Bangalore is about to have one of it’s largest live concerts ever, courtesy of aging 1970s rockers Deep Purple.
Who are/were Deep Purple? For our readers who like to listen to music originally recorded in their lifetime, Deep Purple were part of the the holy Trinity that founded Heavy Metal, along with Led Zepplin and Black Sabbath.
Their biggest hit was probably “Smoke on the Water” which reached #4 on the Billboard charts in 1972, and which is “#426 on Rolling Stone Magazine’s The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time”. If you’ve got a friend learning to play electric guitar, you’ve probably heard him or her attempt to play it, along with Stairway to Heaven.
It is commonly the first song learned by many beginner guitarists, it’s also noted for it’s extreme difficulty. However, it’s main recognisable riff is not difficult and consequently is constantly played by learners.
In fact, it’s so popular, that one famous guitar store in Denmark Street, London, used to sport a sign on the wall reading ‘If auditioning a guitar, please refrain from playing Smoke on the Water, as this is causing our staff mental torture’… [Link]
Events like this contribute to this peculiar retro-quality that parts of Indian culture have. I suppose it’s good that Indians still appreciate the retro given that they’re still receiving visits from bands whose biggest hits were over 30 years ago. Heck, Deep Purple first broke up in 1976.
Bangalore is the only Asian stop on the reconstituted band’s tour. The group will fly in from South America to play one night in India before flying on to Europe, so in some ways it’s a big deal.
But (and I’m wrinking my nose here) … don’t you think that India should be receiving more up to date acts now? I know that tickets are expensive for the average Indian, but Bangalore should have more than enough young employees of multinationals that they’re willing to pay something close to international prices for a ticket. Why is it that, despite India Rising and all that, that India attracts only 3rd string western bands on international tour? I’m sure I’m missing something.
<
p>
Some classic Deep Purple:
<
p>
And a more recent incarnation of the band playing Smoke on the Water:
<
p>
I agree. It’s either the super-retro or the super-new hip-hop stuff. I can’t tell you how sick I am of listening to Justin Timberlake’s ‘Sexy back’ here in Mumbai (and in Delhi and Kolkata). Retch.
Ah! SM reports on one of my oh-so-acute cultural observations about India. I haven’t spent any substantial amount of time in India for close to 10 years now, but another star who periodically renews his lunch/clothing/rent allowance in India is Bryan Adams (even those commie purveyors of socialized medicine up north require people to pay for roti, kapda and makaan). For a brief period, there were even torrid rumors of an affair with Karisma Kapoor back in her day. I cite only the most reliable sources: http://lakdiva.org/suntimes/970622/mirror2.html (search for “The blue eyed beauty”).
3rd string? Ouch…I think you just answered your own question right there – maybe they’ll start showing up when you start playing nice. @=) Plus, Deep Purple selling out shows in India as opposed to some disposable, flash-in-the-pan act currently commanding the charts like Ashley Simpson or Daniel Powter leaves me a smidgen more hope for humanity. Anyways, Deep Purple playing in India is no accident. They’re quite popular there and have played in Bangalore a couple years back. Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian woman in space, was a big fan. From the wiki:
Chawla kept in contact with the band from outer space and Steve Morse wrote a song for her the day she died. [link]
My guess is that it comes down to pure economics. Whereas a band like U2 or an act like Madonna, instead of going all the way to India and incurring the extra expense, can simply book more dates in Europe or North America where they can get away with charging upwards of $200 per ticket, still sell out the show, and not have to spend the money to ship their stage setup all the way to India. In the case of Deep Purple or Bryan Adams, they probably sell as many tickets as they will ever sell in the major markets, and so it is still profitable for them to go to India.
Desis are deeply retro in their musical tastes. Every boy I grew up with loved Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple even though they were several years out of date by that point. And desi kids often know and love music of their parents’ generation without thinking of this as a quirky retro taste. Similar to the obsession with “classics” in literature classes in Indian schools. You demonstrate your cultural refinement not so much by your knowledge of the new and trendy as by your mastery of genealogies, whether musical or literary.
