I was cleaning the toilet bowls of the San Carlos Seminary College in Mabolo, Cebu City in 1993 when I heard a song by the Eraserheads for the first time. The music came from a house just outside the seminary’s west wall, from a room where the owner’s daughter would sometimes treat us seminarians to long-distance striptease at night.

I froze, a bottle of muriatic acid in one hand and a toilet bowl swab in the other. Who was this guy warbling about his house being small yet clean, pati sa kusina? And what was my favorite childhood rhyme “pen pen de sarapin de kutsilyo de almasin” doing in the song? What decent songwriter would use Skyflakes and Coke 500 in his lyrics? And what guts to base his song on Nat King Cole’s “Too Young.”

But for some reason, the song seemed to threaten my dream of becoming a priest-musician. The seminary was teaching me classical songwriting and here was this frisky, bouncy tune threatening to undermine the seminary fathers’ efforts. The song sounded irreverent – and one couldn’t afford to be irreverent in the seminary — and yet I was enjoying it, without a tinge of guilt. It just blew me away.

I asked my classmates if they had heard of the song and the artist. They said they hadn’t, and they were not interested. They’d been singing “Diosnong Magtutudlo” (Heavenly Teacher) all their life, any music from the radio was the devil’s creation. And they had toilet cleaning to do, please. But I was determined to know more about this raw sound that made me pause and listen, and doubt my vocation.

With the Internet and cell phones still unheard of, and the limited TV hours allowed us, the best place to do my research was the library. There were newspapers and national magazines there, our only contact to the entertainment world outside. Surely they could provide me with information. So I rushed there after my toilet assignment and begged the librarian to please allow me a few hours’ extension because I was doing a research on the Spanish Inquisition.

From a Sunday magazine I learned the band was called Eraserheads and the song was called “Toyang,” a cut from their debut album “UltraElectroMagneticPop!” The article listed down all the other songs in the album: “Easy Ka Lang,” “Maling Akala,” “Pare Ko,” “Shake Yer Head,” “Ganjazz,” “Ligaya,” “Tindahan Ni Aling Nena,” “Honky-Toinks Granny,” “Shirley,” “Walang Hiyang Pare Ko,” “Combo on the Run.”

The article also carried a picture of the group. In plain shirts, torn jeans and old chucks, the four guys called Eraserheads looked no different from the istambays drinking “mestisa” (a mix of gin and beer) at the sari-sari store across the seminary gate.

In our dormitory that night, I couldn’t sleep. The song kept playing in my mind. If “Toyang” blew me away at first listen, were the other songs equally mind-blowing? I hated the prohibitions in the seminary. I envied college students outside who could listen to the Eraserheads anytime they wanted to.

I waited for “Toyang” to play again on the radio from the house outside the wall. Then a few minutes and I was watching the hazy figure of the girl moving rhythmically to a different song but whose irreverent appeal was now familiar to me. The girl wasn’t strip dancing this time. She was simply head slamming, occasionally hitting imaginary drums, and shouting at the top of her voice, “Di ba, ‘tangina!”

sun.star opinion, september 2, 2008