saGuijo Café and Lounge
Defining the Alternative Scene
By Mikee dela Cruz
PUBLISHED: MAY 2009

A foreigner who visited the place wrote in the guestbook of its Web site that it may just be better for the place to remove the seats during the busy nights, and have the audience, instead, sit on a banig (mat) on the floor – this way they could sit closer to the performers while mingling with the other visitors, and, for that matter, have more of the people queuing outside get into the venue to witness what goes inside it.

Since saGuijo – which started as a café concept, though now more of a bar – took off around the last quarter of 2004, a few months after it opened in April of the same year, this has become a somewhat expected observation of the venue.

“This is not your typical see-and-be-seen nightspot,” Angelo Carlos, who owns the venue, says. 

In their Web site, his business partner, his cousin Chris Carlos, stressed: “This is a place where patrons and performers alike can (quite literally) let their hair down.  No judgment.  No pretentiousness.  No social bigotry.”

For saGuijo, “it was always about the music,” Chris Carlos said, since the venue’s main objective is to provide a proper venue for the music lover.  But rather than being an “out and out performance space where musicians are required to cover the latest Top 40 Hits, saGuijo is a bastion for individual creativity,” he added.  “Genres be damned, (but) we seek the fresh, the vital, and above all else, the original in contemporary Filipino music.”

INDIE PASSION

Angelo Carlos, who majored in International Business in San Francisco, came back to the Philippines in 2002.  “I was enjoying myself in gigs (watching local talents), and later on got to thinking that maybe the scene needs more exposure, and maybe I can do something about it, something about what I passionately like,” he says.

So saGuijo was opened in April 2004 as an “alternative bar, something that caters to the indie (independent) scene.”

“Initially, (business) was slow, at least for the first two, three months.  No one has heard of us – plus we are in a semi-residential area, and most of the gig places (a year and a half ago, when we opened) were in Quezon City, though there were also the occasional trendy bars in Makati, then,” Carlos says.  “Being in a semi-residential place was a challenge because there’s less visibility that way.  I don’t get as much walk-in, compared with Greenbelt, or Jupiter, where the (venues) get a lot of spillovers.  I don’t get any of that.  People come here (only) because they want to be here.  When they come here, they make it a point to come here because this is pretty out of the way.  But in a way, it’s good also, since it gives us a snobbish appeal.”

Eventually, however, word got around that there’s this place in Makati that caters to a different taste.  “Just spreading the word, that was the challenge (when we started).  But once the word got out, it had a multiplying effect.  You just have three good nights with people having fun, the following week word about it spreads out.  People tell others, ‘There’s a good bar with good vibes, and it’s good fun there.’  And people come,” Carlos says.  The challenge for him now is continuously having good nights.

Carlos noted that the crowd that goes to saGuijo is very specific.  “It’s not like the other high profile clubs.  This place has no pretensions, it has a more relaxed setting.  And we want to keep it like – not that we’re snobbish or we are pseudo avante garde or something, it’s just that this is what we do.  So if you like independent local talents, this is the place to go to,” he says.

Obviously, at first, people were skeptical about their venture.  “People asked, ‘What, put a bar in the middle of nowhere?’  So, naturally, in the beginning, the clients were mostly our friends, and very few walk-ins.  But by October 2005, coinciding when “a lot of good local bands, and a lot of good albums came out, things started to pick up for saGuijo,” Carlos says, adding that this is no wonder since “when you come here to watch, you get to see another spectrum.  Aside from the signed popular bands, you also see other good bands playing, they just happen not to get as much exposure, air time, and all that.  And that’s what we’d like to have: a mix.  I’d like for signed bands to perform with up and coming bands in saGuijo.” 

There are two ways for a band to be allowed to play in saGuijo – either by invitation, or by submitting a demo.  Carlos, however, is a big fan of originality.  “I don’t care if they can cover Pearl Jam, Black Party, or whatever.  I don’t care how popular they are.  I want (for them to have) their own materials – as long as they are edgy and they played their own compositions, played them with heart and passion, then they’re okay.”

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