Rock
A memory hits me today: obsessions were common occurrences in my family – pineapple upside down cake, leather clothes, and music. My brother, when he was not stuffing cake down our throats, would latch on to A Song. It could be disco, or pop, but it meant that we had no choice but to hear it until our ears pleaded for mercy and our nightmares’ soundtrack consisted of either Boney M hip grinding to Sunny (once so true, I love you-uu) or George Michael lamenting perfidy and infidelity on Careless Whispers. With Sunny, the phase came to an end when the vinyl record developed scratches and all we could hear, thankfully, was a halting Su-Sun-Sunn. Careless Whispers – I still can’t hear that song without wanting to tear my hair out. That obsession peaked in the era of cassette tapes, and many fine TDKs were chewed up as the song whined on.
That memory has come back to haunt me recently. In fact, I may have inherited a few of those faulty genes myself. It’s been forty-eight hours and my kids are threatening to confiscate the Sound Dock. My long-suffering partner is putting on a brave face but has strategically retreated to the living room. I’m in the throes of researching all the possible versions of Dire Straits’ Tunnel of Love played live over the years. Now that I have the versions I like (eight at last count), I am happily immersed in listening to each, one after another – because how else will I learn to recognize the low notes on the Sydney version or the Hammersmith Odeon version that doesn’t have the annoying backup vocals by Illsley? All I can say in my defense is the family should be thrilled I didn’t pick AC/DC’s Thunderstruck or Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song for a forty-eight hours listening session…
Friends were amused and amazed when I rediscovered rock music in my thirties. “How can you bear to listen to such noise?” The fact is I never did stop listening to rock music. It’s just that people became more aware (wary?) of my life-long and passionate love for the genre once my kids came along. Some were outraged that I actively educated my sons in the history of rock music, and encouraged them to listen to Scorpions, Rainbow and Journey, as well as Phil Collins, Queen and Linkin’ Park, taking in Tina Turner and Bon Jovi along the way. The outrage stemmed partly from a misconception about the lyrics of classic rock. When friends shuddered and complained about the violent lyrics, I advised them to check out the hip-hop scene. Sure, rock music has never shied away from sex, drugs and death, but I’d say most of the lyrics of the classic bands (Scorpions, Rainbow, Deep Purple, Eagles, Def Leppard, Pink Floyd or even Aerosmith) make some sense. It’s not mindless drivel about killing your brother in the hood or demeaning your girlfriend. The other unexpressed fear, I suppose, was that my kids would wean their kids away from a carefully researched diet of Classical and Jazz music, as advised by the childcare experts!
It’s been many years, the kids are adults now, and I no longer have the evangelical need to convince friends of the reasons I love the rock music of the seventies and eighties. The appeal is in the rhythm and melody, the lyrics and the guitar riffs. My musical tastes are pretty fluid. With the single exception of the New Wave Indian bhangra-pop-film-techno stuff the radio channels promote (I’m not even sure what the genre is called), there really isn’t any genre of music I dislike. Rock music has a special place in my heart, but that is not to say that I won’t listen quite happily to Mozart or Miles Davis or MS Subhulakshmi or Michael Jackson…music makes me happy!
With two brothers almost a decade older than me and music-mad parents, it was inevitable, I suppose. We grew up in an environment filled with music. Both my parents whistled beautifully, even had their own signature whistles to call each other. My mom hummed along with Kishore and Lata, as well as Deep Purple, incessantly, driving us all quite mad. We went through a few days of alternating hilarity and hell when Smoke on the Water” stuck in her head, and she whistled or hummed it non-stop. I find myself doing much the same thing today. There’s a certain joy in singing out aloud with your favourite singer, and (in my imagination, at least) matching him note for note. Just belting out the high notes lifts drooping spirits – how can it not?
