The Dawn…and Dusk of Teddy Diaz

Hear Direk Freddie Santos

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

One week into hosting the Talent Discovery Night at Café Alvarado and it’s: hey, not bad! Two weeks into it and it’s: hmm…getting boring. Then the third week comes and in walks a group of 4 darkly dressed young musicians wearing overcoats and angst.

The one thing I found most striking about this group was its leader, guitarist Teddy Diaz. There was a magical, mysterious air touring about him and maybe because of my folkhouse-loving days as a groupie to guitar players, I found him arousing. Then they sang. And we got blown to bits.

On the opening bars, I felt this group was gold. More than any Filipino singer or band that I had ever heard, this group UNDERSTOOD new wave music. The whole time they were singing, I kept telling myself: wow, these guys are REAL! While others settled for imitating Duran Duran, Tears for Fears and Depeche Mode, these guys had delved into the heart of the matter and were bravely forging their own journey through the new wave ocean.

In an earlier blog (No.2 Legs In Cebu), I talked about the cathartic moment when first I heard Chopin. Same thing happened here with…The Dawn.

The Dawn in their first gig ever at Roxy’s. Thanks for the pics, Jett!

That was their name and in the world of Philippine new wave music, that’s what they brought…Teddy, singer Jett Pangan, bassist Clay Luna and drummer JB Leonor. And that’s what they kept bringing each time I asked them to come back to Café Alvarado. In fact, Teddy brought more than just great new wave music. He asked me to sing with them. (Yeah, right! Like as if I knew new wave!) But he dared me and I went along and sang with them on one of their originals. I thought I did badly but unknown to me, Teddy was trying me out for something far more radical.

They were about to record their first single and Teddy wanted to open the song with the chorus given an operatic treatment. The song was Enveloped Ideas and it became the biggest Pinoy new wave original hit of all time. Teddy’s idea was that I would sing the operatic intro but in the end, it was fabulously-voiced Jett who recorded it along with the rest of the song. Dang! But I always take comfort in knowing that Teddy thought of me for that.

Hear The Dawn

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I need to take comfort there because there is little to find when I think back now on the life of Teddy Diaz.

A couple of years after the Café Alvarado story, and after I had directed them in a launching concert at the Light and Sound, I had become a regular events director at Sony. After one such Sony event, spotting Teddy Diaz and the Dawn’s former manager Martin Galan in the crowd, I immediately asked them for a portfolio of some kind, something I could send to the Sony recording studios in the States for the biggies there to consider. I really wanted to push this group, I had so much faith in Teddy and the Dawn. Then, for reasons beyond anyone’s ken, darkness came.

It happened a few months after that Sony event. Teddy had just brought home his girlfriend and was standing outside her house when he got accosted by a couple of street thugs who not only tried to rob him but mercilessly slashed his throat, the whole thing happening before the horrified eyes of his girlfriend and her family as they watched through the windows.
Within hours in a world of no cellular phones, not even beepers, word spread throughout the local music industry. By the following day, fans and colleagues were coming in droves to his wake. There he lay, his shoulder-length hair so neatly combed, his throat so carefully covered with a white scarf.

I sought out his father, movie character actor Vic Diaz to offer my sympathies and found myself unable to say a thing. Vic, renowned for his expressive eyes, could only confess sadness and anger through his orbs, his head shaking as if emotions were pushing him from one corner to another. All of it, to all of us, was incomprehensible.

But by the grace of God, the music did not die. Teddy’s vision was solid, his legacy was sterling. The Dawn would expand, disband, regroup and reclaim more than once the rightful title of the Philippines’ greatest new wave band…ever. For many or no reasons, I never directed them in a full show again but I will always be grateful that I was one of the very first to be ever enveloped by Teddy Diaz and Teddy’s ideas.

Direksions:
1. Love the Art – when you hear a certain piece of music and it hits you beyond comprehension, hold on tight to it. Your heart is hearing something special and you gotta keep listening till your mind hears it, too.
2. Respect the Science – I cannot stress this enough for young singers who don’t realize that when they copy a style, they become nothing more than mere echoes, shallow and fading. You like the style? Then study it. Understand it. Absorb it and what will emerge is a treatment all your own.