As for ticket sales, it’s not the twentysomethings or hip young teens who can afford the phoren band concert tickets, but thirty and fortysomething yuppies, so guess what – they’re going to go for Deep Purple and Bryan Adams.
I was worried that few of the readers would know Deep Purple, hence the basic intro to them. But you’re right – if they really are that popular in India, then a good number of our readers will be familiar with them.
DJ DP – thanks, that’s quite helpful. The story about DP in space is amazing.
I did not know that Steve Morse joined the band in the nineties. I’m so out of touch. The man has mad skills and I saw him play with the Dregs (back when they were the Dixie Dregs) when they were the fall concert for my prep school. He would definitely have resurrected Deep Purple.
Another band which is crazy popular among many in India is Pink Floyd, at least among 30somethings. I think a lot of people like this ‘retro’ stuff (without thinking of it as retro) because a)they think it’s ‘cool’ b)they don’t realise the actual popularity level (or lack thereof) in the West and c)they just like it. I have a colleague who is a half-Punjabi/half-Tamil who grew up in South Bombay from an elite family…he prides himself on not being able to speak Hindi, and also on his huge Pink Floyd collection.
He prides himself on not beign able to speak Tamil or Punjabi either, just to be clear.
If Pink Floyd were to reform, they’d be able to sell out any stadium anywhere in the world, I don’t think that’s unique to India. If I recall correctly, their last tour in ’94 sold out 3 shows at Giants Stadium in Jersey and 2 shows at RFK in DC (I was at one of those!!!). It would probably be the same if they toured today.
I think it’s totally cool that Indians are retro. Why should Indian tastes be current Western ones? Do you own thing, man.
Anyway, quality matters and Deep Purple is better than a lot of the crap you hear on, um, oh wait, I program my own digital ‘radio station’ so I can’t really finish that sentence……hmmm, any suggestions for good trip-hop (I’m still a eighites/nineties gal), electronica?
Bangalore has many bands compared to most other places in India, and most of them start playing progressive rock, classic rock etc. Almost all of the bands i’ve seen start up in bangalore play floyd, ozzie, deep purple and a lot of heavy metal. If you want to be in with the crowd that frequents open mics and other jams through out the city, you better know your classic rock. I think this love for classic rock is great! One of the reasons bands like deep purple are so popular. On the other hand there are bands like Thermal and a quarter which in my opinion are just fantastic and a step ahead of the rest. Bryan adams i suspect got famous for his soundtracks and because of the limited availability of other music back in the day. And if you were old enough you probably had a few numbers by englebert humperdinck and a rack of country music tapes 🙂
think a lot of people like this ‘retro’ stuff (without thinking of it as retro) because a)they think it’s ‘cool’
One of the many quirks of Angicized desis. They also read Ayn Rand and PG Wodehouse with biblical reverence. We can look forward to a hip hop revolution in Delhi twenty years hence, with the new anglicized desis eschewing whatever happens to be current in America.
My 54 yr Amreeki coworker’s first rock concert was Jethro Tull. So was mine. It’s all about $$$. Unfavorable conversion rate makes it worse.
A bit about college tradition. You are this clueless boy/girl of 15/16 who gets inroduced to “real music” by seniors. “This is heavy man. You need to check this out”. Enter DP, LZ, Floyd, Doors etc. etc.
Saw DP in ’90s and they were in fine form. These guys in their mid 40s made the opening act (desi boys half their age) look silly. Hopefully the local rockers have improved since then.
You might want to dig into Bal Thackeray blessed Michael Jackson concert. Hilarious stuff that. Also MJ fan club here.
This is true, though I don’t understand why. Does it have anything to do with that era’s love affair with India? Speaking of rock bands and their love affairs with India, loving the Beatles is compulsory for desis back home.
