Desolation Row

Happy birthday Killer Queen

2011-09-05T12:40:00.006+04:00

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 !)

Azadi !

2011-08-15T11:03:00.021+04:00

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...."

Rock hard,ride free , Jai Hind !

Grungemetalwhatever

2011-07-10T13:34:00.015+04:00

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 !

July Morning

2011-07-09T23:37:00.004+04:00

Hot air heaving maelstroms of boiling moisture. Little pinpricks of roast sand. Dust fog , heat haze. Tunnel vision. And very dehydrated thoughts.

No , there's nothing special about July around here.

Still there's always the promise of a better place you reach riding a damn good song. With the day comes the resolution : you'll be looking for it.

And then you know it's never too late to have a July morning.

Beck To Jeff

2011-06-28T13:33:00.014+04:00

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 i can 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, Bob / Bring It All Back Home , Lou !

2011-05-23T23:11:00.021+04:00

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 Its Alright , 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 !

Return To Chick

2011-05-10T21:44:00.019+04:00

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 !

Return To Forever

2011-05-03T10:37:00.034+04:00

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 Vulcan Worlds . Now that's how you want your mojo served up,man -sunny side up,hot sizzle on toast. Wicked stuff.

Easy Rider / The Weight

2011-04-11T12:18:00.013+04:00

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.

Sixty Eight & 1/30

2011-03-09T12:56:00.021+04:00

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 !

RIP George Harrison.

Double Fantasy and what might have been

2010-10-10T12:00:00.021+04:00

John Lennon would have turned 70 yesterday. 30 years ago around this day he was recording Double Fantasy. 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.

Shine it like a rolling stone

2010-09-19T12:20:00.007+04:00

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 The Silver 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.

Yeah , let there be lots of it

2010-09-16T21:21:00.000+04:00

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 ..........!

On the road. Famously (Or,Almost)

2010-09-05T14:19:00.000+04:00

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.

This one got me on my knees

2010-09-02T21:48:00.000+04:00

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 !

Inspired. Epic.

Just epic.

Being For The Benefit Of MistersTull

2010-08-21T12:38:00.000+04:00

Benefit was my second Jethro Tull album . It still takes me back to that Delhi summer of '91. I can almost smell the sweet-salt stench wafting in from the Def Col nullah nearby , feel the scorching hot wind toss-salading the air to a roasted haze (and the discomfort of enduring that for a semi-furtive chotta Gold Flake outside my room) , hear the Ring Road traffic trying its damndest to drown out my Phillips record player , see all the very many friend stars my planet orbited around - and , hell yes , almost feel the lightness of a 19 year old Summer Holiday being . In short , it's a happy record for me.

So it helps that the music is so fabulous to get back to now. The Tull sound of 1968 (Stand Up) -1978 (Songs From The Wood) spawned many mastepieces and rings solid and true. But I overdosed on the stuff for a long time . It was a kind of Lost Weekend phase of swamping myself with late 60's / 70's rock that in hindsight probably got in the way of discovering more contemprorary new sounds when i still could. (gets harder with age doesnt it!). Tull are still up there with my favourites but not quite in the same way anymore. Not that there's never a Tull moment now but they've certainly been fewer . I tripped out on Benefit yesterday and that's how this post !

I saw Tull in Dubai around 2003 or 04 , double billed with Indian Classical flute maestro Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia. The individual sets were great but the combined jam session at the end was all over the place. The two flutes were loud and out-of-sync. The other musicians were desperately trying to get half a decibel in edgeways. It was chaos. My abiding memory from the gig - 10 feet away in the front row , for a change - would have to be the priceless look on guitarist Martin Barre's face when the good pandit abruptly cut in with yet another trilling solo just when our Martin had taken advantage of a lull in the flute storm to launch one of his own on the guitar. Look of adoring veneration it was not. I saw Ian Anderson proffer a sympathetic "damned if i saw that coming" shrug to his longtime Tull collaborator. Hilarious !

