Three weeks after I first got to Singapore, I caught a short-lived exhibit at the National Museum. It was on Singaporean music history, and somewhere in the middle of it I found a half-corridor-long retrospective of Singapore's "Rhythm and Blues Period" in the 1960s. I glued my face to the wall to get a good look at the photographs of the bands. The poses were straight out of American Bandstand, Motown, and Sun Records -- only with Chinese, Indian, Malay, and Eurasian faces.

"Asian blues" had always seemed like a weird and undiscovered chapter to me. I had fuzzy visions of Emperor Pu-Yi swinging at a jazz club in the 1920s, or South Vietnamese kids loitering to the rock 'n' roll soundtrack of a GI club in Saigon. (Okay, so blame it on the movies.) But the idea of finding an Asian band that actively played and recorded blues seemed unlikely for some reason -- maybe because of my American ego, my ignorance of the history involved, or my underestimation of the power of a B. B. King record. A blues scene in Singapore?-- in a country smaller than the Montana sector of Yellowstone National Park? I didn't expect it. But it was there, and its history was in those photos I was staring at.

Doggin' & Pesterin' the Blues
In the 1960s, Singapore had two important blues acts: The Straydogs and The Pests Infested. While most Singaporean bands were catching on to the British pop/rock bandwagon, the Dogs and the Pests were chasing after something different -- black music, Muddy Waters, twelve-bar jams. Blues wasn't very popular back then since all the gigs were dances, and you can only fox-trot or waltz to so many blues covers before you storm the bandstand. But the Straydogs were still good enough and popular enough to start headlining the Sunday tea dances at the Golden Venus nightclub in 1967. A year later, they recorded their first single, "Mum's Too Pampering," written by vocalist Lawrence Lim and harmonica player Ronnie Kriekenbeek. And then a few years after that, the reign was over -- the band broke up after line-up shuffles, musical differences, all the usual ailments. They had scored a minor hit in Malaysia, but it wasn't enough to convince the band to commit to music full-time. Kriekenbeek moved to Australia. The lead guitarist, Jimmy Appudurai, had signed his Fender Strat and given it to a friend, pledging that the days of Dogs were finally over. The guitar was on display in the museum.

The Straydogs recorded three singles, all on the EMI/Singapore label. I looked around for a listening booth at the exhibit, but no dice. After that visit to the museum, I spent two months searching for those recordings but turned up nothing. If the cashier at the record store was old enough to have even heard of The Straydogs, I'd get a laugh and the guy would shake his head: No, it's too old, don't have. Next I tried the guitar shops, hoping for a music freak, an oldies buff, anyone who could give me a lead: Straydogs? Yeah, man, I remember . . . they're all dead, I think.

Blues Fest, Blues Reunion
In September of 1996, Newbie Schwartz (the only person who knew about my Straydogs obsession) called me up to tell me about the first ever Singapore Blues Festival being staged at Clarke Quay. There weren't any franchise acts on the bill (which surprised me since I'd heard that Buddy Guy had played a concert here earlier that year), but I was looking forward to getting a dose of local blues, and maybe even a taste of that vintage Straydogs sound that I could only imagine.

The vintage stuff didn't come right away. The first three bands -- Heritage, John Hanson & Friends, and Don Victor -- were all "muscle" acts drenched in loud, distorted guitar riffs. Heritage, the opener, started off with a couple rocked up blues standards (John Lee Hooker's "Boom Boom" and Big Joe Williams' "Baby Please Don't Go") driven by frontman Atwell Jansen's blues harp. But the band quickly fell into a heavy-handed Hendrix mode ("Red House," "Voodoo Chile") before bowing out with a long, long version of the Allman Brothers' "Whippin' Post." John Hanson, an Aussie southpaw guitarist who wears his axe like a necklace, kept the volume up on covers like "Farther On Up the Road" and "Johnnie B. Goode." Hanson was by far the fastest and flashiest soloist of the evening, but he was outcranked by the triple lead-guitar line-up of Don Victor's band. (Each song had how many guitar solos?) After two hours of power chord blues, Siva Choy and his backing band, Crossroads, took the stage. Right away, I sensed something different about these guys. Siva, who fronted the band and played rhythm guitar, seemed older, wiser, rootsier. Was he the Obi Wan Kenobi of the Singaporean blues scene I'd been searching for?