Werd. It doesn’t matter how old you are, where you are or what kind of music you’re into. Pink Floyd is Pink Floyd.
my teen years in india were an air guitar haze — smoke on the water, the wall, stairways to heaven etc. retro SP? absolutely and wonderfully so. posturing as cultural refinement? rubbish. as MD says above, “do your own thing, Man.” we just did our thing. now reading classic literaure — surley that can’t go out of style? and surley its about the hippest thing anyone anywhere can do.
Do you think Bollywood ‘co-opting’ hip-hop (well, superficially cheesy hip-hop dance moves, anyway) makes it less cool to the so-called anglicized desis? They sound damned interesting to me: Ayn Rand, PG Wodehouse and Deep Purple! Haha. They sound like 70s, US east-coasty prep school kids……
“You are this clueless boy/girl of 15/16 who gets inroduced to “real music” by seniors. “This is heavy man. You need to check this out”.
OMG – SO TRUE!
Ditto the compulsory love of the Beatles and Ayn Rand, esp. Ayn Rand among a certain generation of parent-types. What’s up with that? Given how randomly American culture penetrated India given the limited availability of pop culture products, maybe it was as simple as someone’s phoren uncle/aunt bringing back some records or books that were circulated ad infinatum.
Of course it’s a demonstration of cultural refinement – you show you’re cool – and plugged into Western culture from waayyyy back – by being familiar with the Beatles and Led Zep and what have you. If it were simply a matter of doing your own thing, would English-speaking desis of a particular generation all love the exact same music?
To all you Pink Floyd fans out there, I wasn’t dissing the band…obviously they were one of the most popular ever. It’s just the rabid, wierd following they seem to have among a certain subset of desis. I can’t tell you how often that band’s name has come up in conversation with 1st gens. Kind of like what Shodan alluded to about how kids get initiated into this music in college in India.
Ayn Rand may simply be collegiate rebellion: if the upper/upper middle class world around you is genteelly-socialist, out comes Ayn Rand. Or not.
PS: Brilliant post, Ennis. SM is really fun these days.
Pssst Pink Floyd loving desis: this ABCD (okay, technically Indian-born) thinks you are really, really cool. Seriously. Develop your own relationship to, and understanding of Western culture. Please, please, please, don’t be soft-soaped into a global South-Asian must-think-alike mindset….I love the way different cultures mix and mash outside influences up. Stay mixed and mashed!
When talking about the 60s/70/s in India, I think the above quote explains it all…
Who doesn’t love Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd? I mean it’s nearly impossible to really appreciate the development of modern rock without understanding these two bands.
Actually I’m always interested in how pop music develops in India. From across the ocean, all I see are film songs or really (REALLY) bad remix albums. But there’s got to be some really awesome, artistic music happening in India that I just don’t know about. In fact, I don’t know of any Desi bands (I would pay real money to hear Deep Purple-influenced Desi rock, btw). But there’s so much music in Indian culture, and there have been so many disaporic artists that I have to believe they’re there. Can anyone point me to cool stuff from the Desh?
PPS: I hope I wasn’t being patronizing in the last comment. I just love quirky details like this.
Growing up in India in a world of East 17 and Ace of Base, classic hard rock was an incredible outlet. I remember rocking in 1995 with 50,000 others in JNU to Deep Purple. Good to see that culture live on.
And yes, I love the fact that you can still go to a bar in Bangalore and hear Pink Floyd and Led Zep at midnight.
Yanni. The reason Taj Mahal marble is turning black.
You are wrong, You should have done some more research about this. Some of the best International Bands/Artists performed in Banglore/Bengaluru. I was in Banglore for about 8 months in 2001 and I was amazed to see number of international bands performing there.
You are wrong, You should have done some more research about this. Some of the best International Bands/Artists performed in Bangalore/Bengaluru. I was in Bangalore for about 8 months in 2001 and I was amazed to see number of international bands performing there.
Sorry for the double post
long time lurker here. deep purple are actually quite popular in india, especially among the geeks. here’s a possible explanation, in a post i wrote a few days ago. (i’m sorry i’m shilling my own blog) 🙂
No matter if its hip-hop night, retro-night, rock night, or Bollywood night, every club in Bombay ends with a tribute to Bryan Adams with “the summer of ’65”. Why, oh why?
