Praise be to Nero's Neptune. The Titanic sails at dawn. Everybody's shouting " Which side are you on ?" This blog raps the good Rock.Classic mostly - but,hey, any prefix you like. The circus is in town.
Remarkable , think of it, how many solid and tight quality bands there have always been . You know, the ones that not only have each individual member being really bloody good at what they do but also have them getting it all together to perfection.
Queen, ah ! One of the finest (pardon please the banal cliche)
Today on Freddie Mercury's 65th birth anniversary , here's one number that just goes so well with the man , or at least his public persona. Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon from A Night At The Opera. All camp frolic-and-frivolity but underneath of that is some brilliant songwriting.Quite the small wonder this track. Packs in everything in a minute. Love Brian May's solo at the end. Also the way it is sequenced in the album,fits so perfectly in there.
The other similar track on Night... is Seaside Rendezvous. Same attitude and feel. ("It's such a jollification as a matter of fact / So tres charmante my dear" and of course the "Give us a kiss" at the very end - immortal !)
Happy birthday Killer Queen , you must be kicking some butt up there. (Puns ? FM likely would have !)
Funny country ours. Bollywood stars do three hours of Hindi dialogue inside a movie ,they can't manage three seconds outside it. Strangers from your socioeconomic class find it offensive if you didn't approach them in English. Cool young urban Rock is about singing in a put-on accent about far-off things. I know a city website from the north eastern part of the country that actually headlined a visiting American musician ,can't recall the name,saying that people in this city knew his music more than folks back home in the States. Yes,congrats on the bone. (No offense. I'm from there myself but you gotta say the place is seriously Westerner-Than-Thou)
Took coming out the country and meeting other people for me to truly realize the absurdity of these things. No other nationality makes such a fetish out of what's basically mental slavery than we the subcontinent elite. The Chinese don't,nor the French , or the Arabs , Swedes...just nobody to this extent.
Can you separate out your music from your identity politics ? With age and exposure i've realized that - when you do give it any thought at all - the question's tougher than it appears. You might think it a bit rich all this coming from an English-language blog about Rock music. Tough one. All told , and after all these blog posts, i do find myself wondering if it wouldn't have been better if this music wasn't such an all-consuming obsession , if it was only one of the many passions of a really culturally well rounded mind. The reality though is that this stuff is a very big part of my life and no fucking way am i ever going to be apologetic about it. And the point of the post was never about taking anything away anyway.
Where i am going with this is the search and the hope for that original desi rock and roll sound. Desi in origin, desi in context, rock and roll in form and spirit. Hard to articulate actually ! Innovation,basically, i guess . Which doesn't equate to randomly inserting a sitar-tabla bridge section in a song. Nor to singing in an Indian language necessarily. 'Vernacular Rock' of the Rock On variety sounds quite contrived to me, even weird and unnatural. And ordinary as hell.Sorry.
I haven't quite found that 'it' yet. No doubt a breakthrough is around the corner- later if not sooner.To be sure there're already some good acts around. Bhoomi's Bangla Rock sound is original and great but somehow i couldn't connect. The language probably. Likewise i snatched a glimpse of this Tamil band on TV, just a couple minutes but they already sounded really interesting. Indian Ocean of course is mega- but that i'd put in a different category , more technical,more virtuoso.
But the straight-on , three minute shot of great original rock and roll ?
I found it across the forbidden border, deep inside the territory of Junoon's Azadi. Sufi Rock ! What is more rock and roll than Sufi and what could have been a greater inevitability than
Sufi Rock ? Somebody had to do it and it turned out to be Junoon. Don't know all that much about the band. What blows me is the album.
Easily , freaking easily , the freshest and most original Rock sound to have ever come out from our side of the world. Quite a few other acts emerged in its wake but i believe when Azadi came out , it was path breaking. I'm big on it. Its there in my car and it's probably the only album i listen to days at a stretch a couple of times every month ,been doing that for a few years now !
I thought it broke new ground in just about everything. First , the sound. Remarkable how a bare combination of light guitar , bass and some kind of dhol (Indian percussion) somehow manages not to leave any empty spaces in there. And the vocals are powerful. The beat gets you moving - think Stones or AC/DC at their punchiest and then some.
