Last Sunday, I was with my wife at the flea market in Amcorp Mall PJ. Her interest in antiques and collectibles has accumulated a houseful of knick knacks, much to the despair of our part-time cleaner. I am responsible for cleaning the breakables but she had to deal with extra furniture when mopping the floor.
Anyway, to give an idea of how much time we could spend, we arrived before noon and left after 4 pm! The quick lunch took less than half an hour. Over time, even though we are not regulars, we got to know some dealers and half the time was spent on small talk.
PJ Auctioneer, Chew has been to our house once to have a look at the items. One of the things he mentioned was that we should have kept the original boxes of our Matchbox vintage cars! Without them, we lost at least 40% of the value. He has a durian orchard near Batu Gajah and his wife is from Ipoh, so it was during one of his frequent visits.
There is this old man (older than me lah) from Klang who likes to dress like an eccentric in an army-like jacket with badges and with a flatcap. Once he was late because of the infamous flash flood between Klang and PJ. I chatted with him in Hokien. Besides Penang, I think Klang is another place where Hokien is widely spoken. I once bought from him a saraswathy veena with broken frets and missing knobs, but otherwise in good condition, for show. Many people mistook it for a sitar but it is quite similar, but unlike sitar, it is used mainly in south India instead of north
I started writing to tell about my jamming with a guy who plays the ‘erhu’ and I digressed!
Anyway, I saw this regular dealer, Boey, on the third floor who sells ‘erhu’ and other items. This time, he was playing it, accompanying a tune from a gramophone. I started chatting with him and told him it would be nice to jam with him for a change. Got his handphone numbers and promised to contact him.
On Monday morning, I felt that if I did not take the trouble to organize, it would be one of those ‘talk only’ promises. Called Boey to confirm that he would be free and then called my friends in KL to make sure both of them are available.
Met him at the Esso station off Jalan Kasar, then followed his car to his house in Medan Damansara to leave his car and fetch his erhu.
At my friend’s place in Sentul, after introduction and exchange of pleasantries and jokes, we tried out a few tunes. It was quite a let down as I was told he used to have a band and could handle guitar and even organ too. Basically, as usual, we had difficulties choosing songs or tunes suitable for all of us. Main problem being he was out of touch and from memory, he could play lead of some nice Los Indios numbers but we were unprepared and just guessed the chords as we go along. Most of the time, it was like us practising as usual and he tried to fill in the lead whenever he could, especially tunes that he knew.
The other problem was, Boey being English educated, taught himself how to play the erhu. So we could not even suggest any Chinese tunes without us being able to hum the tunes in the first place!
Finally, just to cut a long story short, for example, we were quite happy to alternate guitar and erhu lead for Apache! With Bailamos, I seemed to be the only one familiar, I had to decide between rhythm guitar and drums, and I chose the former so that I could lead them!
The good thing was, we tried something new and Boey promised the next time, he would come prepared to play the banjo! Let’s hope it will be more inspiring then.
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