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Published on February 14, 2008

Ask Prart and Sangchan Aroonrungsi, founders of Prart Music Group, about their business and they'll chat for hours. Pose more intimate questions about their successful relationship and they are reluctant to spill their secrets.

But today is Valentine's Day and after two years of pleading, the two have finally agreed to talk. "I've never given an interview before," smiles Sangchan, or "Lar" as she likes to be known. It's Lar who takes full responsibility for the management of the business, leaving Prart to take care of the music side.

Prart and Lar met by chance at Bangkok's jazz pub Saxophone while celebrating New Year 1992. They started talking and soon discovered they shared a mutual friend, Pry Pathomporn, an indie artist who made his name during the boom years of alternative music.

"I immediately knew she was different from other women. We had a similar way of thinking; there was no thought of self," says Prart, who at that time was also an indie artist and music teacher.

"My first impression was that he was an interesting guy," recalls Lar, who at that time worked in marketing with real-estate company Thanayong.

They started going out for meals, borrowing books from each other, and within three months were inseparable.

"I remember meeting at McDonald's on Valentine's Day. He came very late and gave me a pineapple pie as a gift," she laughs. "Like most women, I would have preferred a flower. But he's very nice and gentle too."

They married in mid-1994, a few weeks before Prart left for the US to study for his diploma course at the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles. "I really missed him," Lar says.

She followed three months later and was soon enrolled on an MBA at Pacific State University in the same city.

Prart was born into a family of musicians. His father was bandleader for the Wanderer and his mother a singer with the same group, and they entertained American soldiers at several GI bases before coming back to Bangkok.

Lar was born in Lamphun where her parents manufactured ready-to-wear clothes and also ran a longan plantation.

Did her family disapprove of her relationship with a musician?

"I didn't tell them at first. When they learned I was in a serious relationship, they told my elder sister to meet him. I tried to present him as a music teacher, a columnist with Quiet Storm magazine and an artist who recorded his own albums. At that time, he was very skinny with long hair ... he looked like a drug-addict," she says.

In August 1994, Prart travelled to Hawaii and stayed at his uncle's home where he prepared as much as he could for his new life in LA, renting an apartment and getting a driver's license.

"I got a double surprise when I landed in Los Angeles," says Lar. "As we drove to the apartment, he played my favourite Pun Paibulkiert song and when we arrived, I saw he'd attached a flower to a music sheet on his bed. That was so romantic!"

They lived in the city for two years, with Prart earning $30 (Bt1,000) to $40 an hour playing Western music at Thai restaurant Khruangthes on Hollywood Boulevard while Lar worked as a manager of a Thai magazine.

"We went to gigs and concerts a few times a month," he says.

"I liked what he liked so I never felt bored going to concerts with him," says Lar. "I can listen to Pat Matheny, Larry Carlton, Robben Ford or even Steve Vai, but I'm not as into the music as he is."

They returned home in 1996, Prart making a list on the plane of what he wanted to do when he arrived in Bangkok. His aspirations included opening a music school, hosting music programmes on radio and television, producing his own teaching media and setting up a pub like Catalina in LA. Why not aim for personal stardom?

"I've never wanted to make music for a wider public, so it wouldn't be possible for me to be as famous as Phi Bird [superstar Thongchai McIntyre]. I've never expected to be in the country's top five," he says.

He built an extension on his parents' Nonthaburi house and turned it into a small teaching facility before finding a new location on RCA for Prart Music School. Before long he was also producing a five-minute guitar-teaching programme, "Prart Music Workshop", on iTV. It proved so popular, he later adapted it as a video for commercial sale.

"We received so many calls, we didn't sleep," Lar says. "Affordable guitar lessons were a new thing for Thai people."

Prart and Lar then launched Overdrive, a free magazine with just four A4-size pages. This year, the magazine celebrates its 10th anniversary and the group now also incorporates music label Tonic Records, rehearsal room Tone Studio, the much-praised teaching media programme Tone Project and Overtone pub on RCA. Prart is also a regular concert organiser, bringing in some of the world's best rock bands to play in Bangkok.

"Everything I do is based on education," he says. "We like to do useful things for Thai people, although we are still earning barely enough to keep body and soul together."

"A student once remarked that if he were like us, he would be wealthy. We've never reached that point. I never think of how much profit we can make but rather how much money we can afford to lose," says Lar.

But while Prart and Lar are permanently short of funds, they're certainly not low on love and are held in great affection by the country's music circle.

So how is their relationship today?

"We're like friends rather than just husband and wife," says Prart, whose song "Moonlight" from his third album is dedicated to Lar.

Kitchana Lersakvanitchakul

The Nation