Monday, July 6, 2009

He's out of our lives

WORKING in a newspaper, and having a wife in the Lifestyle section certainly allowed me a few perks. Like watching concerts for free.

I have very sketchy memories of Michael Jackson's concert held in 1996 at the reclaimed land along Roxas Blvd. But what stuck into my mind was the two hours it took us to park our cars. From there we walked for about 500 meters to the arena, with a few local celebrities in sight.

It was part of his HIStory world tour which stopped for one December night in Manila. Tickets were in the form of thick plastic cards with his face emblazoned on it along with the P5,000 price tag. It costed three-fold at ringside.

There was massive build up of suspense that evening as we were advised to be there 5 p.m., and the concert proper started past 8 p.m. There was no opening act. But of course, no one needed an opening act if he's the one performing.

True to hype he arrived in style. The lights went out. A space ship suddenly plopped on stage in blinding smoke. Then, he emerged. For some reason, his first number escaped me.

What I remember was he sang Billie Jean in exact MTV get-up of black sequined jacket and white shirt. Thriller in red and black. He also hang on a moving crane while singing a song I can't recall; brought out a giant globe and sang with kids as he belted Heal the World.

But he didn't sing Ben. No One Day In Your Life. No Got To Be There. The songs that made me sleep in the afternoon when we we small weren't in his repertoire that night.

Thinking about it now, I remember the few foreign acts I had the good fortune of watching.

The very first one was the Hall and Oates Unplugged at the Big Dome. I was still in college then, and that meant I had to scrimp on my baon to raise P100 that earned me a seat at the general admission. I don't know if it was just their style but Darryl Hall and John Oates didn't have any spiel, which was probably a good thing.

There wasn't even any back drop but exposed scaffoldings behind them. They just sat there on wooden boxes, acoustic guitars on hand and sang hits like Out of Touch, She's Gone, Maneater, Private Eyes one after another.

Which brought me to Phil Collins concert at the Philsports (Ultra) football field in the early 90s. Reports had it the former Genesis drummer arrived with eight trailer trucks of concert set pieces. Strangely, the whole place looked like building rooftops. He came out of one of them, and did a solo on drums as an intro.

A couple of years back, I was at the far end of that football stadium watching Barry Manilow. It was a two-night concert, the first one of which was held at the PICC which an office crush named Vangie watched. I only had enough money to watch it standing on the field. Alone.

The first song I remember very well. He started out straight to the chorus of Ready to Take a Chance Again. His Greatest Hits rang in the air one after another. But his voice was often overshadowed by the audience singing the song themselves. There were ladies crying, especially when the first strains of I Write the Songs played out.

He sang As Sure as I'm Standing Here reading the words from a paper. He said it wasn't one of his most popular and was surprised to learn that it was a big hit back here.

Now, that was one major conversation piece for me and Vangie later on as we both heard the song from a Lovingly Yours, Helen episode starring Vivian Foz and Ariosto Reyes Jr.

Thinking about it now, and totally abandoning the thread of thought I had when I started writing this blog, it felt good learning that both of us happened to be watching the same show on that same Sunday afternoon far back then.