Then , there's the lyrics. Not a great one for lyrics myself normally but here it's part of the package. Great Sufi poetry (when you understand it TBH , not easy but then there's always Google !) and some pretty powerful messaging , including,yes, the politics of mental slavery ! ("Ghulami me khush hain abhi dusro ki / Ke rehte hai jannat mein woh ehmaaqo ki../... Kaha jo unhone woh sab ne suna /Aur jo hamne kaha woh kisne suna ? Koi yahan apni zubaan samjhe kaha ?" - great dig !).
And over it all is just this spirit , once the album gets into your system you sense it. It's creativity , originality, intelligence and musicmanship all coming together in the freedom that rock and roll is all about !
I consider it not just the greatest desi rock album but one of my favourite rock albums of all time. Period. If you're an Indian rock lover and not heard it , hear it NOW.
Here's Khudi. I couldn't find a more apt dedication than this beauty for this the first day of our 65th year as a nation state. The video & sound quality is passable but you get a sense of the song and its movement. A powerful and inspiring piece based on the poet Iqbal placing the human individual and the human spirit at the higher plane where he thinks it belongs.
"Sitaaron se aage jahan aur bhi hai / Abhi Ishq ki imtihaan aur bhi hai/.... Tu shaheen hai, parwaaz hai kaam tera / Tere saamne aasman aur bhi hai /Tu shaheen hai Basera Kar pahado ki chattanon par / Tu shaheen hai, tu shaheen hai...."
Last month's issue of Classic Rock had a cover story on twenty years of Guns' Use Your Illusion with a related feature on how Grunge killed 'party hair metal' around that time. (Nirvana's Nevermind was released around the same time). Like most stuff on Classic Rock , it's a great read. (love the mag. It's expensive but it's such value !)
Thing i like about that period is it's one the very few in my listening life when i was checking into contemporary music of the time. To be sure , it was bang in the middle of my hippie music-only phase (ouch !) and i was one of those insufferable bores not uncommon to my generation in India at that time that always went "yeah-but- if- it's-not-from-the-sixties/seventies -i'm- not- listening- to- it". But i was listening to a fairish bit if current music too , especially the hard rock and metal stuff. GNR i loved,still do actually.
Nirvana i didn't get into then though , just heard a couple of tracks. In fact i remember this morning sometime in '92 or so at my University bus stop , this guy's raving about a band called Nirvana he'd watched the previous night and i thought he was talking about a local Delhi band and gig he'd been to. Then he tells me it was on MTV or Channel V or something and that was the first i heard of Nirvana - beat that ! I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit covered by a local band. It was good ! But i thought for the longest time that it was by Pearl Jam !
History is always afterwards , right ? At that time , i don't think too many people were differentiating along those lines. I mean , at least for me Nirvana and Pearl Jam were just new hard rock bands with a different sound (low-guitar-solo aspect of which i didn't like too much !) They were being called "Alternative" i knew. But that aside i don't recall if people were actually calling it ''grunge' at that point. Or setting them off against other hard rock / metal acts. It wasn't until after reading this CR piece that i saw the bigger picture of how that played out and how it all but killed off the whole LA glam metal thing.
And not knowing was natural because it wasn't relevant to my context. See the playing field is always out there in the US / UK / the West somewhere . India's obviously too nascent - even now - to be that dynamic. Several genres can very comfortably coexist as favourites with the Indian rock lover. As i said , kids were still discovering the Beatles or the Stones around that time when Satellite TV and music television was first coming in.Their parents - same generation as Lennon or Jagger - possibly hadn't even heard of the stuff. And in all likelihood , thousands of kids even 20 years later today are possibly going through the whole process. It's still a very small place but for sure it's growing larger by the day. A critical mass will no doubt arrive. But certainly back then , you wouldn't be drawing too many lines through what you listened to. Separating it clearly out from the bubble gum pop your kid sister danced to was line enough.
The other thing personally for me was i never did get into the whole glam metal thing. NWOBHM was where it was at for me and my metal buddies. Maiden and Priest ruled. Metallica. GNR , hell yes. But we couldn't be too arsed about bands like Motley Crue or Poison. Found it ordinary. And i hated that make-up-on look. Yucks. So for me it didn't need Grunge or anything to kill that scene , it never lived in the first place far as i was concerned !
The same CR issue also has a piece on a band i hadn't ever heard of ."German experimentalists" called Can. Intrigued , i checked them out on You Tube. Trippy,very !
