God Bless

 

Part One: The Name of the Thing

You have to understand something about Achmad Albar—who everyone called Iyek, which is the kind of nickname that only makes sense if you’d known him since before he was anyone, back when he was just a skinny kid with a voice that could strip the paint off a ‘68 Chevy—you have to understand that when he came back from the Netherlands in 1972, he wasn’t just bringing himself home. He was bringing all of it with him. The hunger. The music. The particular electrical charge that had been building in his chest since the first time he heard rock and roll crack open the sky above Amsterdam like God Himself throwing a switch.

He’d been sharpened over there, in the land of windmills and gray canals and cold rain that fell like it had a job to do. Sharpened the way a knife gets sharpened—by friction, by resistance, by being run against something harder than itself. And he brought that sharpened thing home, back to Indonesia, back to Jakarta and its diesel heat and its smell of clove cigarettes and fried rice at midnight.

He also brought Ludwig Lemans.

Ludwig had been his guitarist in Clover Leaf—the band that had given Iyek his first real taste of the stage, that had let him discover what his voice could do when it was backed by a proper electric guitar and a drummer who actually listened. Ludwig was a good man. More importantly for our purposes, Ludwig was a present man, meaning he was still alive in July of 1974.

Not everyone in this story would be.

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But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. That’s a bad habit. I have it sometimes too, that urge to telegraph the darkness before you’ve earned it. Let’s back up. Let’s go slow, the way summer goes slow in a country that doesn’t have winter to remind you that things end.

After Ludwig came Fuad Hassan.

Fuad was Iyek’s brother-in-law, which in Jakarta meant something specific and binding, the way family always means something specific and binding in places where the streets have names but no one uses them. He’d married Camelia Malik—Mia, everyone called her, Mia—Iyek’s stepsister from the marriage of Djamaludin Malik and Farida Al-Hasni. Two families stitched together by a wedding, and now two musicians stitched together by blood-by-marriage, which is a different kind of stitching but holds just as well, most of the time.

Fuad Hassan was not a young man finding his way. He was already found. Aktuil magazine, that Bible of the Jakarta music scene, had noted in Issue 149 that Fuad’s career had started in 1962, which meant he’d been playing drums while Iyek was still figuring out how to tie his shoes. Pandawa, Zainal Combo, Dieselina, Madness, The Pros—the names scroll past like a mixtape of a decade, a decade of stages and smoke and the particular exhaustion that comes from caring too much about music when music doesn’t pay the rent.

He’d also been to Europe. This mattered. This mattered enormously, in the way that all small biographical facts matter enormously when you’re trying to understand why a man becomes who he becomes. Fuad had seen Grand Funk. He had seen Led Zeppelin. He had—and this one seems almost impossible to type without pausing for a moment to let it breathe—he had seen Black Sabbath. All of them. In the flesh. Ozzy Osbourne howling at the ceiling, Jimmy Page playing like his hands were plugged directly into something old and electrical and not entirely from this world.

“All in the same vein,” Fuad had told Aktuil, back in 1971, “with incredible showmanship and world-class musicianship.”

He came home a different drummer. You can hear Europe in his playing, in the way he hit things, in the way he understood that the drums weren’t just keeping time—they were telling the truth.

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Fuad brought in Donny Fattah.

Donny was a bassist, one of those players who understood instinctively that the bass guitar is the skeleton of a song—not what you notice first, but the thing that holds everything else upright. He’d been playing with Fancy Group Junior, and Fuad had seen him play one night and something had clicked in that way things click when two musicians recognize each other across a crowded room.

“He was impressed by my bass chops,” Donny said later, with the kind of modest pride that doesn’t sound proud until you’ve heard it a few times.

And so: four of them.

Iyek on vocals. Ludwig on guitar. Fuad on drums. Donny on bass.

Four guys in a city of millions, in a country that didn’t yet have a rock and roll tradition the way it needed one, in a year when the whole world was still figuring out what music could do if you turned it up loud enough and aimed it at the dark.

They needed a name.

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The first name wasn’t theirs. It belonged to their manager, Derek Madradi, who had a background in racing and apparently thought that a rock band was somewhat like a motorcycle—something with speed, something with chrome, something that left marks on asphalt.

He called them Crazy Wheels.

“Yeah, we just went along with it,” Iyek said later, laughing the way men laugh about things that embarrassed them before time made everything funny. “We weren’t ready to argue.”

