~”Below zero” was how Rey Valera describes his life before fame and fortune beckoned. He was impoverished and living with relatives whose kindness he repaid by doing household chores for them. He found refuge among the dead, in a cemetery near where he stayed in Bulacan. That was his studio. Almost half of the hit songs he wrote was composed in that cemetery. Rey looks back at how he struggled, and how, years later, he would emerge as one of the Philippines’ top songwriters and musicians. He was in Toronto for a Valentine’s Day concert. For an older couple who watched him, listening to his songs rekindled a love that has withstood time and age.
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The struggle of my life created empathy – I could relate to pain, being abandoned, having people not love me.– Oprah Winfrey
TORONTO – He’s got no matinee idol looks. Nor the charms of a young star.
Yet Rey Valera, the singer, songwriter, music director and film scorer, managed to cause a minor stampede, shrieks and ear-splitting excitement among fans he reared through a generation of love songs he says he composed in the tranquility of the cemetery.
For a generation, it’s his music and its many romantic moods. And that’s no truer today than in the Greater Toronto Area where admirers and song lovers still warble his compositions. (Video at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2BqqXghEeI)
“It’s true,” he reveals to the guffaw of the audience, because the peace and quiet of the graveyard inspired him to write and produce songs that identified the generation of the seventies. (Video at: http://youtu.be/rxLwVK-Gftg).
A day later in a brief interview at FV Foods on Bathurst and Wilson where his Toronto handlers Mon and Teresa Torralba brought him for a snack of “kakanin”, Valera confirmed what he had earlier stated – that nearly one-half of his songs took life, ironically, in the frightful midst of the dead.
“The cemetery was my studio,” he says half-smiling. That part of his life had been one of restlessness and pain, mostly from being poor, according to him. Single and penniless, he lived with relatives, and did household chores for them as a way of repaying their kindness.
“My life was hard and problematic. I had no money. I really came from below-zero,” Valera reveals, his face looking pensive as he reminisced the past when he started writing songs that would become big hits.
The cemetery near his relatives’ home had given him the opportunity to contemplate. Being there, he said, was also a means of escape from the unpleasant routine of cleaning the house.
“Even if I had worked my butts off for ten years, I would still be zero,” Valera shares. “That’s how poor I was”.
That chapter on the road to fame and money had provided him with a deep insight about life. “That is why I can relate with the poor”.
Valera sat down with FV Foods owner Mel Galeon in one table while their friends and the local media occupied two adjoining tables. The loud chatter amidst the piped-in Valera songs and the “kakanins” – one of FV Foods’ strengths to fame and success – flowed freely and endlessly.
The store’s homespun ambience did not escape notice by Valera himself. (Video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB5_bewBrFA).
“Sometimes it’s not just the food; what’s important here is the environment – you feel relaxed and you know you’re with your own people,” he says. “It counts a lot. And you feel at home”.
Valera’s pieces are the stuff that melts and wins hearts, like in “Maging Sino Ka Man”; that vows adoration and love as in “Kahit Maputi Na Ang Buhok Ko” and “Sinasamba Kita”; that beseeches an end to agony and pain like in “Tayong Dalawa”.
“His songs are very down-to-earth,” says a middle-aged fan, one of the many that packed the auditorium of the Toronto International Celebration Church on Railside Drive on Friday, February 14, the unofficial day for lovers.
Mon and Teresa Torralba put up the concert as a look-back to the seventies and early eighties when the Philippines buzzed with Manila sound, which later on evolved as OPM or Original Pilipino Music. Torralba’s “Pers Lab” was one of those songs responsible for that genre. (Video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08565sDWzlM).
Valera and Toralba, the latter formerly of Hotdog band, were an explosive combination given their contribution to the evolution of Filipino music. Indeed, their songs plus the spontaneous acts and the almost endless blabber by Valera made his Valentine’s Day concert a riot.
Musical stars Ryan Orlanda, Theresa Panaligan, Bea Santiago, Joshua Tamayo and Don Torres gave a hint of what was to come. Their songs highlighted the music of Valera and Torralba. (Video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfaZeAwcEuc)
“I write songs not because of my life. I write songs for the common people. I put myself in their situations. That way I’d understand them because I can feel what they’re going through,” he explains.
Valera’s songs had universal appeal. They touch, they inspire, they move people. One – Mr. DJ – was life- and career-changing for its young singer then, Sharon Cuneta. (Video at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unoCnlNuACc )
For 86-year-old Aning Sanchez, they are therapeutic. Daughter Angelina, a medical doctor, told her brother Ino how their mother instantly became “Wonder Woman”.
“No pain, walang masakit at hindi inuubo,” was how she describes her in an email. “Malakas, parang si Wonder Woman,” she adds.
Aning Sanchez, who uses a walker to move, and her 87-year-old husband, Nardo Sanchez, flew down to Toronto from Sudbury, Ontario – a distance of 390 kilometers – to watch Valera’s Valentine’s Day concert and celebrate 57 years of wedded bliss.
After the performance, the couple and daughter were among those who awaited their turn to have CDs and shirts autographed by Valera. Aning, walking alone, pat him in the back, saying she liked the show, and thanked him.
Reached for comment, Aning gushed at how they loved the songs, specially “Kahit Maputi Na Ang Buhok Ko”. To stress the obvious, she stroked her hair to mean she and husband have managed to stay together up to this ripe age for almost six decades now . . . Just like the song.
” . . . Ang naklipas ay ibabalik natin, hmmm…/papaalala ko sa’yo/Ang aking pangako na’ng pag-ibig ko’y lagi sa’yo/Kahit maputi na ang buhok ko . . .