Music to me pretty much equals guitar-based music. i know that's quite limiting but there it is nonetheless. So there's an entire galaxy of axemen to look up to. I couldn't finish a favourites list here if i tried.But ican narrow it down to the one great big daddy for me.
Jeff Beck is the package. He's a technician , stylist , player and writer all at once. He's rock star , he's musician. He's virtuoso, he's accessible. He does cerebral ,he does unpretentious. Most of all , he pushes the envelope.
Be it Jazz in the 1970's - two better consecutive albums than 1975-76's Blow By Blow and Wired anyone ? - or Electronica / Ambient in the 2000's , Beck has pushed it like few in the industry have. Where people like Clapton and Page -lesser musicians with whom Beck has often been tagged as an afterthought almost - have always ever sounded exactly the same since 1960-something , this guy has constantly challenged himself and evolved.
And what brought on this post was listening to this number this morning, this happy ferry siren on a river of song : Nitin Sawhney's Nadia from 2000's You Had It Coming. Flow with it !
Happy 70th to The Man. What could i say here that's not already been said ? Here's something more from the FT today though. Nice read. Well anyway it's not about the person anymore. Not even about his music by now i guess. Sure , there's a Don't Think Twice ItsAlright , a Jokerman , an Oh Mercy to listen to on either side but Bob Dylan to me now is an abstraction , an idea - concrete and all too real but an idea nonetheless - that spans the 10 or so albums between 1965's Bringing It All Back Home and 1975's Desire. And a part of you that's always going be intact through everything.That stuff's so ingrained in who you are it becomes personal.You don't write about it.
So on Mr.Zim's birthday today i'll tip my hat instead to Mr.Lou Majaw and the remarkable Dylan birthday celebration concerts he's been doing every year since 1972 in my childhood town of Shillong in distant North Eastern India. 38 unbroken years ! For absolutely nothing but a love of the music. And trust me : 'nothing' is a lower amount around those parts than it is in Bombay, Delhi or Bangalore let alone the moolah economies Mr.Dylan and the rest belong to.
This video here is part of a docu film i found on You Tube on The Great Society , a cult Shillong band circa1970's-80's featuring Lou (among other solid musicians - like Rudy Wallang of Soulmate India's finest Blues band today)The whole docu is great , very nice film making i thought... But especially hear the man around 3:20 onwards on this video - around 4:50 about discovering Dylan and around 7:30 when he talks about growing up poor.
Just goes to show how this 24th May effort is just pure passion , commitment and loads of integrity. Hats off to a true legend. It's guys like these that keep it all afloat.
These concerts have started attracting more attention now (here's a 2006 BBC report). I hope they grow to be really big - and commercially successful. God knows the man deserves it. This year's edition will be a 10-hour marathon. I was thrilled to stumble upon this blog and learn that they're also planning an outdoor camp. Not sure if it's finally happening but either way wow , to be there man !
Happy birthday , Bob Dylan. Keep on keeping on , Lou. And stay Forever Young you both !
Carrying on from the last post. I did for sure ! Chick Corea's been ruling my waves this entire time. The Elektric Band was his 80's project. Another all-wow cast. Esp. John Patitucchi on Bass and Scott Henderson and then Frank Gambale on Guitars. Three of the finest players ever across any genre. The EB had a more 80's New Wave electro/techno sound , drum programming and stuff.
Their first album (1986) The Chick Corea Elektric Band was also the first Chick Corea album i ever heard. I'd got that sometime around '91-92 from this place in Palika Bazar,New Delhi,India. It was quite a place this little shop. This was back in the day in India when CD's were an exotic rarity your more loaded friends owned and you gathered en masse at their place to trip along to after a bit of green or black , LP's had gone irrevocably off the market and Magnasound was Revolution packed inside a plastic box.
So anyway the deal was , this shop stocked imported CD's - big library by any standards- and they'd record music for you on cassette tape for a price. Stuff you couldn't get at your music store , mostly unreleased in India. Good business model for the day - but its death was always certain you'd guess even back then. (Aside : though taxes , that other alleged certainty in life,must have been very distant. Palika's that kinda place ;)) It was great. You'd browse through the catalogue - a photo album filed with CD album covers -and go bonkers trying to decide which of the million magnificent options you'd shell out your precious 100 bucks on.
Funnily enough i've never found the album CD anywhere though i did finally manage to get the first Return To Forever album - another priceless gem i'd got at the Palika place- at Virgin Megastore here in Dubai. All salutes to You Tube - That Which Has Erased The Word 'Elusive'.