My dad has a collection of over 750 LP records, CD’s and cassette tapes. He is also the proud owner of a Sony Spool playing machine, circa 1960. The damned thing takes most of the morning to set up, and then the spool plays for about half an hour. When he wrote to Sony Japan, requesting them to sell him spare parts, they replied promptly, offering to buy the machine from him to display in their Tokyo Headquarters museum. Apparently, not many of these machines still exist in working order. Dad took fright that some black suited Japanese executives would arrive at our doorstep, bowing for all they were worth, ready to wheedle his precious away, and stopped corresponding with Sony immediately.
He is an incessant collector of music. He claims to know the music on every LP or CD he owns. It’s clear that he has multiple copies of many popular works, but as he grows older, he seems to enjoy the joy of possession as much as the joy of listening to his music at cranked up volumes that would have earned my brothers and me a yelling in our teen years.
My earliest memories of music are, to say the least, eclectic. A day in our home could and did encompass Bismillah Khan early in the morning, All India Radio’s mid-morning show of film music, Cream and Boney M vying for volume supremacy, Beatles and BeeGees and ABBA, Mantovani or Paul Mauriat, some Beethoven or Vivaldi as the evening wore down, and then some late night Louis Armstrong or even Fifty Guitars.
I spent my teen years, forging a separate musical identity from my family. Very early on, percussion and rhythm appealed to my quite uncoordinated body and soul. Rainbow was my first introduction to classic rock. Blackmore and Dio, what a magical combination! I remember a reluctant look of respect and admiration on my brother’s face when I brought home my first recorded cassette – the double album “Best of Rainbow”. Pre-recorded cassettes were hard to come by in the Madras I grew up in. We bought blank cassettes (TDK D90 were my favourites) and begged and pleaded with the music stores we patronized to record the songs we wanted on them. Vibes at Anna Nagar and Diskplay at Alwarpet were the places to go to. Anant, the owner of Vibes, had a fantastic collection and loved what he did. We were in awe of his knowledge and hung on to his every word. He didn’t mind recording a full album but he balked at any requests for assorted music. He introduced me to Styx and Rush. What a guy!
My boyfriend was a heavy metal maniac, which meant I spent my time with him disparaging Iron Maiden, his absolutely favourite band. I resented its intrusion on our time together, but unconsciously absorbed it all. This came back to me as a surprise twenty years later, when I headbanged with the best at an Iron Maiden concert, and thoroughly enjoyed all the songs I’d last heard a long while ago. Maiden really rocked the place that night. Live concerts by these groups are like a dream come true for rock music buffs. Bryan Adams and Beyonce are entertaining, sure, but these guys are the stuff of legend. This is the music we grew up on, listened to each song till it was embedded in our brains, knew every chord and every riff on the studio and live version of each song, knew the order in which the songs were recorded – all this without thinking about it consciously. It, literally, was like oxygen. It didn’t matter that most of us never learned to play a musical instrument. We could still phonetically dissect every last chord of Smoke on the Water or Hotel California or Stairway to Heaven, experts all on air Stratocasters. Some lyrics spoke to us in lonely hours, others spoke of our thoughts and feelings as if we had written the words ourselves. It wasn’t only the super groups who struck a chord. One passion of mine is hunting out the obscure groups with the One Big Hit. Some of their music is great, especially if you’re into 80’s arena rock. I’m talking about groups like Giant and Firehouse (more than one hit song from them, of course). The big daddy of arena rock, Journey, is another favourite.
Growing up, I always dreaded the time in the future when these songs would no longer be as meaningful, would no longer haunt the soundtrack that played in my head. Now I know that musically, nothing has changed, life is good – we’re never too old to rock ‘n’ roll. And I knew that my love for rock had been safely passed on to my kids when I could hear them in the back seat of the car, six- and three-year-old rockers, singing “dream on, dream on, dream until your dreams come true” along with Steve Tyler or demanding to listen to some obscure 80’s one-hit wonder sing Turn Up the Radio: “Turn It UUPP!”