With the benefit of You Tube , two of my fav tracks from the album : Inside and Teacher

The spirit of Rush !

2010-08-14T20:40:00.000+04:00

Cold and flu when it's 45C in the shade outside is never good news , and even worse on a weekend. What saved me yesterday was digging into an old CD i hadn't heard in some time. Rush and The Spirit Of Radio. And did i dig ! Its still playing now , more than 24 hours later. Start to finish and over again. Can't say that virus is gone but heck who cares now ..

Lee , Lifeson , Peart - three more consummate musicians you'd be hard pressed to find in a single band. Rush - can't say they are underrated but somehow they're not in the first few names that leap at you from out the pages are they..and yet the influence they've obviously had on music and musicians is immense. They're one of the few 70's Prog bands that cut through to this day. Yeah i guess they had their share of epic length songs but somehow it comes across (at least to me) as without the indulgence that so screwed up that genre back then. My only gripe (of sorts !) is the vocals. Hmm , that high pitch doesn't do much for me at times, Geddy - especially when you combine them with some super earnest lyrics from time to time ! :) LOL. But seriously thats the only minor thing that goes against them for me. And very minor , mind. But in the end , that doesn't matter much. The complexity and richness of the music just takes you to another place each time.

Here's the incredible Tom Sawyer - catch the mist , catch the myth , catch the mystery , catch the drift !

My rock and roll misadventures - 3 : Wah Wah B. Badd - cry baby !

2010-04-24T01:20:00.000+04:00

This carries on from our last misadventure as Grass at Oasis,BITS Pilani , India.

The next mis(s) followed soon after. We were playing at the Crossroads festival , SRCC , Delhi University. Some of the additional stuff I remember preparing for this one were Proud Mary and Johnny B Goode. Kartik could sing those bloody well , especially Proud Mary. And Kim could play them note perfect.I was adding in improvised (for obvious reasons !) solos on both. That included using a Wah Wah on Proud Mary.

Backstory : The pedal I had was a Fuzz Wah Wah of 70’s-80’s vintage.I’d bought it from this guy who’d shown up with a friend one evening looking to raise some dough for a booze up. I did some dough raising of my own from my mom- in consideration for a brief lecture on life in general and how I was approaching it in particular.I shelled out 75 rupees (around USD 4 then) and there it was – my first effects pedal (and sadly also my last). It was lying around for a year or so though before I took it out for rehersal now . It worked well enough and filled in some colour into the blandness.

The gig was a different story though. There,the only Cry Baby-ing the pedal brought on was in the vulnerable deeps of my pysche.

Because my guitar inexplicably went out of tune the moment I stepped onto the damn pedal ! It was stunning. I carried on with the solo , what else was there to do ! Even tuning the guitar back after that track and unplugging that pedal away for the rest of the show weren’t enough. The guitar tuning effed up on me yet again as I was doing the second solo on Johnny B. Goode, our set closer.It was a really screwed up solo anyway where I just went up and down the Am Pentatonic blues scale in as many cliched phrases as you can think of. Add to that ‘loud’ and ‘badly out of tune’ and man , I plumbed some new depths there that day. The only saving grace was that the crowds that’d started at around 50-60 (ground capacity 2000-3000) had dwindled to around 20-30 by the time we were through ! Ha !

Another thing that dwindled was the band and it dwindled to nothing. Though Kartik and I continued to play together, that was the last gig all of us did as Grass. Did I hear you mutter a civil Not Surpised-And-Thank God ?

But I have never figured out to this day just what the hell that pedal did do to the guitar to set it off key like that.

Gaurav’s drawing up there is very much in tune though.

As for Johnny B Goode , many people have covered it but my favourite is the Judas Priest version. It’s punchy as they come. Check it out here. If you’re not into Priest – and I’m not either , by the way – just bear the initial screeching and then hear it take off. It rocks hard and it rocks well !

AJA : At home , at last !

2010-04-04T12:08:00.000+04:00

The dangers on the rocks is surely past. Still i remain tied to the mast. Could it be that i've found my home at last ?

