Before Hotdog gave Manila its anthem, the Garcia brothers lost a recording deal in Honolulu because they didn’t have a single original song to play.
In the early 1970s, Dennis and Rene Garcia were playing in a band called Red Fox, a regular act at a Manila venue called Third Eye. By 1973 they had landed a residency at Mike’s Broil Your Own, a nightclub in Honolulu. A major American label heard them there and offered a recording contract. Then the label pulled the offer when it became clear that Red Fox performed only covers.
Dennis flew home and started writing originals. The brothers dissolved the band, assembled a new lineup, and called it Hotdog.
Their debut album, Unang Kagat, came out on Villar Records in 1974, and its timing lined up with the national calendar in a way no one could have planned. The Philippines was hosting the Miss Universe pageant that July at the Folk Arts Theater, part of the Cultural Center of the Philippines complex that First Lady Imelda Marcos had championed since the late 1960s.
Hotdog’s first single, “Ikaw ang Miss Universe ng Buhay Ko,” caught the wave of national excitement so completely that the band performed at the pageant’s proclamation rites on July 21, serenading the contestants.
A year earlier they couldn’t get signed. Now they had a hit on every radio station in the country.
The catalog grew fast. Songs like “Bongga Ka, ‘Day” and “Annie Batungbakal” became big enough to be turned into feature films starring Nora Aunor. “Pers Lab” and “Langit Na Naman” stayed on the radio for years. But the song that outlasted all of them came two years after the debut.
Dennis wrote the lyrics for “Manila” while on a work trip in Asia, where he was employed as a creative director. Rene composed the melody. They recorded it at Sampaguita Recording Studio and released it on RCA Victor, with “Ako’y Hindi Angel” on the B-side.
Rene sang lead, but he wasn’t alone on the mic. Ella del Rosario, the band’s first and only female member, shared vocal duties. Ramon Torralba and Tito del Rosario played guitars alongside Lorrie Ilustre on keyboards. Jess Garcia and Roy Diaz de Rivera were on drums.
The starting point was a gap in the world’s playlist. Dennis said later that Tony Bennett had “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and Frank Sinatra had “New York, New York,” and nobody had written the equivalent for Manila. So the brothers wrote theirs.
Dennis called the result “the mother of all Hotdog hits.” He and Rene, he said, created it “not thinking of ourselves as Tagalogs, Bisayans, or Ilokanos but as Filipinos missing the Philippines.” When someone suggested the melody borrowed from an older track by the Mabuhay Singers, Dennis was firm: “100 percent original and organic, borrowing from zero influences.”
That claim of shared Filipino ownership got tested decades later. When the Philippines hosted the 2019 Southeast Asian Games at the Philippine Arena in Bulacan, the organizers chose “Manila” as the entrance music for the host delegation. The crowd sang along and President Duterte bobbed in his seat next to the Sultan of Brunei.
Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte questioned the choice publicly, arguing that the song represents only the capital. Presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo agreed that a song reflecting all three island groups would have been better. The event’s organizers stood by the pick: when you welcome someone in Manila, they said, you welcome the whole Philippines.
Dennis responded on Facebook, addressing his friend Pancho Alvarez, a Cebuano writer who had asked about the song’s origins. He repeated what he had said since 1976: the song meant Filipinos missing home, wherever that home was.
The term OPM itself owes something to the world the Manila Sound built. Danny Javier of the APO Hiking Society is widely credited with coining “Original Pilipino Music” while working as a marketing executive at Jem Records, originally to describe the ballad-driven pop that followed the Manila Sound’s commercial peak. The term now covers all Filipino-composed popular music, but it grew out of the same cultural moment that Hotdog helped define.
Other artists have kept recording the song for their own reasons. Side A put out a soft rock version on their 1998 album Ang Ating Awitin, released for the Philippine Centennial Independence celebration. The REO Brothers gave it a Beatles-inflected arrangement as part of a fundraising effort for survivors of Typhoon Haiyan in 2013.
The Eraserheads recorded their take for a 2001 tribute album called Bandang Pinoy Lasang Hotdog. In 2020, Gary Valenciano performed it alongside Armi Millare at a virtual concert held after Dennis’s death.
Rene Garcia never saw the SEA Games performance. He died of cardiac arrest on September 2, 2018, at sixty-five. He had been trying on shoes for a concert in Jakarta scheduled three weeks later. He stood up, smiled, and collapsed. Dennis announced the death that night.
Dennis survived his brother by sixteen months. He died of renal failure on January 18, 2020, at sixty-nine, so suddenly that a close friend said he hadn’t shown any symptoms. He had a full year of projects ahead, including a stage musical built on Hotdog’s catalog, scheduled for Resorts World Manila that June.
In his final years he also co-founded Bandang Pinoy Co-Op, a cooperative designed to help aging and retired Filipino musicians build new skills and find work. A song about returning home, and the songwriter spent his last chapter building a way for musicians to stay in the game.
After Dennis died, his son Paolo put together Muling Kagat, a rarities album of unreleased and reworked Hotdog recordings that included a new version of “Manila.” He released it online in July 2020 and said he couldn’t let his father’s memory fade without a proper tribute. He deliberately avoided making it a greatest-hits collection. “If it were,” he said, “the first track on side one would be ‘Manila.’”
A tribute concert followed, originally planned for a live stage but moved online because of COVID.
The song keeps traveling on its own. It was written by two brothers who lost a deal in Hawaii for having no originals, and it turned into the original that outlived them both.
What’s the song that puts you back in a specific place, even if you haven’t been there in years?
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