Papa was a Rolling Stone
Joey Pepe Smith, godfather of Pinoy rock, on surviving his abusive alcoholic dad and being the father to five children from three different mothers
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 naïve 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.