This track Elektric City is my favourite one from that album. I was thrilled when i heard it then in 1991 , i'm thrilled when i hear it now in 2011. The video is a whole other place too. The clothes , the hair , the colours , the look , the dancers , the semi-graininess. It's the 1980's in all its decade-that-fashion-forgot glory. The music's bright , upbeat , light . The sort of light that keeps the underlying brilliance of the music afloat through its the entire length.
So if you've read this far , check it out without a second t. Satisfaction guaranteed !
Gotta thank IKEA , or my own ineptitude at carpentry actually , for this post. This off-kit CD rack i assembled last summer is starting to collapse. Plenty of long neglected stuff falls into my consideration now. One of these is an awesome 2-CD Return To Forever live set bought sometime in the mid-00's. A sole copy lying in an obscure lower shelf off a quiet corner at Music World , Ansal Plaza , New Delhi , India. Lowish price too. Listening to it a lot these last few days.
Jazz. I believe you need to have at least some music theory in your head to honestly,truly and really get it. Take this really nice piece on what makes Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue an all-time great. You need something like that to explain. And even then you still gotta know your 12-Bar from your 32-Bar,your mode from your scale. Ha. Yes ,so music theory. Or an exceptionally sophisticated natural ear. Having neither , i've never got it - at least, not honestly,truly and really. And so never gotten into it.
But Jazz-Rock.Love it ! Just the right blend of far out and accessible. My orbit's been limited around Usual Suspects-planet though. Circa 1970-80's. (Didn't it all kinda die out after that ? Or no ?) In varying quantities of bits and pieces, your John McLaughlin / Mahavishnu Orchestra , Al Di Meola , Weather Report , Stanley Clarke, Pat Metheny , George Benson , Jaco , Tutu & Amandla -Miles, Jean Luc Ponty, Spyrogyra, and most of all i guess , Chick Corea / Return To Forever / Elecktic Band.
Hola You Tube. Video of Return To Forever's classic Sorceress , superb interplay between these gods Corea , Clarke , Di Meola. Absolute treat. Or , another link , the four-way trading between 2:25-6:00 on this link of VulcanWorlds. Now that's how you want your mojo served up,man -sunny side up,hot sizzle on toast. Wicked stuff.
Revisited Easy Rider last night. God what a flick. Forget the hippie scene , the Sixties , the drugs , the desolation. Forget the Road Movie , the motorcycle ideal , the freedom mojo , the joy trip. Strip the movie of all of that and Easy Rider'd still touch deeply and speak wisely. For me , 40 years and 10,000 miles off epicentre, the movie's like some seismic tremor shaking the whole cultural terrain.
Magic movie-soundtrack moment. The whole movie pehaps ? It's almost imposs to pick any one track. The movie's intended to be that way after all i guess.But last night i really travelled miles on this one . The Band's The Weight.
Terrific choice. Look at the sequence , the twilight silhouettes especially , and you might well pick a West Coast psychedelia sound of back in the day to go with it , a Dead or an Airplane perhaps. The movie picks The Weight instead. As opposite of psychedelic as could be. And it gets it so damn right ! Because the whole no-frills-solid lightness of this track is what the scene's all about. Terrific. Oh and - here as it is through the movie - heartachingly beautiful cinematography,right.
Second consecutive post on a Beatle birthday is pure accident.
George Harrison's 68th (25th Feb) passing one by has a nice symbolism to it. Everybody's second favourite Beatle after all. But , in ways both tangible and intangible , he was the different one, right ?
What he brought to the table musically with both the Post '65 Beatles and solo is obvious. You could argue he was the key driver of the band's second-half evolution in the sense that his growth was disproportionately the highest. Be it worldview / mindset , singing , writing , musical breadth or indeed guitar playing ( which grew from ridiculous three note linear add-ons to his own signature 'floating note' style solos and slide playing).
It carried on from there. All Things Must Pass has got to be an All Time Top Something album , Traveling Wilburys an All Time Top Something all-star ensemble.
A true talent - and a personality. Macca was always reputed to be playing to the gallery but i believe Lennon did a lot of image cultivating and gallery playing too. Harrison though remained his own man to the end. He truly didn't give much of a damn.
