Knocking on heaven?s door

Lou Majaw and Arjun Sen jam together; generations of musicians gathered for a festival at Someplace Else; Gary Lawyer sings with Orient Express

Pilgrimage in the ?60s to playing ground in the late ?90s. Nondon Bagchi in tribute to Park Street and its harmony hubs

going to park street for us teenagers in the ?60s, particularly on Sundays, was like a pilgrimage. One simply had to be there. Three to 7 pm on Sundays was Jam Session time in about four or five places on Park Street and these sessions were the domain of the teen brigade, mainly. The best pop bands (most often called ?beat groups?) performed four 45-minute sets of the latest and most popular songs. The place to go for most of us was Trincas because The Cavaliers and then the Flinstones, two groups who had the edge over the others, performed there.

The place was worse than a can of sardines, specially the dance floor. Not that one belonged to the privileged bunch that got to dance. You had to have a date; partners were hard to find. The pretty girls had made promises to dance with eager young men even before proceedings began and the chances of someone saying ?yes? to someone only known as a regular face was next to nil. But if you had enough money to nurse a coke through four hours you had a right to hang in there and soak it all in.

Which we did, week after week. Till we knew every song backwards. Songs by the Beatles, The Monkees, Dane Clark Five, Swinging Blue Jeans, Herman?s Hermits, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, the Beach Boys, Union Gap, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and towards the late ?60s the appearance of the Soul music of Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, the Motown sound and just a touch of British rock. And more often then not, I would be staring at the drummer. Excellent drummers they were, too. The Flinstones had Steven Booth and the Cavaliers had Robin Sen, and Later ?Fats? Kapoor.

Imagine the rush, then, when owing to some quirk in the cosmic sequence of events, I found myself, in December 1968, on the same stage, the very shrine to which so many pilgrimages had been made. Friends who had a band in Darjeeling boarding school were here for the winter vacation and they needed a drummer and that was it. We auditioned and were taken on for short spots on Thursday nights and Sunday mornings. We called ourselves Chequered Tricycle and though we did some pop, perhaps for the first time on Park Street, there was a lot of Rolling Stones, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and other rock material.

We rehearsed from six in the morning till opening time that was just after 10 am, six days a week. Two glorious winters went by. We were up close with bands and musicians from other parts of the country, as well as some of Calcutta?s leading lights.

Usha Uthup (then Iyer) was there. Toto Wahlong (?The Golden voice from Shillong?) was there. Biddu Appaya (producer of the international No. 1 hit Kung Fu Fighting) was there. It was heady stuff. And we were hooked.

Twenty-eight years passed before I played again on Park Street, though the music never stopped. We played concerts in auditoriums and dance gigs at clubs and did campus performances. Bands changed, the music changed and developed and thanks to the creativity of songwriters like John Brinnand and Dilip Balakrishnan (who were both part of Great Bear), and later in the band High, where Dilip was the driving force, we got seriously into original work.

The early ?80s was the time I got into playing jazz, with Carlton Kitto as my mentor, and this is still an ongoing thing. About the same time an alliance was formed with Gyan Singh and wife Jayashree (of Skinny Alley) where we got seriously into the tight discipline of classic pop, never a thing to be underestimated.

Old friend and bassist extraordinaire Lew Hilt was there in nearly all these scenarios. Drummers and bass players probably feed off each other more than any other combination and it has been a pleasure, a privilege and a learning experience being associated with this remarkable human being, with his great sense of humour, steeped in the romance of living life to the full, always ready with a word of guidance (?Hey, Non, maybe you can modify that bass drum pattern a little?).

In early ?97 a low-key meeting was held at The Park which was to have far-reaching results. I had been visiting the hotel quite frequently in the capacity of a food writer and had got to know the then F&B manager Abhijit Bose, a music buff. He had dreams and plans of reviving live music on Park Street, in particular at Someplace Else (SPE), the pub at the hotel which after 11 every evening got transformed into a disco with a good selection of recorded music and a substantial, well-heeled clientele.

Abhijit asked for some inputs. I had one very simple one. ?Hire us,? I said. ?We?ll play the classic rock of the Woodstock era. Hendrix, Doors, Dylan, Stones? Apart from the younger crowd, you have many regulars in their late 30s and 40s who now have money to spend but grew up listening to exactly that in college. And even the younger crowd knows the music of these icons. Only, give it a healthy run before deciding whether it?s working or not.?

On the last Wednesday of March 1997, Hip Pocket started performing at Someplace Else. There was an understanding that there would be no unnecessary hype in trying to make this experiment work. The music would have to stand up and be counted for what it was worth. We were to rely purely on word-of-mouth for publicity, apart from the occasional insertion in the personal column of the newspapers.

It worked. Today, there is live music at SPE six nights a week; sometimes seven. It is a buzzword with the music fraternity and with the listening public, countrywide, and many well-known musicians have performed there, and many more will perform there. To say that it is a phenomenon which even pundits in the entertainment and hotel industries cannot quite fathom would not be off the mark.

In hindsight, there can be many theories. To my mind, two things count. One is that the music is sincere, no strings attached. All the bands are seriously committed to doing as genuine a job as possible and an audience can always smell that. The other is the wisdom of the management in letting things happen in the way that they have.

For Hip Pocket, it has been over seven years and I am enjoying every stroke and every note as if it was Day One.

A word about the audience. Fortunately, in this neck of the woods, we are not blas? and cynical? We are more open and willing to share and party together if the essential ingredients are there.

There must have been times of uncertainty and amateurishness on stage during the initial period but the audience has borne with the musicians, and shared in the process of making things cook. Many thanks.