The sound that made manila sing

MANILA, Philippines, July 18 ------ The members of HOTDOG never set out to create a movement — they simply wanted to make music they themselves would enjoy playing. Nearly five decades later, that music has become part of the Filipino vocabulary.

Songs like Manila, Annie Batungbakal, Bongga Ka ‘Day, Ikaw ang Miss Universe ng Buhay Ko and Pers Lab have long outgrown the radio charts that first introduced them. Today, they serve as cultural shorthand that can transport generations of Filipinos back to moments of joy, youth, and everyday life.

For original members Jess Garcia, Ella del Rosario and Mon Toralba, however, those songs began much more simply: inside rehearsal rooms, recording studios and long conversations among friends who never imagined they were helping shape the future of Filipino music — or create what would later be known as Manila Sound.

Why HOTDOG?

Before the music came the name. As fondly remembered by Ella del Rosario, the band’s first female vocalist, HOTDOG was always meant to be written in all caps, with no “s, just the way founding member and principal songwriter, the late Dennis Garcia, originally conceptualized.

The inspiration came after Dennis and his brother Rene returned from a musical stint with the Red Fox band in Hawaii during the early 1970s. But the expression itself wasn’t uniquely Hawaiian. “Hot dog!” was already a widely used American slang exclamation throughout much of the 20th century, expressing excitement, delight, or celebration, like another way of saying “Awesome!”, “Cool!” or “Yippee!” whenever something exciting happens.

Dennis loved the expression and adopted it as the band’s name. He simply saw in it the same youthful energy he wanted the band to embody. That spirit — playful spontaneous, and unmistakably contemporary — would eventually define both HOTDOG and the sound that forever changed Filipino popular music.

Before Manila Sound had a name

Long before they became icons of Original Pilipino Music, the members of HOTDOG were simply students from some of Manila’s biggest schools. Jess Garcia was an Atenean drummer. Ella del Rosario was an Assumptionista who laughs that she barely spoke Tagalog at the time. Mon Toralba had just entered De La Salle as part of its first co-educational batch when he joined the group at only 18 years old. “We were just kids who wanted to have fun,” Ella recalled The STAR. That youthful perspective would become one of HOTDOG’s greatest strengths.

While much of Filipino popular music remained rooted in kundiman traditions or Western covers, the band began writing songs that sounded like the way Filipinos actually talked — playful Taglish, everyday humor and stories lifted straight from ordinary life. “I didn’t even know what tagyawat or dumudungaw meant,” Ella laughed, recalling her first encounter with Dennis Garcia’s lyrics. Yet that very mix of English and Filipino became revolutionary. “When we sang in Taglish, we connected the gap,” she said. “It was like there was no divide anymore.”

The songs nobody wanted

Ironically, HOTDOG’s breakthrough almost never happened. According to Mon Toralba, record companies initially had little interest in the band’s original compositions. “No one wanted to take us,” he recalled. Their first recording, Ikaw ang Miss Universe ng Buhay Ko, struggled to find a label until Villar Records decided to take a chance on the group — a decision that would ultimately help change the course of Filipino popular music. Once the song found its way onto the radio, however, everything changed.

Television guestings became a regular fixture. Albums followed almost yearly. Concert invitations arrived from around the country and overseas. The band even starred in its own feature film, “Hotdog: Unang Kagat.” “We never imagined people would embrace our original songs,” Mon said. Looking back, he spoke not with nostalgia, but with gratitude.

Source: philstar.com