Music

I recently attended the first show of Them Clones’ promo tour for the launch of their debut CD. The band have a bunch of great songs that they’ve been massaging carefully for a very long time. The result is a polished set of tracks and a really strong and tight live show. Everything went great at the Hard Rock, Pune and I have a feeling the show would have continued for at least another hour if it wasn’t for the ridiculous 11pm closing time imposed by the Maharashtra government.

After the show was wrapped I overheard a guy complaining to the bartender. Let me break it down for you. This guy is the quintessential (read cliché) Indian rocker, complete with a goatee, long hair, Sepultura t-shirt, dirty jeans, the works. His rant is probably painfully familiar to the band members (and managers) of any Indian rock band.

It went something like this (I’m paraphrasing because I was several beers in at this point): “What was that shit, man? How can I get into the music when I don’t know any of the songs? When they play big places like this they should only play covers”. That statement right there encapsulates everything that is wrong with your average Indian “Rock Fan”.

Our asshat at the bar there showed up for a free show, promoting an album and expected to hear covers. He has no respect for artists trying to create instead of regurgitate. He has no feeling of pride or ownership for local talent. He has no concept of the fundamental building blocks of good rock and roll: A band cannot survive, let alone grow, without its fans (even if it’s your 2 friends from school).

In any part of the world where great rock music happens it begins with the local fans: The small core audience that cheers, adores and provides sexual favors and drugs to the aspiring rock Gods. That entire culture is missing completely in the Indian rock scene from what I can tell. Until that happens bands will become great despite being from India rather than because they’re from India.

This happened about 2 weeks ago. I was on a Skype conference call with Rackspace and Mosso trying to get a really ridiculous level of redundancy setup for a client. That is not the point of the story.

The point is Rackspace put us on hold. When Rackspace puts you on hold you hear music piped from a local radio station in Texas. They were playing a song that sounded good to me, so I switched Skype’s output to speaker and used Shazam on my iPhone to figure out what song it was. Shazam, for the uninitiated, records the audio it hears on the iPhone’s microphone and uploads it to a server that figures out what song it is. Shazam has not failed me yet. The result showed up in about a second and I searched for the song on Amazon MP3, bought and downloaded it. All this happened before the support guy took us off hold.

If you had told me this was possible when I was 15 I would have thought you were on drugs.

The song was Leon Russell’s – Roll Away the Stone.

So I saw the video. There is no doubt that she is now pure pop in the worst sense, making my love for the band’s music almost tragic. But, to the topic of the song: It made virtually no sense to me at all. Now I’ve always considered myself to be relatively knowledgeable about popular culture and definitely capable of understanding American slang, but this stuff was just ridiculous.

I dug this out in my search for answers. I kinda wish I hadn’t.