Keep it up, Spirit of ’67!

My friends and I first saw the group perform last year at the Conways Bar of Makati Shangri-La and we were so "spirited" that we could have danced all night. That’s right: when you hear the Spirit of ’67 sing those lively songs (especially) from the ’60s and ’70s, you just can’t stay put on your seat, you have to be on your feet swinging to the beat... dancing!

It was Jesi Mendez and his wife Gina who invited Nestor Cuartero, Daisy Romualdez and me to Conways Bar, assuring us that we would fall in love with the (music of the) Spirit of ’67. Added Jesi, "I warn you, you would keep coming back for more!"

That night, the Spirit of ’67 played mostly songs from the sizzling ’60s and the smoldering ’70s – from The Beatles to the Dave Clark Five to the Herman’s Hermits to the Stylistics to, well, name it and they played it – and our group, Baby Boomers all, and others in the SRO crowd couldn’t help traipsing down memory lane. Well, that’s the whole point, I guess, why the Spirit of ’67 was organized – to bring back those memories when you and I were a triple decades younger and life was simpler and easier and more fun to live.

The group was formed in 1992, then known as SOSSOC (as in Spirit of ’67, Spirit of Champions) by silver jubilarians (except for one) during an Ateneo high school reunion. It was the idea of Berg Villapando (advertising executive and musical director) to gather his Class ’67 buddies who played with different combos (such as The Snobs, Quarrymen, Unix, The End, Up From Down Under, etc.) and, yeah, play it one more time. Except for Berg’s son Boom who played the keyboard, the original members were all professionals and successful practitioners in various fields – Berg on lead guitar; Babes Rojas on second lead guitar; Jake Arellano on bass; Paeng de Guzman on drums; and Candy Dizon, Johnny Velasquez and cousins Bimbo and Cholo Santiago on vocals.

They were an instant hit. Soon, they were getting invitations to play at weddings, birthdays and other occasions, so the group started adding songs to their repertoire. Unable to cope with the schedule that was getting tighter and tighter, some members dropped out and new ones came in. It was in 1997 that they shortened their name to simply Spirit of ’67. By then, the group had carved a name for itself, drawing enthusiastic crowds everywhere they performed (Studebaker, Tony Roma, Strumm’s, Kiko’s Bar and Q.C.’s Retro Bar).

Today, the Spirit of ’67 has built up a repertoire of more than 250 songs, two-thirds of them understandably from the ’60s and ’70s.

Let’s give the nine members a round of applause as we shake hands with each of them (before we start shaking to their music):

• Maso Diez trained at the UP Conservatory of Music and started singing and cutting records with the Hot Dog band in the late ’70s. She went on to doing lounge acts, commercial jingles and stints with other bands here and abroad.

• Steve de Jesus has been playing the guitar since his high school days at Lourdes School. To this day, even with his eyes closed, he can play the solo guitar of the Ventures and the Shadows’ instrumentals of the early ’60s as beautifully as he does Santana stuff ’60s to ’90s.

• Keyboardist Nato Canlas plays all kinds of music, from pop to rock to R&B to jazz. A musical arranger and sequence programmer for "live" performers and recording artists, he has kept abreast of the latest in sound and technology, such as synthesizers and sequencers.

• Drummer Arnold Austria comes from a family of musicians. He started as a percussionist in the early ’70s, playing percussion for his father Lurdring Austria’s orchestra and other big bands. He eventually played – what else? – drums for and travelled with various show bands, and backed up recording and performing artists here and abroad.

• Bassist Jake Arellano stopped playing bass when Up From Down Under broke up in 1970 but he kept up with musical trends and went on playing as a hobby. No wonder his bass just keeps on getting better and better and, according to Jake, "meaner with age."

• Cholo Santiago, on the other hand, decided to join Birth of the Cool when Up From Down Under disbanded, playing nightly at the Hyatt-Savoy’s La Concha on Dewey (now Roxas) Boulevard. Then, he performed with different bands in Japan, Hong Kong and Thailand until he came home for good in the early ’80s and got into the business of booking Filipino entertainers abroad.

• Bobby Santiago used to play bass guitar for The End, which was the most-sought-after band in the ’60s for proms and graduation balls of exclusive girls’ schools. Then he went into advertising and marketing as mainstay of McCann Erickson (which became Lintas and then J. Walter Thompson). He now works full-time as president of a leisure and entertainment company.

• Candy Dizon, the most articulate member of the group, is regent of the Manuel L. Quezon University, with a Business Management from A.I.M. He is also a logistics service provider for San Miguel Brewery, Inc., Philippines, and a part-time management consultant of various firms.

(Joining the group every now and then is semi-retired Johnny Velasquez who’s engaged in the telecommunications business. A product of Stanford University, Johnny was Chief Finance Officer of Piltel and executive assistant of former PLDT president Tonyboy Cojuangco, the same job that made him quit Spirit of ’67.)

So what else can we say to these guys but, keep the spirit up?

(Note: The Spirit of ’67 performs every Tuesday at Dish in Rockwell and at Makati Shangri-La’s Conways Bar every Thursday.)