BackMusic | The smoking Seventies
Much is left unsaid, unexplored in this book about the evolution of Western popular music culture in 1960s and 1970s India
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One night in October 1972, two men were stopped from entering Slip Disc, a new, cramped discothèque in Mumbai, a few metres from The Taj Mahal Palace’s more established club, Blow Up. The security guard at Slip Disc was under orders to keep out the “hippies" and these two men were the very definition of the term, with their long, unkempt hair, and (presumably) colourful clothes. But then, a musical events organizer who worked at the club spotted the duo, and felt a vague sense of familiarity. When he asked for their names, the answer must have left the man stunned: Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. And so unfolds the story of Page & Plant, the indomitable duo from Led Zeppelin, and how they ended up playing an impromptu little gig at a little known club in Mumbai, backed on the drums and bass by local musicians, and fortified by, in Plant’s own words, “loads and loads of illicit substances".
Sidharth Bhatia’s India Psychedelic: The Story of a Rocking Generation, is built on a great idea, mapping the evolution of Western popular music culture in urban India and weaving it into the larger social and political contexts of the time—growing up in the 1960s, the heydeys of Kolkata’s Park Street and the city’s Anglo-Indian community, Binaca Geetmala and Binaca Hit Parade on Radio Ceylon (because Indian radio was under a diktat not to play anything but Indian classical music), the Naxal movement, striptease and magic shows at Mumbai’s Marine Drive restaurants, and how the gelled Elvis pompadour metamorphosed into The Beatles’ mop-top—yet nothing really comes together.
Like anywhere else in the world, American and British rock and pop music in India was about spreading the joy, of being unfettered, and part of an universal culture of being young, being free, owning the night, being alright.
When the war with Pakistan began in August 1965, for example, and Mumbai’s throbbing nightlife came to an abrupt halt, a young Biddu, the “long-haired Lone Trojan" then, was belting out If I had a Hammer to packed restaurants in the mornings. If the night was out of bounds, the mornings would do fine (later, Biddu left India, taking his chances in England, wrote the hit song Kung Fu Fighting, and became a Disco star).
These were exciting times, full of audacious adventures, travelling musicians, and copious quantities of ganja (marijuana), and despite having all the information, the book fails to capture most of that buzz. The narrative never rises above giving the reader just the basic outlines of a time and a moment, even though some of the details make it evident that much is being left unsaid, unexplored. This is a pity, because little is known or archived about Western popular music in India from the 1960s and 1970s, and by extension, its most fervent practitioners, the Anglo-Indians (a community now vanishing silently).
One of the most exciting stories (or barely the germ of one) in the book concerns two musicians from Colaba, Mumbai, Derek Julien and Mike Fay, who, while playing in a restaurant in Pune, were offered a steady gig in Somalia, and landed up in Mogadishu as Il Calibro (which literally translates to “the beetles"), played at bars full of Italians, joined expeditions to capture animals for zoos, and barely escaped a military coup in 1969. This in itself could be a book-length story, but in the book it occupies as much space as it does in this article.
There is little doubt that the book is well-researched, but the details are haphazard, often stacking up in an unwieldy directory of names, bands, clubs, restaurants, and places, delivered in bloodless prose. Clichéd phrases and concepts come back at you in a relentless loop: “youth culture" and its rebelliousness, or “westernized" urban India versus the “real" India. It’s as if the author is not convinced himself of the value of the cultural niche he is exploring, and does not see beyond what could easily, on the surface of it, be dismissed as nothing more than hollow imitation. How interesting can a culture be if it does not create? This is a disservice to an important time, and an important movement that shaped the way young men in Indian cities listen to or create music, and the way different cultures came together to synthesize into something entirely its own, like the songs of Gautam Chattopadhyay and his band Mohiner Ghoraguli (Mohin’s Horses), where the Blues met the Bauls, urban India met rural India, and social commentary met love songs.
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