In addition, the King composed the alma maters for three of Thailand’s leading universities (Chulalongkorn, Thammasat and Kasetsart), along with love songs, rags and blues, many of which have been recorded by a number of artists. In a popular Bangkok nightclub frequented by jazz and blues fans, over the stage is a huge photograph of the King playing the saxophone, the instrument for which the club is named.
When Hucky Eichelmann moved to Bangkok in 1979 to join the music faculty at Chulalongkorn—after teaching at the University of the Philippines in Manila—his repertoire was limited to Bach, Vivaldi and other classical composers. What he discovered was that the Thai audience for classical guitar—and for classical music, for that matter—was practically nonexistent.
“Then I learned that Thailand’s King wrote music, and that the people knew and loved the music, just as they loved the King,” Hucky recalled. “So after getting permission from the palace, I recorded an album of ten of the King’s songs. A year later, the King called for a command performance and I was formally introduced.”
Hucky said 350,000 copies of the album were sold, an astonishing number for a market of Thailand’s size. His new tribute to the monarch, called His Majesty’s Blues, contains fifteen more royal compositions, spanning the range of the King’s works, including not only the blues, but also love songs and Dixieland-inspired rags.
“The King’s music is good,” Hucky said. “He has written some very lyrical things. His patriotic songs are sincere and his ragtime is fun. He is spontaneous, a part of his love for jazz. There is in his repertoire, as in his reign, a sense of balance.”
It’s been many years since His Majesty traveled abroad with his saxophone. Yet, his music still circles the earth as Hucky spends about half of each year touring Europe and the Americas, taking the royal repertoire to a growing audience. “I tell them that there’s a king out there writing and playing music,” he said. “At first, they don’t believe it. So I play a few of the songs and the people really enjoy it. I am a guest in this country and this is a way I can pay something back.”
Recent years have not been kind to royalty in much of the world. In many nations, monarchy is regarded by some people as archaic, or merely ornamental. Nothing more needs to be said about the state of royalty in England, where the crowns have been knocked askew by those wearing them, and the tabloid newspapers have left the poor dears hanging in tattered embarrassment.
Yet, in Thailand, portraits of the King and his Queen, Sirikit, were prominently displayed on the walls of virtually every home and business in the Kingdom. In Thailand, H.M. Bhumibol Adulyadej and his family were revered, in much the way royalty everywhere was, once upon a time. The King of Thailand was— and is—most insist, the embodiment of national unity, the glue that may be what holds the country together.
The glue that held the King together? Surely music played a role. He once told a group of students—who later joined him in a jam session—that “the purpose of music is to educate and relax the mind. We musicians can express our feelings and awaken reactions. Music can be used for satisfaction, for amusement, to help us persevere.”
THE NAME SAYS IT ALL
Love for Sale
When I arrived in Bangkok in 1993, I was an aging, libido-gone-astray, Western male awash in The World of Suzie Wong, Thai style. Welcome to the Land of Smiles, indeed. Thailand had been the place for casual, convenient sex for farangs since the 1960s and America’s war in Vietnam, when the big, pale foreigners came to Thailand for the first time in large numbers for what was euphemized as R&R, and, thirty years later, I joyously joined the parade. Patpong and Soi Cowboy and Nana Plaza were places where nearly anything imaginable was available at an affordable price, where horny males could push “rewind” on life’s remote control and return to an unrequited adolescence… and this time, the girls would all say yes and make you think they loved it. I was reminded of something one of the literary McCourt brothers said: “You’re never too old to have a happy childhood, and I’m having mine now!” If, as the song promised, “dreams come true in Blue Hawaii,” fantasies came true in Bangkok. It was biology at its friendliest, gynecology with a beat.
Some farangs told sad stories about the girls they at first claimed to love and subsequently called gold-diggers and worse. In too many cases, the epithets were deserved. Wallets and ATM cards were stolen. Some of the men were drugged as well as robbed. Many bar girls convinced several men simultaneously to send money every month, employing one of numerous commercial services available to answer the letters that came to them, juggling their boyfriends’ holidays so that they didn’t overlap. (One of the services, located near the American, British and Dutch embassies, was called Language Lovers’ Translation Centre.) Money was solicited to pay for fictitious parental illnesses and other needs at home that bore no relationship to reality. Many of the women played their customers along though they already had Thai families. Some even married them just to escape poverty, divorcing them as soon as they were settled in a country where common property had to be shared and alimony—an alien concept in Thailand—was an accepted part of a marital split.
Still others had Thai boyfriends, many of whom took the women to work on their motorbikes and lived off their earnings. More than anyone would suspect actually preferred female companionship. Yet, none of this was revealed as the little darlings crawled all over their customers’ laps and whispered, “Number One! Lob you too much! Go hotel?” I had an attorney friend who worked in Phnom Penh and took his holidays in Bangkok who said, “I never knew any group of people who lied more than lawyers until I started spending time in the bars.”
Still, the tide of males rolled in, praise going where praise was generally deserved, the thousand-baht notes right behind them. Some of the non-complainers surely were the ones Tennessee Williams was talking about when he said that the city’s name said it all. There was no other way of putting it: if you weren’t happy at home in Sacramento, Manchester, Frankfurt, or Perth, you booked a flight to Bangkok, where young, beautiful women would give you the time of your life. Even if you were a geek or old or fat and couldn’t get or keep it up. Affordably. Paul Theroux wrote that in Bangkok, even the “most diffident” got laid.
But it wasn’t just quick and easy sex. Tens of thousands of the pay-bar-go-loom liaisons led to marriage, removing the women at last from the poverty that impelled most of them into the business to begin with. Many actually fell in love with the men, went home with their new husbands, stayed married and became parents. I knew several such couples, in Australia, Europe and the United States. One of them adopted the woman’s son, who subsequently became an avid cricket player. More, including me, remained in Thailand, building homes upcountry for our wives and the new families that usually came with them.
It didn’t always work out—how many marriages did?—but it was a nice arrangement, at least initially. And for the women who worked in farang bars with no interest in marriage, they kept whatever they got from the men with no questions asked or taxes paid. It wasn’t a profession that earned respect for the women— quite the opposite—and too often the exploitation, on both sides, ended in misery. But it was not an altogether bad deal.