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Lou Majaw was shirtless, in his signature denim shorts, mismatched socks, shaking his wild white mane, dancing and singing through the audience at The Tollygunge Club on Saturday night when a woman gestured for a selfie.
The 78-year-old, who had been playing guitar and singing for over one-and-half-hours, smilingly obliged. Then he spoke into the microphone in his gravelly drawl: “Beauty and the beast. Beware, I might give you a nightmare!”
Behind him, on the stage, the band belted out unadulterated rock n roll, driven by thunderous drums, rumbling bass lines, wahwah-pedal-drenched-guitar, and grinding organ.
The relationship Lou Majaw, the forever-young grand old man of Indian rock music, has with Calcutta is special. It’s a city that shaped him as he roamed its streets in the 1960s. To escape the harsh realities in Shillong, he had tagged along with a family that had a wedding to attend in Calcutta. Majaw wrote his first songs, Sea of Sorrow and I Had a Woman, in Calcutta.
The Great Society – Lou Majaw (guitar, vocals), Rudy Wallang (guitar, vocals), Ferdinand Dkhar (bass, vocals) Keith Wallang (drums and vocals) and Brian Suting (keyboards) – opened their performance on Saturday night at Tolly Club with Sea of Sorrow.
“Calcutta taught Lou Majaw to survive,” Majaw told My Kolkata before the show. “That’s the respect that I have for this place. The exotic streets and lanes and bylanes and pavements… is like fire to my soul. My stomach and my pockets were empty but Calcutta taught me a lot. I like this city!”
Majaw and his band poured all that history, that connection into a performance that felt both like a homecoming and a rebellion.
The Great Society first took shape in Shillong in 1977. The band was ahead of its time, introducing Indian audiences to rock, blues, and reggae through powerful original songs at a time when such sounds were still finding their footing in the country. They disbanded in 1992. They reunited after 34 years at the Shillong Cherry Blossom Festival last year.
It was an impromptu desire to do just one gig. One performance led to another and Majaw and the men were back at it again. “He’s the culprit,” Rudy said, pointing at Ferdinand Dkhar aka Ferdie, the man who lays down the bass.
The original Great Society lineup was: Lou Majaw (vocals/guitar), Arjun Sen (vocals/guitar) and Bert Cooper (drums). In 1980, Rudy joined on the bass and later Sam Shullai replaced Bert on drums. Shullai passed away in 2022, but he is always deep within the subconscious of the band members, Majaw said.
At Tolly Club, he and his band exuded the spirit of the late sixties and seventies when music was raw, rebellious and deeply personal.
The first half was acoustic, with soulful renditions of The Great Society classics such as Hey Little Man, True True Loving and Oh Most Beautiful that made the auditorium bob their heads to the beats.
The second half was a banger, filled with infectious energy and the shirtless Majaw wading through the audience routine.
Kolkata's resident guitar god Amyt Datta was present throughout the performance
Lou Majaw is often dubbed “The Bob Dylan of India”, also because he has been holding an annual concert event to commemorate Dylan’s birthday in Shillong for 54 years now. Documentaries have been made on Majaw and his Bob Dylan’s Day celebrations have found their way into the pages of The New York Times.
Three Dylan songs – Knocking on Heaven’s Door, Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 & 35, and It’s All Over Now Baby Blue – were the only covers the band played in their entire performance at Tolly Club.
The venue may have looked more fit for a corporate function complete with a lectern on stage and chairs for the audience covered in white cloth, the band’s acoustic set may have been introduced as “rhythm section”, but when Lou strummed his guitar, often punctuated by karate chops of his right-hand on the fretboard to ring out harmonics, when Rudy leaned into his note-perfect solos, when Ferdie Keith and Bryan laid down the groove, it was rock n roll at its most organic. Straight from the heart.
You wouldn’t even know that Majaw was having serious breathing issues from his asthma, you wouldn’t know that the band had had very little sleep, having had to travel to Kolkata via Bhubaneswar because of bad weather.
By the time the gig ended with a rocking version of Knocking on Heaven’s Door, everyone was on their feet, dancing.
Pradeep Guha Thakurta, head of the entertainment committee at Tollygunge Club, said there were “lots of requests from the senior members of the club to bring The Great Society for a performance.”
Pinaki Mitra, a music enthusiast and director of entertainment company Omo, promised to host a rock festival in Kolkata “with bands from Mumbai, Bangalore, Calcutta and Shillong”.