It's kinda hard to write this post all submerged in this vast , endless and utterly magnificent ocean of sound that's surging in through my headphones.

Who wrote that tired sea song set on this peaceful shore? You think you've heard this one before.

It's Steely Dan. It's Aja. It's awesome. It rules my life these days. Well , as much as a band or an album can now anyway.

What i really dig about the band is their complete subordination of everything else to the music. No stardust , no statement , no glitter , no glimmer, no love-peace , no greenpeace, no angst , no existentialism, no nothing. Heck, mostly not even a band. Only a cast of exceptional musicians revolving around Walter Becker and Donald Fagen from project to project.

No nothing- except the music and a relentless pursuit of musical perfection.

I first got into them during college when I went in for the more straight-on rocky stuff - though mind, their straight-on isn't as straight-on as your average rock band anyway , right. Albums like Can't Buy A Thrill and Countdown To Ecstacy were more my scene.

But Aja i just didn't get back then. (except Peg obviously!) Maybe it was the sax , the jazz , i dunno. I had it duly recorded on cassette tape of course - one for the collection , see - but didn't bother revisiting for a long long time.

Until now. And this time i'm making up for all these years of neglect. Big time !

This album is a masterpiece of collossal musicmanship from start to finish. There's guitars,keys,drums,horns. There's production, there's poetry,there's funk , rock , jazz , jazz-rock. Everything mixes into an exquisitely tight and intricate blend of sound. And you dont expect less from an ensemble that includes Wayne Shorter , Larry Carlton , Lee Ritenour , all those other cats...So much magic this one.

Like when that laidback slow tempo gives way to a sax-and drums explosion at the end on Aja , or when that teasing guitar solo snakes its way out through bass-and-horns heaven on Peg , or that warning-chimes intro cues in on the funky menace of Josie , or (most of all) when the first piano chops and horns of Home At Last lays out the red carpet to the greatest exposition - and the only one , far as i'm concerned - of Homer , Ulysses , exile and the loss of direction .... all things considered ,an enormous song. On an enormous album. Ah !

Aja featured in an apparently well known Classic Albums documentary series of some sort .I was so glad to come across these great clips on You Tube. I thought they brought out both the musicmanship in terms of the art & craft of the album and the personality - that whole other "calibre musician-not celeb rock star" quality to the geeky Dan duo very well. This video of the making of Peg : wow !

Still on Abbey Road

2010-02-12T01:22:00.000+04:00

It was almost 30 years ago today.

John Lennon had just been shot dead and it was all in the papers and my older cousins had been talking about it and telling me all about the Beatles. And I bought my first record on 12 Feb 1981. I remember it like it was yesterday. A cold overcast day in Guwahati, Assam, India. Bought it at Bharali Brothers , something of an institution in the city at the time for music and musical instruments. I believe it’s turned into just another electronics store now. Pity.

Those were days you’d ask the guy at the counter to play the LP for a bit before you shelled out your dough. Or your dad's for that matter. 50 bucks – if that’s what Papa shelled out - was a lot of money then. Especially when shelled out for a nine year old ! And I’ve never managed to forget the thrill of hearing the first ShhhhckDngg hiss-and-bass sounds of Come Together. We were on a visit to the city and I had to wait a couple days to get back home to listen to it but that sound stayed with me all day. It has stayed with me forever.

I know it’s hard to pick a particular Beatles album from their last few. But I guess I’d have to choose Abbey Road - and for purely musical reasons. It’s close to perfection. Brilliant songwriting. Strong contributions from all three. (And mind, Ringo actually sang on Octopus's Garden as opposed to mumble it). Easily George Harrison’s best guitar playing with the Fabs.(And Ringo even did a bit of drumming on this album). The blue of Something, the bright yellow of Here Comes The Sun.The black comedy of Maxwell's Silver Hammer. Pick a weak track anybody ? Those several classics on this album you could listen to in 1970 or 1980 or 1990 or 2000 or 2010 and not tell which era they’re from if you didn’t know. The harmony on Because. That fade out on I Want You (She's So Heavy). A medley at the end to bring the curtain down on a show the dimensions of which the biz is unlikely to ever see again. What a swan song this album was. And I bet it was intended, planned and written to be one humongous Rock-and-Awe swan song. The guys knew it would be their last and gave it their all. And more. Namely, production.