33&1/3 is a relatively lesser known album from 1976. I didn't know about it when i stumbled upon it by chance back in the autumn of 1990 - in a dank brokedown room inside a dilapidated brokedown building deep inside off seedy brokedown Free School Street (now Mirza Ghalib Street) in Kolkata , India. That place is an Ali Baba cave for old LP records and the like - but that's a separate note.
33 & 1/3 has some solid music. Here's the groovy album opener Woman Don't You Cry For Me. Funk , slide , killer slap bass. Love it !
John Lennon would have turned 70 yesterday. 30 years ago around this day he was recording DoubleFantasy. The album was released days before his death. In many ways it was his best.
Lennon had just come out of retirement and wasn't about to dish out the old same old. Double Fantasty was a fresh sound , every inch 1980 and New Wave with its synths and drum machines. I saw an interview on You Tube where he was calling disco the most exciting new genre at the time. All the stuff that had been brewing outside while he was baking bread and changing nappies at home , stuff like punk and disco and technology , all that had been absorbed and then put to their considered use , just so , by a master magician on this album.
The songs / vocals on the album are divided alternately between John and Yoko. The Yoko numbers are clearly hard-punk influenced. Those vocals takes some getting used to ( i never could !) and all things considered kinda weird ! Though stuff like Yes,I'm Your Angel is very good. John's are masterpieces all. I believe pretty much all of them make it to all the Best Of collections i've seen.
Double Fantasy turned out to be Lennon's last album but it could so easily have been the start of something new and exciting. What might Mr. Lennon have come up with in the 1980's , 90's , 00's, 10's ....? Sadly , we'll never know.
Here's the superb , very funky Cleanup Time - the one number that inexplicably did not make it to any of those Best Of compilations.
Thu night : with 10-15 flicks in the backlog at home , i inadvertently ended up with something i'd already watched: Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home . Just like that. And discovered there a quote my friend Meraj had posted a couple of days before on FB. (Dylan " you can't be wise and in love at the same time").
Fri evening : library trip to get a few Hindi movies and i picked Scorsese's Shine A Light because it happened to be lying around on the counter. Just like that. And my friend Gaurav had mentioned that film in a comment on this blog recently too. (Gaurav : " the way he shoots Jagger , what can i say , Love ?") . Serendipity anyone ?
As filmmaking goes , No Direction Home is a brilliant documentary . But a lot of the music there doesn't do much for me. (Though it got me to the Highway 61 . . CD next morning). What i'd give to watch a similar film on Dylan's 1965-1975 period.
Shine A Light is only a concert docu , nothing more. But the music - and the grand olde Stones ! Ooh ! A couple things : first , if such a thing was possible Keith Richard has gotten even worse on that old guitar. Oh Keef , we love you for the original , genuine-article cowboy rockstar that you are. Just spare us those licks is all.
But second : the band as a whole - Keef , Charlie , Ronnie ,...man,just such presence ! Keef singing You Got TheSilver is a stand out highlight. And then there's Mick the Jagger ! Mick Jagger. Jagger is effing incredible any which way you look at it. Showman ? Showbiz ? He is showbiz , he is effing it. Always was , always will be. Love , G, it's love !
PS : Re. Keith Richard's guitar strengths / lack thereof. Ron Wood isn't better either. Guitar isn't a strong point with the Stones ,period. There's a story going back to when Mick Taylor quit and Eric Clapton was rumoured to join the Stones but apparently the Glimmer Twins didn't want somebody that might remotely outstage them. I think that explains a lot.
Elsewhere on this blog , i'd written about how live versions may often not be as good as the studio track. But check this baby out : AC/DC doing Let There Be Rock.
Now if this doesn't get you going KERRRRRAAAANNNGGG ..........!
Carrying on from the last post , the right music can really do things to a scene when it comes on in together with a change in mood or atmosphere. Like Elton John's Tiny Dancer in the bus ride scene on Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous . It starts with the tense charge of bad blood and fatigue from the previous scene. Then the song takes over , the trip begins and - as Penny Lane puts it - you are home.
The song's great , one of the very few Elton tracks that does it for me.And the placement is perfect. A beautiful magic moment in a brilliant movie.
Magic movie-soundtrack moments can groove into your head and stay there forever. Its a combination of things. The music itself of course , but also the context of the film and the scene.
The Layla fade-out on that sequence-from-hell from Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas :a classic (and desperate) love song lays into gangland gorefest with all the unrestrained vengeance of soul poetry.What juxtaposition, what a scene and what use of soundtrack !
