Editorial»
On the verge of ‘Blow(i)n’ in the Wind’!
JAN 07 - The year 1964 had arrived in Darjeelingtown. But one sad memory of 1963 still lingered in me. It was the assassination of the US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK). With his untimely murder, his New Frontier also had a premature death.
It was a misty evening in Kurseong where The Hillians had a programme. I went downtown for some food and papers. When I unfolded The Statesman, JFK’s photograph and his obituary stared me in my eyes. I don’t know what I played that evening and how I saw through the programme with moist in my eyes most of the time. Youthful JFK’s immature death created in me in a mental coma for a long time. A dream had appeared and disappeared so fast. That’s JFK for me! That was also 1963 in a nutshell!
Otherwise, I guess I wasn’t doing that bad, eh! I had become the de facto leader of The Hillians. I was the bandleader who donkey-rehearsed the group for hours. I was the negotiator at the Gymkhana, Central Hotel, the Planers’ Club, Glenary’s and other venues for the best bargains. I made sure that we were looked after properly; cheques prepared promptly for payment. I met Messrs Wadia, Madan, Edwards and Vice Chief Air Marshall Roberts respectively of the Gym, Central, Glenary’s and Planters’ and squeezed them dry for the best possible money for our performances. With our income, I paid my boys and myself salaries and bonuses, bought new records and equipment, selected playable songs and favourite numbers, built up our repertoire, ordered new uniforms for the band. This way, we were the richest teenagers in town because we worked! Whereas our friends had to grovel to their parents for pocket money and allowances! What a lark life was, oh my!
We also had to take care of our studies at college, rehearse for the Talents Nite, the Bhanu Jayanti celebrations, the dances and other “socials”. Oh Lord, life was full, with screaming girl fans to take care of on the side.
In short, The Hillians was a huge corporation, and I was its corporate head, the CEO and chairman of the board.
I was also the group’s chief mechanic and electrician. I had a doctor’s kitbag in which I had a world collection of nuts, bolts, screws, screwdrivers, pincers, cutters, tapes, adhesives, wires, switches, testers, valves, fuses. With these, I reassembled and connected the amplifiers and speakers to the stabilisers and the main lines, fixed the microphones and the public address system, placed them to effect the best possible acoustics and worked the lights for our best photogenic angles and pyretic movements on the stage. I worked alone and with my bare hands, was electrocuted many times, and needed a long rest before the all-night marathon session under my stewardship.
These hectic schedules made me wonder one dawn as I wobbled home from a night’s riotous music making: There ought to be some amrit, an elixir, a prayer, a mantra, to erase the fatigue and retain our freshness and preserve our energy and verve. The special diet I fed my group and the tumblers of Complan drew loud protests and complaints, especially from older Ranjit. There must be a way, a method, and a medium to warp our time and enable us to go rip-roaring like the rambunctious college dancers, mardi gras revellers, barflies and imbibers who managed to do it all 48 hours a day.
The next day’s Time magazine reported the arrest of the Rolling Stones for possessing amphetamines and other enhancing drugs. Well? Were The Hillians also in need of such alternatives? The awesome question hit my psyche and conscience that week. Times were indeed a-changing.
It was because universal Rock n’ Roll and Pop was also going a-changing. Gone were the pure and perfect Oxford diction of Pat Boone, Nat “King” Cole, Dean Martin, the Platters and other performers, Black and White alike. Along with their jazz, swing, standard, sentimental and movie-theme music, their suave images were replaced by the lapel-less and mopped up Beatles and the even-dirtier, rougher and more violent Rolling Stones. The Mersey Beat, the Liverpool Sound, the Liverpudlian accent, Beatlemania and the British Invasion were putting asunder the old values and accepted norms.
The new music of the 60s came in many forms and formats. First, it was a shouting and loud music.
Secondly, the Beatles brought infectious melodies, charging guitars and drums, loud amplification, positively infectious tunes with damn catchy words and intricate harmonies. The latter called for imaginative chords that tied Rock music to the Olde Europe of Bach and Beethoven.
Thirdly, it was the British Invaders’ eclecticism. Demonstrating their varied tastes and temperaments, they adapted to or borrowed from Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, Everly Brothers, Motown Sound, girl groups. In all these, they displayed their unmatched song-writing savvy, brash guitar-oriented attacks, wildly enthusiastic vocals, and youthful flair. They unabashedly borrowed from blues, popular standards, gospel, folk or whichever suited their musical “vision”.
Fourthly, they were also self-contained, self-sufficient, multifarious and multifaceted. They wrote, played, composed, sang, arranged, orchestrated and reordered their products among themselves. Those who didn’t possess these five or six tracks of in-house operative excellence would rather go elsewhere. Consequently, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin et al had to branch out into films, hit Las Vegas nightclubs. Those no more good in producing Studio Rock and Top Ten hits had to be out on their roadshows, touring. The Beatles were at last exhausted by louder and more riotous Beatlemaniac and phobic fans on their worldwide shows, and retired to the studio for more enhanced concepts into arrangements with intricate ensembles, daring use of recording techniques with more varied and un-Rocklike instrumentation with unique “confessional”, confrontational, personal and expressive verses for their songs in place of the old boy-girl nonsense. Consequently, the Beatles’ “Things We Said Today” was a “Bhote song” to Choden Tsering Bhutia while we promptly labelled Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers In The Night” as a homosexual song of nocturnal “cruising”.
These discoveries and developments were overwhelming. But only today, 40 years after the “passing fads” that burst in the 60s in Britain and the USA, I’m able to be prosaic in retrospection as a reminiscent critic. Back then, it was the miasma and the mysticism of the movement that confused The Hillians and me, and we responded to what were happening all around us by playing the kinds of music that were blowing in the high winds of the lonely and lofty Darjeeling.
Yes, it was then another drastic dichotomy hit me. It was the name and music of one Robert Zimmerman, known today as Bob Dylan. His muse and moods brought another dimension and dispensation into the New Music that indeed began “Blowin’ In The Wind” all around the world.
Indeed, “The times [were] a-changin’”!
(The writer can be reached at <peterkarthak@wlink.com.np;
peterkarthak@hotmail.com>)Posted on: 2004-01-07 02:17
Headlines
Advertisements
