My rock and roll misadventures- 1 : All Shook Up

I played guitar. Well, at least , sort of. Was part of a couple bands. Of sorts, anyway.

My rock and roll non-career never took off but it threw up plenty of high jinx stage disasters worth a good laugh today. So I’m putting a few up on this blog.

The first goes all the way to around 1984 when Rahul , my mate at St.Edmund's School , Shillong,India and I – Beatles freaks both – had just learnt a couple of chords. And started fancying ourselves as a bit of a Lennon-McCartney duo! That included making up and tape recording our own versions of L-M tunes. My ‘lead guitar’ notes had to be heard to be believed - having neither any idea in hell about scales nor a basic musical ear, I’d play any random note no matter what key the song was in. With some horrible results. And when I say horrible, I mean truly effing awful.

There used to be these ‘Musical Evenings’ at school that we entered once. Rahul on vocals /rhythm guitar and me on ‘lead’ guitar (whohohaha). We roped in a classmate for ‘bass’(whohohaha) .Then we needed the biggie : a drummer.

And we ended up with a smallie. That’d be Ricky , this kid three or four years younger than us. When you’re 12 or 13 that’s a big age difference. And if you’re trying to be a cool rock dude at that , it’s also an embarassement. Ricky though was the most accomplished of us four , i.e. he could actually play the drums. In fact , he sounded like he could play them like Billy Cobham. (OK , maybe Keith Moon , as we didn’t know about Billy Cobham then). And he had access to , like , a real drum kit we could rehearse with.

We thought we’d do two songs for the show : Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da and a composition that was called something like“My Sweetheart My Love" . Gawd ! Bloody rich that , considering we probably didn’t even know a girl at the time that wasn’t a relative. It had exactly two chords : Am and E. The song was the absolute bottomless pits but gotta say Am-E is an interesting combination anyway.

Our gear : hmm. A borrowed drum kit and three accoustic guitars. Of which mine was a beginner size almost-toy. And that’s gear out of the way.

Well yeah , I said we got a bassist but I didn’t say we also got an electric bass did i

Cutting to the show :

The evening opened with a band from Grade 10 , the big guys. That was probably the first time I’d heard a proper band that up close. I was blown away. They were doing the Stones, probably Under My Thumb. That completely shitted us. So when it was our turn to take the stage we were these four terrified stage-fraught , tounge-tied kids wondering WTF we were doing there.

It was a disaster waiting to happen and boy , it happened big time!

I played the ring-in to Ob-La-Di so off key that the only reason Rahul didn’t get thrown off was that he couldn’t hear it. We were playing accoustics with a mic in front of the guitars and the volume was turned way down low. (for good reasons i guess ). Rahul in turn forgot the lyrics for most of the song including the entire first verse.The bassist had anyway frozen in a legs-akimbo cowboy pose from the moment he strode on. And young Ricky , he went off on his own trip. A fast tempo one. The drums were a couple of cycles faster than the rest of the song.

So for most of the time we were on stage , all you could hear was this little robot thashing a 16x16 on the drums and snatches of clumsy rhythm guitar jangle and a few words from time to time.

The ultimate disaster was when the song had finished.

Because Rick wasn’t.

He kept the drums going even as Rahul and I turned around to face him waving at him to stop. But the kid just went on and on.

And now all you could hear were loud drums and louder jeers.

We just ran off the moment he finally did stop. Or maybe we didn't even wait that long.

And , BIG surprise : we didn’t attempt “My Sweetheart My Love”

I could never completely live down that evening for the rest of my stay in that school. There was always the odd bozo a year or two later to ask if I was the guy who’d tried to play Ob-La-Di with a Grade Three drummer that refused to end the song.

And so began my rock and roll stage misadventures.