Personally I am not a fan of ’80s music. {Does Deep Purple even qualify as ’80s?} Mainly because all I watched were Hindi movies until I was 12 (even though I grew up in the US) and went straight to glam rock during the disturbing teenage years. On the other hand, my hubby (born and raised in Mumbai) loves ’80s music!!
Oops, I meant 69. See how much I hate it?? 🙂
To some extent, yes. I have fond childhood memories of hippies in the park.
Sniff. I listened to nothing else but Beatles in my teen years.
To say that someone does something because it is cool implies that they do it to make a statement and not for the pure experience. I assure everyone that we (us, growing up in India with limited access to LP’S) LOVED these retro bands. Purely and completely. American culture didn’t permeate India entirely randomly. These bands were very, very big here too. Why some of them were more popular in India than others
is as hard to understand as the unpredictibility of show biz is. Why do some bands make it anywhere and not others? I talked with a band member from Boney-M (they are big in Romania now) once who just never understood why they were worshipped in India while many a great band (with as much marketing and access) never made it there. Maybe the anti-establishment irreverence of Pink Floyd had appealed to an anti-implerialist sentiment, maybe Boney-M was easy to sing along to in a country where not everyone could decipher rock-star mumblings and rants, the Bealtles were of course the Bealtes , and just maybe the cult status origins of Deep Purple can actually be traced back to one single album that was mailed by a ‘phoren’ uncle to a IIT Banglaore sophomore in the 70’s.
Try yelling “Summer of 69” at RYAN Adams concert. Then you will know true hate.
I have a hazy recollection of watching Uriah Heep live in India on a dusty soccer field. Talk of classic lit and rock music rolled into one.
Before they were big, Police played Bombay a couple of times – a little extra money on their way to and from Tokyo perhaps.
The fascination with Bryan Adams and Summer of ’69 is real, and it amuses me. You’re right, almost every bar will play this at some point in the evening. As one of my exchange students in India said, “when the time comes to make our slide show of our time studying abroad in India, Summer of ’69 will be the theme song.” Two of my exchange students were Canadian, so they were particularly amused by the Bryan Adams fascination. I remember seeing a guy walking around with a t-shirt that said “Summer of ’69,” with the lyrics printed on the back. And this was in 2004.
There are exceptions, though. One of my favorite bars in Bangalore seemed to play Thievery Corporation on a loop whenever I went there.
Shodan:
Is RYAN Adams the lesser-known, lesser-talented, oft-neglected younger brother or cousin brother of Bryan Adams? 🙂
I gave up on sleep for a whole winter at an Indian college when the hall band prepping for a western musical competition decided to set shop in the great outdoors right under my dorm window. Hearing The Police’s “Message In A Bottle” a gazillion times, performed at various degrees of badness, made me turn reactionary, and made me refuse to be educated in the finer points of Led Zep’s “Staircase” or Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. I had to wait a couple of years till I made a crossing across the black water to inject myself with classic rock, which really does rock.
As others have already pointed out, the incidence of such retro tastes media-wise (music and books) in India has to with economics more than anything else. CDs were practically no exsistant in those years (1990s) and much of rock music traffic was on borrowed copies of the original tapes, which were usually imported and held by their owners as communal trust.
A. Rand’s desi reach can be explained by the availability of her books as very cheap pirated paperbacks (I paid Rs. 30 for my copy of her “Fountainhead” vs. Rs. 400 I paid to buy Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy” in paperback, in the late 90s), which one can buy from the “footpath” booksellers. I don’t know if she would have been happy with such a subversion of intellectual property; I know I would be if anything I might write hits that “footpath” market even though I would have to mingle with august company such as Jackie Collins, John Grisham etc.
I think the circulation of western music is much better these days in the desh, given cyberia and Bitorrent even though the availability of “good” books at “desi” prices remains quite dismal. Here a shout out to Penguin India: how many frikin’ kids (or parents) can afford to pay approximately Rs. 1000 for an omnibus volume of Satyajit Ray’s stories (an example chosen because this was a gift I gave an cousin in middle school when I was visiting desh two years ago) when the average annunal income (an optimistic number) is Rs 100,000?
