I think many Filipinos born during a certain time will have connected to the music of the Eraserheads in one way or another. For the nineties and part of the new millennium, they were the band of the Philippines, their songs a manifestation of sorts of the national consciousness. For this review, I’d like to explore their documentary film through their songs. Let’s start with the obvious one first. Many Eraserheads songs dwell on one’s infatuation towards a girl and perhaps no other Eraserheads song embodies this the most than Ang Huling El Bimbo, a song from their third studio album Cutterpillow. From the very first line, the song’s narrator idealizes his childhood crush, comparing her to the actress Paraluman. In the same way, we’ve come to venerate the Eraserheads, even though as the documentary shows us, they weren’t well received from the start. To the producers who first listened to their demo tapes, the UP Diliman-based band’s sound was messy and unrefined. But something in that sound clicked with audiences, their tongue-in-cheek humor, their songs that revolved on the everyday things Filipinos do endeared them to the nation. That’s the paradox of what made the Eraserheads great: their flaws and imperfections completed them, even if we consider them legends. Unrefinement was their advantage, because no other band sounded like them. That roughness made us see a part of ourselves in them and their music, even though many of us idealized them the same way the narrator in Ang Huling El Bimbo pined for his childhood love.
Most of the first part of Eraserheads: Combo on the Run takes us through the formation of the band and how cultural gathering spots such as Club Dredd became laboratories for artists to test out their sound to the general public, nebulae birthing stars to add to the night sky. This comes at a time after the EDSA Revolution, where the end of the dictatorship didn’t exactly mean the end of state censorship – one look at Manoling Morato’s MTRCB will tell you this era wasn’t exactly kind to works of art that pushed the envelope. The documentary dwells a bit on the growing counterculture post revolution and how the Eraserheads was a part of it – in particular, the row over the lyrics of Alapaap, a song from their album Circus. Though the documentary doesn’t quite push the point in the end, they made it clear that the whole thing was (I guess appropriately), a circus in more ways than one. And as for the general public? We didn’t care. As kids and edgy prepubescent teens we wanted to push the envelope, which is probably why the Eraserheads had such a hold on the youth. During out intramurals we were singing Pare Ko on the big stage and some of us sang ‘di ba, tangina‘ instead of the tamer ‘di ba, ‘langhiya‘. A bunch of us got into trouble for that but for us, we didn’t care, and neither did the Eraserheads.
One of my favorite documentaries about a band is the 2004 film Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. In that film we see the legendary band Metallica in a completely different light, their flaws laid bare for everyone to see, as they teeter on the brink of disbandment. The album that was made during that documentary, St. Anger, still divides fans to this day: it’s rough, messy and arguably one of their worst outings, but it was a necessary step for them to heal and move forward as a band. The thing with bands that last this long is, when you’ve worked with someone for this long, you’re gonna end up fighting and disagreeing on a lot of things. The same thing happened with the Eraserheads as they moved from the late nineties to the early 2000s. There were some creative differences and personality clashes alluded to in this film, but it’s evident that period of time is still a pretty painful period for all of them. At one point someone (I think it was Buddy Zabala) says that it’s like befriending your ex-wife: ‘at least we’re not fighting anymore’. It takes a lot of emotional maturity to move on from that sort of thing, and when egos get big, moving on gets exponentially harder.
The problem is that there’s only so much one can do with a talking (eraser)heads documentary: we only get small snippets of what it was like being in the band and in turn the turmoil that happened behind the scenes. (As an aside, any critical evaluation of their songs are left to generalized statements.) Quite glaring is that he film feels detached from its subject matter, which is strange considering the film’s director is Ely Buendia’s ex-wife. We don’t really hear or see her perspective aside from one short interview, and her personal insights would have given the film a voice and some extra knowledge to what was going on behind the scenes. For a film about a band that appealed to the Filipino masses, the film creates a gap between the film’s subject and the audience. Another omission is the individual members’ careers after the disbandment and how the Eraserheads influenced many other bands down the line.
In the Eraserheads song Pare Ko, the Eraserheads sing about their despair over romantic rejection. It is still a love song of sorts, though not the love you find with a lover, but instead from a trusted friend. The titular Pare of the song doesn’t need to offer advice; for the narrator of the song, Kailangan lang ay ang iyong pakikiramay/Andito ka ay ayos na (all I need is your company/as long as you’re here, everything’s ok). One other angle in this documentary is how music and art can serve as a source of comfort. One of the throughlines of the film is how the Eraserheads, still with things to work out between them, reunited for a concert to support the candidacy of Leni Robredo. We all know what happened afterwards (the documentary segment unceremoniously ending with the inauguration of the other guy), and once again, the documentary is unable to push the point because of the limitations in its form. We love the band because they’ve been a comfort to us for many parts of our own lives, but we only get a little taste of that here.
I will end this review by going back to Ang Huling El Bimbo. A large thematic part of that song is nostalgia, a fond look back at a past that no longer exists. A lot of other Eraserhead songs dwell on someone or something that has changed over time, like Magasin. The Eraserheads now are not the Eraserheads of 1989, or of 1994, or of 2008 and that’s fine, people change, music changes. A band that remains stagnant over the years are not artists, they’re businessmen: change is anathema to business, because keeping things the way things were allows profits to be consistent. The end of the film is an affirmation that the band, now reunited and wiser, will continue to evolve, and honestly, I love that for them. I’m looking forward to their tour.