Crossroads opened their set with "Bo Diddley," the first song Bo cut for Chess Records in 1955. It's a gem of a song because it's so simple -- just a one-chord guitar groove played to a catchy, syncopated beat. (Actually, it could be vice versa since the guitar basically doubles the drum part.) It sounds easy, but getting an entire band to feel that "Bo Diddley Beat" is tough, and these guys had nailed it. Siva orchestrated the rhythm well, which really distinguished him from the bandleaders who preceded him; instead of trying to outshine his band, Siva made his work.

Bo Diddley bought him a nanny goat, to make his pretty baby a Sunday coat.
Bo Diddley caught him a bear cat, to make his pretty baby a Sunday hat.

The lyrics to "Bo Diddley" are sung in a kind of humming rap; Buddy Holly copped the style in "Not Fade Away," but Holly's high voice sweetened it into mere pop imitation. Siva went for the gutbucket version -- he's got a deep, bellowing voice that bowls you over with some serious soul. (I later learned that he was a legendary R&B singer back in the sixties.) Since he's got such a potent set of pipes, he did without a lot of the usual frontman histrionics. From the neck down, his body kept relatively still onstage except for his right hand mechanically hammering out open chords on his guitar. From the neck up, though, he may as well have been James Brown. Singing apparently wasn't good enough; this guy shouted and hollered out his blues.

On Siva's left stood the skinny, slouching John Chee on lead guitar, his black Les Paul hanging down around his knees; Segar, the no-frills bassist was on Siva's right. Behind them, buried near the amplifier stacks, were saxman Stephen Rufus and drummer Gary Tan. You could tell this wasn't a well-rehearsed bunch -- the arrangments were loose, the tempo skidded between fast and swagger, random things sounded slightly out of tune. (Halfway through his forty-minute set, Siva assured the crowd that everyone in the band kept a day job.) But there was something special in the attitudes you saw in each of them -- they weren't going to show off, so they all stuck together and played the blues.

Mojo, mojo, and black cat bone, took Bo Diddley away from home.
Mother asked mojo, "Where you been?"
Up your house and back again.

One reason why the blues is so inspiring is because the lives of the musicians are as improvisational as their music -- as opposed to, say, classical players who tend to be trained and groomed from the crib onwards. Charles Brown started out as a chemistry teacher, Chuck Berry a hair dresser, Johnny Copeland and Willie Dixon as boxers, Big Bill Broonzy a levee camp worker, John Lee Hooker and Mose Allison as sharecroppers. And the way the blues gets passed down to people is often just as unpredictable and strange: Albert Collins played at Robert Cray's high school prom and got him hooked; Elvin Bishop and Paul Butterfield were University of Chicago students in the sixties until they found new professors in Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf; a young Lightnin' Hopkins served as the "lead boy" for Blind Lemon Jefferson. Maybe none of this seems very exciting compared to Shine or Amadeus, but the connections and influences between blues players are always laced with impressive stories. What does this have to do with the Singapore Blues Festival? Well, it has to do with how Siva Choy first met the blues:

"Before we do our last number tonight, I'd like to introduce a friend of the band who's gonna play with us. He's one of the guys we used to listen to a long while back . . ."

From the left side of the stage, a skinny, bearded, fifty-something-year-old guitarist jumped up onto the stage platform with a red, beat-up Gibson guitar. He plugged into the amp and quickly tuned up. He wore blue jeans and a black Buddy Guy T-shirt. He looked slightly disoriented; actually, he looked like a slimmer, Asian version of Jerry Garcia. Siva seemed hapy to see him.

"Over here we got Jimmy Appudurai with us from the Straydogs, and to finish up tonight, we're gonna do a rock 'n' roll song, it's called 'Long Tall Sally.'"

I watched as Appudurai promptly tore into the intro and got the band rolling, jumping and laughing, ripping Chuck Berry licks up and down his fretboard, re-living a moment from that long-lost Singaporean blues circuit, remembering the high of jamming in a band, feeling the sense of timing and delivery come back to him as his friend Siva Choy screamed out the hallowed words of Little Richard.

Well, long tall Sally has
A lot on the ball
And nobody cares
If she's long and tall.
Oh baby,
Ye-e-e-eh baby,
Woo-o-o-oh baby,
Havin' me some fun tonight.

REFERENCES
1. Cheah, Philip. Liner notes. Repent/Mum's Too Pampering/Freedom. By the Straydogs. BigO Singles Club, 1994.
2. Forte, Dan. Liner notes. Guitar Player Presents Legends of Guitar — Electric Blues, Vol. 1. By various artists. Rhino, R2 70716, 1990.
3. Schnieders, Bob. Liner notes. Bo Diddley. Chess Records. CHD-5904, 1986.