “No problem at all. I’m so lucky. I’m blessed to
have them. I gave them all my love. They, in return, have given me
all the respect that I was hoping for.”
As a father, Smith professes having been there
for all of them throughout their childhood, save Sanya, who recently
has gained fame as a host for a music video show as well as model
and host. He explains: “Her mom and I, after she was born, almost
a year after, got into a hassle. One day, I went to Clark to
play—I was with the Airwaves with Jun Lupito and a couple of other
guys. When I got home, they were gone. A few days later, I learned
that she had flown to Singapore with Sanya. The next time I saw her
again, she was 16 or 17. I flipped out, man. I couldn’t hold back
the tears.” Sanya herself only discovered her true genealogy at
age 14 when her Swedish stepfather and her mother’s marriage
crumbled. Her mother took her back to Baguio for that fateful
reunion.
“That’s when I started calling her Panda.
She was a fuzzy wuzzy bear. She was happy to see me too,” Smith
confides. The two keep in touch regularly, with Sanya often inviting
her father to her hosting events.
On raising several children from different
mothers, Smith confesses, “I never really thought that would
happen to me—collecting women, I mean. But as I went along, you
meet someone, she’d swoon over you… and later on you’re dating
her. Next thing you know, you open your eyes one morning and you
have a baby crying beside you.” It’s still fresh on the man’s
mind how it was to change diapers at three in the morning. “Every
one of them, from Queenie the eldest to the youngest, I did my
share,” he attests. He opines, “That’s probably why they
respect me and love me that much.”
But Smith, known as much for his candor as for
his graciousness, soon opens up: “When me and my last wife
separated, it really hurt, because I was used to having all those
kids around me.” He explains, “Those were the days that rock
n’ roll seemed to have died down.”
He admits, “Probably, I just became a coward.
I couldn’t face all the facts, all the things shoved down my
throat. I just decided to run away from home. I tried to find a job
so I could bring home something. But of course that didn’t happen.
Not after three, four or five years. I was getting the bad end of a
the deal.”
Then he finally confesses, “I get violent
sometimes, when I get pissed.”
“There was nothing I could do. During their
formative years, they sometimes got spoiled by their aunts and
uncles. All the bad things fall on me,” he reasons away.
“Right in front of everyone, I started pulling
out my belt and hitting ‘em [Delta at around 5-years of age].
Right after, I didn’t want to show her, tears came down my eyes.
After I did it, I felt very sorry for myself and for the kid. I had
to hug ‘em. Never did it again. I didn’t say sorry, just asked,
‘Why did you want me to do this to you?’” Smith recalls.
After all that reeling and rolling, this strange
fruit called Pepe Smith didn’t fall far from his family tree after
all.
Many of Smith’s children have taken up careers
in music. Besides Sanya’s work as a veejay, his eldest daughter
has been singing for hotels and restaurants in Bangkok and Vietnam
and his son Bebop is making his first forays into the music world.
Today, Smith resides in Baguio with his long time companion Maela
who herself has four children from a previous relationship.
The man still does his best to keep in touch
with all his children. This year, Smith’s three youngest children
came over to Baguio for a reunion. And then of course there’s the
rest of us—the children of rock. All we have to do is turn on the
radio to connect with our spiritual patriarch for these
dysfunctional times. That’s Joey Pepe Smith, man, godfather of us
all.
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