If you leave aside the elaborations of a Sgt Pepper as another end of the spectrum altogether,Abbey Road was also the Beatles' best produced album . It zaps me to hear ‘purists’ bring the album down by just that notch because of its sleek production. Excuse me. It was a studio album so why the eff not ? And it was 1969 dammit, Neil Armstrong was tripping to the effing moon by then , right. It was anyway always going to be a very Seventies rather than a Sixties record but of course like most of their stuff it went on to bust those era labels. And it’s the production that makes the Abbey Road sound the most current of all the Beatles albums.

So here I am now , another time , another place. Another situation. Not a happy one . Mourning the loss of a dear one. Transience. Easy come, easier go. Another gone.

Same album. Some comfort !

For a guy that feels good listening to a fairly wide range of music , at least of the classic rock variety , I realize this blog’s so choc-a-bloc with the Fabs. Hmm. Well yeah I guess, that’s how it is then. And has been for 30 years. And Abbey Road is where the first step was taken.

Ramblin' Man

2010-01-17T01:15:00.000+04:00

Was a time i'd listen to , i don't know , four , five , maybe more, hours of music a day. That's down to an hour or two on average now. My music system at home conked out more than six months ago now and i haven't had the energy to get it fixed. So while a lot of my listening is off the laptop , a big chunk also happens in the car. I have a 30-60 minute drive to and from work and the music makes it a special part of my day.

My car , a 2004 Ford Explorer , was prolly one of the last in its batch - it has a tape deck instead of CD player (leave alone anything more digital). That's a bummer alright but on the positive side i get to use my biggish old collection of cassettes that wouldn't have got played otherwise.(Radio ? yeah there're quite a few FM stations around but they're mostly shit.)

I took out Jeff Beck's Guitar Shop album from the cassette drawer the other day to play in the car. And bless my soul if it doesn't turn out to be ole Bobby Dylan instead when i popped said tape into the deck. It was one of the Biograph volumes i hadn't heard in some time. It was great ! Tangled Up In Blue , the 1966 live version of Its All Over Baby Blue, Tambourine Man (oh !), that blistering Rolling Thunder Revue version of Isis , Positively Fourth Street , ... all those mindblowers that you discover have pretty much never stopped speaking to you have they. What a really pleasant surprise that tape mix-up. Sweet.

And cassette tapes , what about them ? Gotta say you feel for them. You like the sound quality of CDs, you like the convenience of mp3 . You're nostalgic about turntable records (we called it record player though , not turntable) , you talk about the warmth of the LP sound. But cassettes ? Not here,not there.They're the nowhere men of sound,man . Not that i'm about to go on a harp trip here either , ha !

My rock and roll misadventures - 2 : Burnt bridges,no string attached

2010-01-07T11:47:00.000+04:00

Delhi, India. Jan-Feb 1991 : Freshman year in college and all ganged up with my friend Kartik (who later went on to front Gravy Train, one of the top Delhi bands in the mid 1990’s) to form a band we called Grass. Ha! Kartik did vocals , I tried a stab at rhythm & lead. There were Suhas on drums, Kim on lead guitar and Samson on bass.

We entered a rock competition during the Oasis fest at BITS Pilani in Feb 1991. We worked down stuff like Judas Priest’s Living After Midnight, Pink Floyd’s Mother, Status Quo’s Rocking All Over The World, Kiss’s Heaven On Fire and Police’s Every Breath You Take. The competition had an elimination round where one track had to be a Judges’ Choice.We were okay with that but hoped they wouldn’t want us to do Every Breath because , see ,we couldn’t manage the bridge section.