Donny, for his part, figured Derek’s racing background explained it. And maybe it did. Names come from somewhere. They always do. They come from who you are and what you’ve loved and sometimes from a slightly misguided sense of what sounds cool when you say it fast.

Crazy Wheels played cafes. They played small venues. They covered the Beatles, the Eagles, Sly and the Family Stone—and they didn’t just cover these songs the way a Xerox machine covers a document, flat and dimensionless and smelling faintly of chemicals. They took them apart. They rebuilt them from the components up, from the nuts and bolts, from the thing underneath the thing.

“With Fuad’s permission,” Donny said, “we did play those Western songs, but with our own arrangements. We really tore them apart and rebuilt them.”

This is what good musicians do. This is the difference between musicians and people who play music. Good musicians hear a song and think: What is this, really? What does it want to be? And then they find out.

But Crazy Wheels. The name sat wrong. It sat the way a rock sits in your shoe—not big enough to stop you, just constant enough to remind you that something’s wrong.

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Iyek thought about it. He had that quality, the one that separates leaders from the rest—the quality of sitting with discomfort until it taught him something. And what the discomfort of Crazy Wheels taught him was this: they needed a name that sounded like what they were, or wanted to be, or maybe like what they were afraid they might become.

He went to Fuad.

“Bro,” he said, “how about we call ourselves Gods? You know, like deities?”

Fuad went quiet in the way a man goes quiet when he’s thinking about something that can go badly wrong in a specific cultural direction. Jakarta in 1972 was not Amsterdam. Religion meant something here, meant something pressed into the daily fabric of life in a way that couldn’t be ignored, that you’d be a fool to ignore.

“Indonesians,” Fuad said, slowly, working through it, “might interpret that as referring to the one true God. Not mythological deities. The one true God.”

Which would have been, to put it in the most diplomatic terms possible, a problem.

But then Iyek said: what if we add Bless?

God Bless.

God’s mercy. The mercy of God. Not the God Himself, not the claiming of divinity, just the asking for grace—which is a different thing, a humble thing, the kind of thing that acknowledges that you are small and the world is large and you would appreciate, if it’s not too much trouble, a little help getting through it.

Fuad came around.

God Bless.

The name was official on May 5, 1973, at Taman Ismail Marzuki—a real stage, a real show, a real name. They’d also grown by then, from four to five, Fuad having pushed for a keyboard player with the particular stubbornness of a drummer who knows that the space between the beats needs to be filled by something that understands melody.

After a rotation through a few candidates, the keyboard chair was finally taken by Soman Lubis—an ITB student, technically a university man, which gave him a slightly different quality than the others, a slightly more provisional relationship to the band, as if he were always keeping one foot in the world of lectures and exams, just in case. He’d played before, in a group called The Peels. He could play.

Five of them now. God Bless. Moving toward something, though none of them could have told you what.

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Part Two: July 9th

Some days have a feeling to them before they start. You wake up and the light through the curtains is wrong, or the air smells different, or there’s a sound you can’t place—not a loud sound, just a small one, somewhere at the edge of hearing, like the universe clearing its throat.

July 9, 1974 started as an ordinary day.

The plan was simple. The whole God Bless crew, plus the assorted friends and hangers-on that collect around any band like iron filings around a magnet, were heading to Pegangsaan. This was their place—a shared rehearsal spot, a hangout, the kind of room that smells of cigarettes and ambition and the particular electricity of people who are young and talented and haven’t yet learned what the world has in store for them. They shared it with other bands. One of them was called Gypsy, which is the kind of name that, in retrospect, carries a weight it didn’t carry in the moment.

Two cars were ready to take them from Kalibata.

Fuad didn’t want to take the car.

He had a motorcycle. A new Yamaha, pristine and gleaming, the kind of machine that a man loves with a particular physical tenderness that non-machine-people don’t quite understand—the daily cleaning, the checking of oil, the running of a hand along the tank before bed, as if reassuring it. He had been sick recently, sick enough to worry people, sick enough that Camelia—Mia, his wife, Iyek’s stepsister—was watching him with the particular watchfulness of a woman who loves someone who doesn’t take care of himself.

She said, “you just got better. You should take the car.”

Fuad declined.

There are moments like this in every tragedy, moments where you can see the fork in the road so clearly that you want to reach through time and grab somebody by the shoulder and say no, listen, just listen to me for one second. Take the car. It’s just a motorcycle. The motorcycle will still be there tomorrow. There are a thousand tomorrows. Take the car.

