Thank You For The Music

For old fogies like Nari and me – I include Nari without ever having discussed this with him – who have been brought up on a healthy dose of Americana, music is an integral part of a road trip. Grew up hearing too many great songs about being on the road and watching movies where the protagonist is driving through the great wide open as music flows out of the car. 

In accordance with my vision of a road trip I duly prepared a playlist of songs that all of us might know. One of the advantages of having been to an IIT or an IIM or BITS or an REC is that there is such a thing as campus music – music that anyone who did not live in a cave on campus would be reasonably familiar and could hum along. So I tried to do assemble a playlist on which all four of us would be familiar with most of the songs. Quite naturally, there were a few songs which were on the list that were there simply because I liked them like Marren Morris' 'My Church' – a great road song, which is in my top 10 songs these days. 

Here is the playlist with the rather unimaginative name called 'Trippin'

https://itunes.apple.com/in/playlist/trippin/pl.u-904ptXxlNgk

The first song was for Shobha – my music memory of her room in IIM Calcutta is of Al Stewart playing in the background. 'All that heaven will allow' was my favourite Springsteen song these days, was for Nari – a big Boss fan. 'Me and Bobby Mcgee' was an old campus favourite. 'When Push Comes to Shove' was to get Nari to say, “Oh fuck!” There had to be some Beatles and some Baez and some blues which meant Muddy and Mick singing Baby Please Don't had to be there. Had nothing on for Debu, though next time I promise an Amy Winehouse track, now that I know. As I type this I can see rather clearly that the music imperialist in me shone through and most of the songs on the playlist are there because I believed everyone should like them.

However like a good MBA my arse was covered and I had another playlist called Tavern – the playlist name is self explanatory if you were an MBA working in Bombay during the 90s – which had all the big campus singalongs: Cocaine, Roadhouse blues, Smoke On the Water, You Don't Know How It Feels, Sweet Child O Mine and if that's your kind of music you can fill in the rest of the names.
Playlist Tavern
https://itunes.apple.com/in/playlist/tavern/pl.f8cf06d6a0cb4ada96317a325d3e0d67

Ujjal-da had informed us rather apologetically that one could not stream music in the car since it was an old model. However he did give us a solution which involved a rather complicated setup whereby we could use an FM station to play off the phone. 

For the first leg of our journey from Delhi to Gwalior we never bothered with music. The ride was young and there was lots to catch up about be it Nari's parents, Neel's New York visit, Debu's carpentry, the road itself. On the drive from Gwalior to Orchha at some point we decided that we needed music. Debu seemed to know how the complicated system was meant to work and was instructing Shobha, who was riding shotgun, on how to get it going. The afternoon glare made it impossible for poor Shobha to see the dashboard and figure out how to tune the radio to the appropriate channel. After much fumbling and some minor growling by Debu on how it's a rather easy job, Shobha finally managed to get it going – unfortunately all we got was a a lot of hiss and very faint audio. We all agreed that this was horrible and we should turn it off. 

Now if one has driven the old Honda City, one knows that the turning the music system off is tricky business. You have to press unusually hard else the damn thing flips from radio to CD mode. Unfortunately for Shobha, the latter is what happened and even more unfortunately it seems Ujjal-da had left a CD in the CD player. 

Suddenly 'Ooh! You can move, You can dance, Having the time of your life” erupted at full volume. Nari and I froze in the rear seat, Shobha desperately jammed the buttons and Debu who was driving yelled, “Turn it off.” Shobha growled back, “I am trying!” But Abba continued to thunder away and managed to sneak in, 'See that the girl, watch that scene, she is the dancing queen.” By now I found my voice and said, “Just stop the car and we can turn it off.” By the time I finished speaking Debu reached out with his hand jammed the button and there was pin drop silence in the car. 

Debu was livid, Shobha was livid and Nari and I were trying our best to be invisible. I would love to conclude this is an orderly manner but honestly I am laughing too hard as I type I simply can't remember how the tense atmosphere dissipated. But that it dissipated in a few minutes, I am sure of. Soon enough Nari and I were cackling and declaring that every time we ever heard 'Dancing Queen' this is all we would think of. The bright spot in all of this is every good road trip needs an anthem and we had found ours. 