We began great with Living After Midnight. I was excited as it was a rare number I could sort of play the full solo on. ( Well as excited as I could be anyway in the tightest , daftest jeans I’ve ever worn in my life , a sleeveless shirt in that freezing Rajasthan winter and boots that weighed more than me). We get to the bridge that leads to the solo. “I’m aimin’ for ya” Kartik screams. Dhandhandhandhan Dhan Dhan Dhanan our power chords refrain. “Aaaawwll night long” Kartik shrieks. I launch into guitar solo pose. I play the first note.

And twang the effing first string breaks!

The rest of the song is a blur. But a couple tracks later the judges hand out their request.

And, no shit, its Every Breath You Take.

The end. We 're out of it. (To be fair , we’d have been out of it anyway I guess. )

No probs though, as the next couple of days were spent not unpleasantly thank you .There was plenty of stuff to do,consuming our name not least! Other mentionable highlights I remember includes providing very loud audience commentary when my friend Gaurav was on stage acting in a play. That couldn’t have gone down too well but here’s Gaurav now , he’s done that cartoon up on top this post.

And then there was a great band from Chennai (or Madras then?) that eventually went on to win the competition. They were called Shakuni And The Birds Of Prey and they did a mind blowing cover of Steely Dan’s Bodhisattva. Never heard of them again. If anybody has any, er, stuff on that band be great to know.

(Two Thousand ) Tenth Avenue Freeze Out

2010-01-01T03:09:00.000+04:00

It's the first few hours into 2010 and i'm listening to Bruce Springsteen & The E Street band Live 1975-85 , as i have been over the last couple of days. Its been a few months since I last heard The Boss and a good few years , possibly more than a decade actually,since I heard this live double/triple album. And I'm just effing thrilled hearing it now! Full-on, straight and no frills is the Rock and Roll Bruce Springsteen kicks up and it can be nothing short of liberating when it gets you. Listening to it now , i'm struck by how very very close to the studio original the live versions are. That a good thing ? Dunno. I've read reviews where some of these cats have had their shirts ripped off for not innovating on stage but i'm not sure I agree. Bad live versions when very different from the original can be lacklustre at best and hideous at worst. There are notable exceptions of course - think that live accoustic version of Dylan's Visions Of Johanna for instance -but i guess they're exceptions that prove the rule. All things considered, i guess i prefer live versions that are close to the original. All things considered , i guess Bruce Springsteen is amazing and his best stuff is timeless !

Happy 2010 , be dancing in the light !

My rock and roll misadventures- 1 : All Shook Up

2009-11-01T20:54:00.000+04:00

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.

Counting it down

2009-10-28T20:46:00.000+04:00

So for my birthday I decided Macca & Co. weren't rich enough and shelled out USD 16 towards fixing that hole. And i picked up the newly remastered Beatles For Sale on pure impulse.

Walked into this store to browse a few shelves while waiting for the missus.No intention to buy. No nothing but some spare time. Walked out with my first early-Beatles CD (though i do have LP's and tapes ,stacked up gathering dust somewhere back home)

Now , i pretty much got off the pre-Rubber Soul stuff a long time ago and i'm pretty much never getting back on again. But i've begun to re-like some of it , like , say a couple or more tracks per album.

So listening to For Sale last evening after , what , years must be , was a bit of a trip. I'll Follow The Sun , Kansas City , Every Little Thing...enjoyed those , yeah , and especially the two songs i've never stopped liking : the first two - No Reply and I'm A loser. Love those !

That kinda put me in the mind of a totally idle-head idea. Namely : the kickass-ness of the first two tracks of an album. Like a good opening partnership in cricket. Can think of several can't you...like , oh , say , sticking to the Fabs , Come Together / Something on Abbey Road , or Back In The USSR / Dear Prudence on the White ...whoa , so many of them , right ?

Didn't i say idle-head ? But good thing is you get these idle-head ideas and you got a few more sheep to count for that insomnia - ha !

PS - 16 dollars , yeah , that's what a CD costs around here.Insane , esp this day and age.