Bangelore rocks. Goa, on the other hand, goes with Boney M.
Interesting question. Would the Objectivist Devi want the (OMFG!) State to step in to protect her intellectual property rights? I really wish someone had asked her that…
Re: sillymidoff @ 35
Ah yes, thanks for mentioning Boney-M – their “Greatest Hits” was one of the earliest tapes my father bought soon after buying a tape deck in 84. And one of the fondest memories of my childhood is my pre-school sister dancing to their “Brown Girl In The Ring”. I think you are also right – Boney-M’s as well as that of B. Adams’s popularity, in the desh, has to do with the desi ear’s easy comprehension of their singing. Oh! and it must have been “the college whose name shall not be spoken” Bombay, Delhi, Madras etc – there was (is) no IIT in Bangalore. 🙂
Its funny how some ABDs, in contrast, have such a seemingly passionate relationship with Bollywood and others are very protective about preserving language and culture. Amardeep Singh and Manish Vij are examples of Bollywood enamored American desis. Perhaps the popular culture from “over there” is inherently more fascinating. This may extend into “high” culture as well. Pankaj Mishra writes that reading obscure western authors in the Indian districts created his self-sense; OTOH ABDs incorporate carnatic music into jazz compositions. And there are filtering issues at play here too -the 70s Bollywod figures in the banners at Sepia Mutiny and Ultrabrown, e.g. And I bet you a Shammi Kapoor ‘concert’ would sell out here.
#35. True. You can still see Marutis w/ BoneyM decals in Mumbai. I guess each country has its own preferred brand of trash. Germany had Hasselhoff at #1. UK had Engelbert Humperdinck beating The Beatles for #1 spot in 60s. The US? See Billboard 20. Does anyone remember the big metal concert celebrating Free Russia? Metallica, Oz etc. were greeted enthusiastically. But all hell broke lose when Scorpions came on.
Meenakshi
Whiskeytown fans think so.
I’m sure there are a multitude of reasons for bands not making tour stops in India. But if I were in a mega Rock band with massive light show, a wall of Marshall stacks, effects racks etc, my primary concern would be… the infamous Indian powercut. Do they still occur as frequently as I remember them? I havent’ been to India in 6 years. But man, i could only imagine what it be like for the power to go out mid-song…
No, it does not. They are classic rockers to the bone.
Smoke on the Water is the name of my hometown! 😉
risible: that is a fantastic comment. I do sometimes think that a certain type of ABD is in interested in ‘preserving’ a culture that can’t be preserved, because cultures are dynamic and changing in real time, because they are attatched to their childhood experiences as children of immigrants.
“Over there” is a real phenomenon. Human beings exoticize all the time. And I refuse to believe exoticize is always a dirty word. I mean, when you look at another country or another culture it has, of course, the charm of being different, of possibly transporting you from both the difficulty and banality of daily life. Problems arise when you start to day-dream, to make things up, to refuse to respect that the culture has a life of it’s own and is not just a plaything. Oh, I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I see something very touching in all these attempts to create a sense of self out of a song, or a part of a book. It’s that old impulse for art, isn’t it?
Music, apart from its inherent enjoyability, fulfills a lot of emotional roles. For some westernised or western-leaning kid in India, yearning to break free from the social conservatism, religious hypocrisy, stifling sexual mores of the culture around him, hard/classic rock, or hip-hop, or whatever, takes him to a different world, a fantasy place, a place where he would love to be. For a 2nd gen living in the West, who is yearning to break free from bland surroundings, lack of identity, cultural rootlessness, Bollywood (or bhangra) takes you to a different world, a different identity, a place where, on some level, you would love to be. And something that you may feel is your roots. It should be noted though that MOST young Indians in India are NOT really into hard rock or whatever, and MOST young Indians in the West are not really into Bollywood. Ultimately it is your immediate environment that has the biggest impact on you.