While he is not the acknowledged Father of Pinoy Rock—1950s singer Bobby Gonzales gets the credit by virtue of recording the song “Hahabol-Habol” Bill Haley-style—Pepe no doubt knew more than anyone else in the scene, past and current, the kind of life that rock ’n' roll demanded, and lived it as purely as he could.
We've given some thought on how our rock music is all soft now, that what it needs is to be dangerous again. What we were really thinking about was Pepe, who was our own Keith Richards, which is to say they both embodied Rock flashing the finger against all conventions—of normalcy, propriety, and maturity. Heck, even the conventions of mortality—we'd all assumed Pepe would live forever, because he is rock and roll. He didn't. Turns out he's only human. (Now, if only Keith will live forever, then all is well in rock.)
But that doesn’t take anything away from Pepe’s legacy, not in the least bit.
The best kind of rock, for us, is primal. It has to sound like it’s so frayed at the edges it could fall apart anytime.
It offends and confronts—only because we’ve been too uptight. It’s loud, obnoxious, and evil—only because the other kind of music, the baduy kind, could and have often been much worse. It’s often obscure—only because so few really get it.
This is the kind of rock that Pepe Smith has created. We are including, of course, his body of work in The Juan Dela Cruz Band. But there is another album from Pepe that is truly more primal, dangerous, confrontational, obnoxious, and wilfully obscure that the classic rock cognoscenti has elevated it to the level of myth.
The album is Eve, by the Japanese psychedelic free-blues band Speed, Glue & Shinki, produced in Japan in 1971, of which Pepe was the main driving force even though so few of the things written about the band acknowledge this.
From hereon we will be quoting liberally from the book Japrock Sampler (2007) by Julian Cope, musicologist and singer of seminal English band The Teardrop Explodes. The book is an impressively scholastic yet irreverent study of “how the post-war Japanese blew their minds on rock ’n’ roll.”
In the book, Cope devotes an entire chapter to Speed, Glue & Shinki and, more importantly, believes Pepe—who was Speed—was instrumental in making Speed, Glue & Shinki one of the most important bands in the nascent Japanese New Rock scene in the ‘70s. He further asserts that Speed, Glue & Shinki were punk before there was punk and that they sound as cool and fresh as any of the snob bands coming out in the 21st century.
Speed, Glue & Shinki were Pepe Smith on drums, Masayoshi Kabe (Glue) on bass, and Shinki Chen on guitars. Both Kabe and Chen were already stars in the Japanese band scene, and Chen saw Smith’s band Zero History playing at a mall in Japan and was impressed by his drum skills and theatrics.
This is how Cope describes the band:
“…named after their drug habits…Speed, Glue & Shinki were a drug-addled early ‘70s Japanese free-blues power trio whose eulogies to snorting speed, shooting heroin, taking marijuana and sniffing paint thinners and Marusan Pro Bond manifested in such songs as “Sniffing & Snorting”, “Stoned Out of my Mind”, and their debut single “Mr. Walking Drugstore Man”…
“…powered by a Filipino singing drummer with a bad amphetamine habit and a propensity for setting his kit on fire with paraffin…
“If ex-Iguanas drummer Iggy Pop had remained behind the drums when he became the lead singer of the Stooges, you’d probably have heard something close to Speed, Glue & Shinki…”
“…the barbarian music of Speed, Glue & Shinki still sounds remarkably fresh to most twenty-first century fans of underground rock ’n’ roll, our ears having been long since re-tuned, de-tuned and tweaked into submission by the punk movement of 1977, the post-punk and No Wave scenes of the late ‘70s and all of the other so-called lo-fi, no-fi and shoe-gazing noise-rock micro-phenomena that have been forced through our melted plastic brains…”
You have to listen to the entirety of Eve to appreciate the barbarism and drug-frenzy of the music. And how extremely cool it was. How extremely cool Pepe was. Everything that we’ve defined good rock music to be, this album is—and then it proceeds to space out some more.
The way we see it, if an eminent music critic compares you to Iggy Pop and says you set things on fire, you have to be ultra cool. The Black Keys? Jack White? Wolfmother? Speed, Glue & Shinki.
Also, if you listen real close to Eve you will find that it is the blueprint of what would eventually be the early Juan Dela Cruz sound. This is even more apparent in the double-album that came after it for one basic, very obvious reason: The Japanese bassist quit and Pepe brought in his bandmate from Zero History, Mike Hanopol, to fill in. Interestingly, Hanopol went on to become the main songwriter for Speed, Glue & Shinki, says Cope. To sample the primal power Smith and Hanopol were able to wield in that album, listen to “Calm Down” on youtube. It has a bass intro that is what a black hole may sound like when it swallows planets whole.
Clearly, Cope saw Pepe as a true bearer of the power of rock.
“Joey Smith’s gargantuan capacity for drugging and gigging infused Japan’s early ‘70s New Rock scene with a cavalier attitude all too absent from their indigenous musicians. His heroic sensibilities, his mush-mouthed mike [sic] technique, his frankly outrageous lyric-writing and his Play Dumb clowning all conspired to make true legends of Speed, Glue & Shinki.”
This puts Pepe Smith in the same inner sanctum where the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa, and Keith Moon probably are. And he won’t be taking shit from any of them, because they are equals.