In the early nineties, Karl Roy was a cult figure, a frontman whose powerhouse live performances in even the smallest of venues became the stuff of legend. By the latter half of the decade, his extraordinary talent as a performer and his range as a vocalist had taken him from the underground to dizzying heights of widespread, popular acclaim. A rock ‘n’ roll animal, his bombast as a showman often obscured the fragile psyche evident in his own songwriting. Coming off a string of missed opportunities, his misfortunes continued when he suffered a stroke last year. Philbert Dy spends some time with the singer and asks him about his past, his music, and the possibility of a comeback . . .

Photograph by Juan Caguicla

The story goes that In September last year, Karl Roy was just outside his apartment in Wack Wack, Greenhills, carrying a case of beer. That’s when it happened. A thrombus cut the blood flow to his brain, everything went dark and he collapsed. 

Karl Roy then, body in shock and barely aware of his surroundings, picked up the case of beer and proceeded to take the stairs up to his apartment. He managed to get in and put the case down on the floor before finally laying still, letting the stroke take its course. 

“So you were having a stroke, and you brought the beer up? That’s pretty amazing,” I say. 

Karl Roy looks up at me. He chuckles. “Beer,” he says, letting the word roll in his mouth. He takes extra effort to form the word, incredibly conscious of the shape his mouth takes as he enunciates the “r” at the end of it. 

His wife Dena later clarifies that Karl had just come home from an all-day shoot with Red Horse and was already inside the apartment. He wasn’t more than a few minutes into telling her how the shoot went when, mid-sentence, he went blank. “It took almost ten minutes for me to get help because Karl would not sit still long enough for me to call or run to get anyone. I finally yelled out the window for somebody to please help me because he was picking things up—our laptop and the case of beer—pushing me out of the way when I tried to get him to sit down. He dragged himself up the stairs in the apartment to our bedroom with a grip so tight on the banister, I had no choice but to let him keep going.” He knocked over an electric fan, picked it up, and then removed his jacket and shirt. It wasn’t until they got him into the car that he collapsed.

Years of bad music and sparkly t-shirts have me confused over what a rock star truly is, but there’s little doubt here. Putting up a fight while your body succumbs to a stroke? That, my friends, is the stuff of legend. 

Everyone who grew up listening to music in the nineties knows who Karl Roy is. They would have seen him at least once live, and remember being mesmerized as Karl Roy took over the stage, jumping, dancing, bringing people to their feet. They remember shows with a hundred bands in the line-up, but never really starting until P.O.T. marched onto the stage. They might have never heard of P.O.T. before that night, may have never kept up with local music before then, but after just thirty minutes of funk grooves, they would be talking about it for months afterwards. 

I remember being in first year high school when I first saw Karl Roy live. P.O.T. was playing at the Xavier School variety show, one of those odd school fair shows that had Wolfgang in the same bill as RETROspect. The show had been pretty dead until P.O.T. came on. The first few chords of “Yugyugan Na” were quickly followed by the sound of a thousand asses abandoning their monobloc chairs. Adolescent Chinese boys and girls quickly lost their inhibitions and danced right in front of the stage in ways that would cause their families to lose face. Karl Roy came on, shirtless and sweaty from the strangely humid February night. “Sige na, pipol,” he pleaded in song. “Yugyugan na.” And everybody answered with their bodies, moving with the music, completely rapt with the sheer presence of the frontman. 
It had been a kind of a homecoming for him. Karl Roy had studied in Xavier once, but he only made it to Grade 4 before he had been expelled. During the flag ceremony, he stole the keys from Student Services and locked all the classrooms. Then he hid the keys. 

“We were fighting over girls. And other things, too. We rocked everything. We wrecked everything.”

I asked him why he did that. “I don’t know,” he replies. “I guess I was just . . . mischievous.” He gives a wry smile. 

From across the room, Dena says “That’s the same answer you give me all the time.” 

“You’re still naughty,” she says to him. Karl can only nod. By the time he was fourteen, Karl’s “naughtiness” had landed him in rehab, working a cocktail of drug dependencies out of his system. He, along with a couple of friends, spent their school days getting high on whatever they could get their hands on. By the time the dismissal bell rang, Karl and his friends would be drooling on their tables. 

It was around this time, working off the chemicals in his system, that Karl was forced to face his reflection and ask “Am I a person that’s going to amount to nothing?” It wouldn’t be long before Karl found his way into his first band, the new wave Advent Call. 

Advent Call was one of those bands that came out of the early nineties band explosion. Like many bands of that era, they rose from the swirl of chaos and creativity that was the original Club Dredd. Alongside the likes of Datu’s Tribe, Rizal Underground, Tame the Tikbalang, Color It Red, Teeth, Yano, the Eraserheads, and a bunch of other great bands, Advent Call was changing the landscape of Philippine music. These bands were creating a scene, an entire culture rising from live performance in small, intimate venues, where a whole generation found their voices. To this day, there are still people who lament the dissolution of Advent Call, who will spend hours sharing memories about those magical Club Dredd nights and whining about how the music of today pales in comparison to the music of the nineties. Advent Call is still around, but with only one of the original members still in the band, even their biggest, most loyal fans have to confess that it just isn’t the same. 

“We were really tight,” Karl says. “We spent, like, Christmas together. Our holidays together. We were always together.” He can only speak fondly of his days with Advent Call, but he was moving on to bigger things. Advent Call had set the stage, but it would be in P.O.T. that the population would really get to know Karl Roy.  

By 1995, the band explosion had died down, and what were left were a few stalwarts who had survived the underground nature of their emergence and made it into the mainstream. By ’96, there was very little coming out of the local scene, and some would say that local music was stagnating. 

And then came P.O.T. With P.O.T., Karl Roy truly unleashed his own unique voice. The band’s sound, an unmistakable mix of funk, soul, acid jazz, and a hearty dollop of good old rock ‘n’ roll, was definitely closer to Karl and gave him a chance to really expand as a performer. The band, most famously composed of Karl, Ian Umali, Mally Paraguya, and Harley Alarcon, had something really special going on. They were the buzz of Manila, a shot in the arm for the local scene. People would flock to Mayric’s to see what the big fuss was, and they would leave those gigs as lifelong fans. 

It was the energy, really. Karl Roy attacked the stage, he assaulted the music. He showed a passion and an aggressiveness and a wild manic streak that woke up a bored listening public. People say that Karl Roy in P.O.T. was “better than Kiedis,” that he exhibited more talent and intensity than the vocalist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers ever could. 

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