The key was hidden. Iyek had taken it—quietly, without announcement, just removed it from where it lived and put it somewhere else, the way you remove temptation from somebody you love. He was looking out for Fuad the way brothers-in-law look out for each other, the way musicians look out for each other, the way people look out for each other in that particular period before the world has taught them that some things can’t be prevented.

Fuad found out about the key.

He threatened to burn the motorcycle if they didn’t give it back.

The key was returned.

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Now: Soman Lubis.

Soman had come down from Bandung that day. He had made the journey specifically to say goodbye to his God Bless friends—not permanently, not in any way that required tragedy, just the ordinary goodbye of a young man who had decided to take his foot off the stage and put it back fully in the world of lectures and exams. He was leaving the band. This was his farewell tour of the people he was leaving behind.

Mia, still watching her husband with that watchful love, had a thought.

“Why don’t you ride with Fuad?”

Her logic was maternal even though she was a wife, not a mother—if Fuad had someone on the back of the bike, he’d be more careful. He’d be aware of the weight of another person. He’d slow down. He’d look twice at intersections. The presence of a passenger is a kind of ballast.

Soman agreed. Fuad agreed.

Both of them agreed.

Here is where the story holds its breath for a moment—that small inhale that comes right before the thing you weren’t ready for.

The cars were loading. People were getting in, arranging themselves, doing that complicated Tetris of bodies and bags that happens whenever a group tries to go somewhere together. And in the middle of all of that, Fuad started the Yamaha. Soman got on behind him.

And they took off ahead of the group.

Just like that. Gone before the cars had finished loading. Two people on a new motorcycle on a Jakarta street in July 1974, the engine sound fading as they pulled away, the heat of the day already building, the city already loud with its own noise, its own traffic, its own indifferent machinery of life.

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When the cars arrived in Pegangsaan, Fuad and Soman weren’t there.

The group waited. This is what you do—you wait, because traffic is traffic and motorcycles can take different routes, and Jakarta is a city of a thousand small delays. You wait and you talk and you don’t yet let yourself think about the alternatives, because the alternatives are the kind of thing you don’t think about until you have to.

They had to.

An empty taxi pulled up.

The driver got out.

He had the look of a man who had drawn the short straw, the man who has to be the one to say the unsayable thing, the messenger who knows that the news he carries will change the people who receive it in ways that cannot be undone.

There had been an accident. In the Pancoran area, near a gas station, not far from Musika Studio. Two men on a motorcycle. A truck.

“Fuad’s in really critical condition,” Iyek would quote the driver as saying, years later, in that careful present tense of memory, the tense that says: I’m not there anymore but the words are. The words are always there.

The driver didn’t know who Soman was. Soman had only recently joined the band, and the world outside the band didn’t yet know his face. But there had been two of them on the motorcycle, the driver said, and he didn’t know if the second one was still breathing.

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The search for hospitals.

This is the part that feels most human, most awful in the specific way that helplessness is awful. 1974. Jakarta. No cell phones, no instant information, no way to know anything except by moving toward it, by asking strangers with frightened faces, by following the trail of disaster from one building to the next.

They were told PELNI first. They went to PELNI. Fuad and Soman weren’t there.

They tried other hospitals. They searched.

RS Cipto Mangunkusumo.

Only Fuad was there. Soman had been taken to RS Fatmawati, which was elsewhere, which meant someone had to go elsewhere, which meant the group was fracturing now, splitting apart like a piece of wood along a grain, some going to look for Soman, others standing in the corridor of the hospital where Fuad was.

Where Fuad had been.

Iyek arrived at RS Cipto Mangunkusumo and tried to get inside and a security guard stopped him and told him—with the blunt administrative delivery of someone who had delivered this kind of news too many times and had learned, wrongly, that efficiency was the same as compassion—that Fuad was already in the morgue.

“Why did they have to say it like that?” Iyek would say, years afterward, still angry, still carrying that anger like a stone in his pocket. “They shouldn’t have said it right in front of everyone else.”

He was right. There is a right way and a wrong way to tell people that someone they love is dead, and the wrong way is with the casual efficiency of a man checking items off a list. The right way involves pausing. Involves looking the person in the eyes. Involves understanding that the words you are about to say will divide the listener’s life into two sections—before and after—and that this is not a small thing, and should never be treated as one.

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Aktuil magazine, Issue 149, August 1974, ran the headline: God Bless Drummer Fuad Dead!