For the rest of the trip Nari and I played music on our phones. The sound was tinny and none too great but hey any music is better than no music. When Joan Baez came on singing 'You Ain't Goin Nowhere' Nari waxed eloquent on how 'Any Day Now' the album where Baez sings Dylan is so great and asked if I had 'Farewell Angelina'. I did not. Shobha and Debu had seen Baez perform live not once but twice! Then there was this time he played us a rather catchy Tamil song where the hero and heroine are naming vegetables and it's a metaphor for love or some such. This led to a discussion on Illayaraja, who Nari disliked for personal reasons. I played 'Norwegian Wood' which had Debu humming along. I played 'Relax' by Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Nari said he would play the next song and played 'Two Tribes' by the same band which happened to be the next song on my playlist as well. 

He asked if we had watched the video of 'Two Tribes' wherein Ronald Reagan bites off Konstantin Chernenko's ear. We both played a lot of the Boss. Shobha demanded Hindi music, I had none but surprise surprise – the chom hating, non-Hindi speaking Nari had all kinds of Hindi songs on his phone. And so we had 'Aap ke kamre, main koi rehta hai' from yaadon ki baraat playing. When connectivity permitted I managed to sneak in a couple of my favourites, “Uthe sabke kadam' from Baaton Baaton Main and 'Aaage bhi jaane na tu' from Waqt. Shobha demanded 'Ae meri Zohra zabeen' so it made the cut. There was a lot of 80's music that played out as well – Madonna, Laura Brannigan, Duran Duran, Hall and Oates, The Boss, Wham and such other. 

Then came a time when we played Ujjal-da's Abba CD in full as well. Much as I have come to dislike Abba over the years, I found myself knowing a fair chunk of the lyrics and singing along too boot. Hearing 'Mamma Mia' had me yelling on how RD Burman was as big a plagiariser as Bappi Lahiri and singing 'Mil gaya humko saathi' to prove my point. Nari kept waiting for Nina the pretty ballerina to make an appearance unfortunately it was not there on the CD. 

Madonna songs led to us discussing on what a great survivor she was and how her influence as music phenom was undeniable. It then had Debu telling us of a friend of Debu's who was an old mate of Guy Ritchie. It seems that for all of Madonna's reputation Guy Ritchie never got much from Madonna. Listening to the Grateful Dead and having Shobha say how her expectations were zero from the CSN concert in Singapore a few years back but they turned out to be outstanding. Nari played Chopin – the rest of us could not recognise the great master. But Chopin led to Debu telling us the story of a great Russian pianist, who by the time he was three years old was a child prodigy and is now always accompanied by his sister. 

An aside: The road trip reminded me that when I rank – yeah I rank everything, read 'Hi Fidelity' to know why men do that – the great narrators I have ever heard, I must remember to rank Debu right up there. His stories and his storytelling are almost always as quirky as they are detailed and unhurried. Nari's aunt from Delhi joined our conversation as Nari told us about how she would bring stacks of records every time she came from Delhi. We ribbed him about being a rich fucker who had record player while growing up. Debu's description of a coked up Amy Winehouse, who could barely sing but when she sang how she blew away the audience. Nari's endless trivia on everything from banned music videos to which version of a particular Springsteen song one should listen to. 

We tripped down music memory lane discussing the days when our only dream was to own a double deck. Owning a double deck meant that everyone around came to you to record their music. Of the legendary recording shop 'Blind Faith' in Calcutta that was run by a tailor in Calcutta – Nari had heard about in Pilani and I in Pune – which was shut by the time we got there. Of TDKs, Sonys and Maxells – I for one had almost forgotten about my desperately saving up money just so i could buy a blank TDK cassette. Nari and I discussed on how we had used clay pots to house speakers and how good that had sounded. Cursing when cassette players chewed up cassettes, desperate attempts to figure out the lyrics of songs the first time we listened to various artists. 

I for one enjoyed loudly singing my version of Dum Maro Dum which my aunts taught me when I was 10 and goes, “Dum Maro Dum, Tiger has come, take a little gum, and stick it on his bum'. Or my version of Last Christmas which had come about in a phase where me and some like minded teenaged boys spent a good chunk of time corrupting lyrics of popular songs. It went, 'Last Christmas I gave you my cock, the very next day you chewed it away, This year to save me from tears, I'll give it to someone toothless'. 

It certainly was not the kind of road trip musically I had imagined. I mean there was no raucous singing along and no hitting the rewind button on the same song five times. There were no blaring rock anthems played with the windows rolled down. Much of the music is not the kind I would come back home and listen to. And yet it was fun. It captured the diversity of musical choices and led to some really nice conversations. And to paraphrase Bogart: We'll always have Dancing Queen'