He had been dragged twenty-three meters by the truck. Twenty-three meters is a long way to be dragged. It is a long way for a man’s body to travel against its will.

Soman had been thrown twelve meters backward.

He was still breathing at the hospital. For three hours, he was still breathing. And then the blood loss was too much, and the medical response too slow, and he was gone.

“The slow medical response was a major factor,” Iyek said. He might have been right. He might have been wrong. Either way, it is the thing a man tells himself in the aftermath of something like this—that if things had moved faster, the outcome would have been different. It might be true. In the place where the unsayable lives, between what happened and what might have happened, no one can say for certain.

Iyek never saw Soman’s body. The keyboardist was taken back to Bandung by his family—the man who had come to Jakarta to say goodbye, who had said his goodbyes in a way none of them intended, whose last ride had been on the back of a new Yamaha on a hot July morning in Jakarta.

“That’s what happened,” Iyek said, years later.

“And it was… man. It was the heaviest thing God Bless ever went through.”

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Part Three: After

There is the tragedy. And then there is the after.

The after is quieter than the tragedy, but it lasts longer. It sits in the room with you. It changes the shape of things.

Donny Fattah called Fuad Hassan the most important person in God Bless’s history, and he wasn’t wrong to call him that. It was Fuad who had built the thing, or helped build it—who had recruited Donny, who had arranged songs, who had pushed for the fifth member, who had stood in a room with Iyek and worked through the theology of band names until they landed on something that felt right. God Bless. God’s mercy.

Ludwig Lemans left not long after. Can you blame him? Can you blame a man for being unable to sit in the same room where the ghost of a thing used to be?

That left Iyek and Donny.

Two men who had started this whole thing together, standing now in the reduced space of what remained.

But here is what you need to understand about musicians—and maybe about people in general, maybe about the particular human stubbornness that looks like recovery but is something older and less comfortable than recovery: they don’t stop. They keep playing. They keep playing even when the thing they’re playing toward is invisible, even when they can’t see what’s on the other side of the next measure, the next song, the next stage.

Jockie Surjoprajogo came back to play keyboards. Ian Antono joined on guitar. Teddy Sujaya took the drum chair, the one that would always carry the echo of Fuad’s hands.

God Bless lived.

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December 5, 1975. Gelora Bung Karno Main Stadium.

Deep Purple. The real Deep Purple—Ritchie Blackmore with his Marshall stacks, Jon Lord with his organs, Roger Glover, Ian Paice, David Coverdale. Deep Purple, who had recorded Machine Head, who had given the world “Smoke on the Water” and “Highway Star,” who were at that moment one of the five or six most important rock bands on the planet.

And opening for them: God Bless. A band with no album. A band with fewer than three years of real existence. A band that had already buried two of its members.

There was an incident. Deep Purple’s crew kicked God Bless’s drum kit. Whether this was deliberate arrogance or a careless accident of roadies who didn’t know whose kit was whose, the effect was the same—the God Bless members were furious, and for a while it seemed like they might simply leave, might play the second night only, might take the insult of it and walk.

The organizers negotiated. There was an agreement. God Bless stayed.

And something happened to them, standing on that stage, watching Deep Purple operate. Watching the sound systems and the stage monitors and the dry ice rolling across the floor like low fog on a horror movie set, watching the crew and the technicians and the operators, the whole machine of a world-class rock concert running like a world-class rock concert.

“After playing with Deep Purple,” Donny said, “everything clicked for us. Oh, this is what this gear does—speakers, stage monitors, dry ice, crew, technicians, operators, all of it. Deep Purple’s visit was truly a revolution for the music industry in Indonesia.”

They went home and they bought sound systems. They bought basses. They bought Marshall amplifiers—the same kind that Ritchie Blackmore used, because if you’re going to build something, you might as well build it toward the best version of the thing.

The benchmark was Deep Purple, Donny said. A top world band at the time.

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This is where the story properly starts. Everything before it—Iyek coming home from Amsterdam, Ludwig Lemans and his guitar, Fuad Hassan building the thing and then being taken from it, Soman Lubis’s last motorcycle ride, two funerals and the long quiet of grief—all of that is prelude. All of that is the darkness before the thing comes roaring into the light.

God Bless.

God’s mercy.

They were asking for grace in a city that didn’t always give it, in a country that was only beginning to understand what its own rock and roll could sound like when it was turned up all the way and aimed at something that deserved it.

The name, it turned out, fit.

It fit all along.