playlist for an autumnal walk

• a gypsy's kiss (deep purple, perfect strangers)
• friends (led zeppelin, the bombay sessions (bootleg))
• a.Nkhiyaan (füzon)
• johnny gaddaar (shankar-ehsaan-loy, johnny gaddaar)
• ruu-ba-ruu (a r rahman, rang de basanti)
• kandisa (indian ocean, kandisa)
• drive (r e m, automatic for the people)
• four sticks (led zeppelin, the bombay sessions (bootleg))
• knocking at your back door (deep purple, perfect strangers)
• everybody hurts (r e m, automatic for the people)
• man on the moon (r e m, automatic for the people)
• help (deep purple, shades of deep purple)

was Rock On! meant to Bollywood's first rock movie set in the future?!

There's a moment in Abhishek Kapoor's directorial début Rock On!, as the title song plays in the background, when the camera pans across a set of posters adorning the wall.

Starting from the obligatory Che Guevara to a handful of photographs of John Lennon scattered about to one of The Beatles, one of Guns N Roses, a Rolling Stones poster sporting John Pasche's famous lips logo on a jean pocket and then, finally, Shepard Fairey's cover for the 2007 Led Zeppelin compilation Mothership. Whoa! Hit pause please. A few bits of dialogue in the film tell us that 10 years have passed since the band performed last for the contest. That camera pan was part of the flashback. This means that the present (featuring our former band members going through life like it was an endless novocaine trip) takes place in 2017 at the very least. It's nice to see that the film didn't have a dystopian view of Indian rock. Rock on!

a flourish here, a spot there

In an interview with Q magazine, Robert Plant was asked what Led Zeppelin thought about how widely used the beat for When The Levee Breaks was. His respons contained a nugget of information that, surprisingly, I've not read elsewhere:

We were flabbergasted and impressed when people started using When The Levee Breaks. when Jimmy and I talked about it, we figured nothing was sacred, as we'd been nicking old blues stuff since the beginning of time. it got a bit preposterous when Michael Jackson did Bad -- which is the riff to Heartbreaker [from Led Zeppelin II] with one note changed and as far as we're concerned is a nick.

[courtesy: When The Levee Breaks: The Making Of Led Zeppelin IV by Andy Fyfe, a book that's low on style but laced with information and one that sports one of my favourite photographs of the band on the cover]

Pop quiz, hotshot. There's a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below 50, it blows up. What do you do? What do you do? . That was Speed. 5 years later, someone latched onto the idea of combining the buddy film along with this premise and a generous helping of mad science to come up with Chill Factor: Things will turn radioactive and bad, if a new biological chemical weapon is exposed to temperatures over 50 degrees Fahrenheit (that's about 10 degrees celsius) and it's going to take an ice cream truck driver (Cuba Gooding, Jr. in a career-questioning role) and a convenience store clerk to keep it getting into the hands of some ex-Army terrorists.

Meanwhile, Subhash Alfred Ghai, last seen as his unsubtle self in Om Shanti Om is returning to the director's chair (Kisna anyone?) with Black and White (in search of harmony). The font echoes the Leone-ian territory covered in Omkara and the ebony-and-ivory packaging aside, the film's premise echoes The Devil's Own; this is quite a comeback for Ghai, whose Karz, the muse for Om Shanti Om was an echo of The Reincarnation of Peter Proud.

stairway to discovery

Running through a set of covers of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, I found a few interesting takes and names. The most interesting name would have to be that of a Norwegian cowboy orchestra -- Dusty Cowsh*t. The other one was Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine. While the name of the band plays on the name of RATM, the leader's name is a pseudonym that also doubles as a slang reference to nutzerella. Every other band member's name is also a pseudonym honouring the cheese motif and when people leave the band, their replacements continue to sport the pseudonym: Gordon Brie, Buddy Gouda, Frank Feta, Bobby Ricotta. Turophiles will probably remember the grandiose exploration of cheese in the Monty Python Flying Circus Cheese Shop sketch [transcript] [youtube video].

november 26, 2007: celebration day

Page, Plant and the elusive Jones have confirmed a reunion for a gig at The O2 Arena in memory of Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegün. Bonzo's son Jason fills the spot at the skins. Ahmet was responsible for signing Led Zeppelin on after hearing their demos, convinced that he was onto something big. In an ironic echo of Communication Breakdown, the rush of an estimated 20 million people to claim 20 thousand seats in the arena brought the concert's website to its knees.

Dancing days are here again. Dance in the dark of night as the drums shake the castle wall and sends your head humming. We're gonna groove. [link courtesy: Amogh]

current listens spinning away

Raju Singh's joyous mix of Celtic melodies and moods into an infectious riff-laden heady concoction aided by Sunidhi Chauhan's enthusiastic warbling makes bam bhole off the Charas [movie notes] soundtrack a great pick

Every track on Highs of the 60s {and, incidentally, The Count Five's Psychotic Reaction can segue into Raju Singh's track ever so easily}

The swirling ambience of Led Zeppelin's towering opus Kashmir, which almost takes your attention off the time signature counterpoints on the guitar and the drums

The interesting time signatures on The Best of Shakti

my first DVD purchase

Got the 2-DVD component of the recent Led Zeppelin power release. Having already grabbed a copy of the CD pack, I have been sitting on the fence on the DVD front. I finally gave in a grabbed the set on a decent sale price on Saturday last. All I have to do now is ... watch it (yeah!).

how the west was won (It's so great to have a heading that fits all the different threads in a post)

First interpretation: The great wonderfully-priced remastered power-packed 3-CD set representing two Led Zeppelin concerts in June 1972 (see previous note). Fans familiar with the BBC Sessions release will not be as awed as the rest of the crowd: Page's Bach quotes, the seamless medleys, the endless improvisations, and the (not surprisingly) overt raw sexual undercurrent to the guitar/vocals interplay. Fabulous stuff. (If you haven't already figured it out, I got myself a copy -- from Borders, which had a surprisingly low price for the set, although the retail price was not unreasonable to begin with). The only thing that prevents me from going and grabbing the 2-DVD set that accompanied this CD set, is my distaste for the whole region-specific business-minded encoding approach.

Second interpretation: TCM's Bollywood month kicks off. Caught Ismail Merchant talking to Robert Osborne, clearing the clouds on such mysteries[sic] as the meaning of the term 'Bollywood'. The kick-off film for this celebration of mainstream Hindi (which they have conveniently labelled as Indian) cinema was Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, famous among us trivia-mongers as the first Hindi (or ever?) film to have a credit that went "Title suggested by" (Kiron Kher, by the way, last seen providing faux Bengali ham in Devdas). This was a film I had seen in the cinema hall, and nothing could bring me to watch it all over again -- there are no subtleties, no fine points. Just bravura performances that border on the fence of cheese and ham.

the HAMMER OF THE GODS strikes again (aka a great reason to begin a fervent dance in abandon)

2003 marks the 35th anniversary of the beginning of Led Zeppelin. Atlantic Records officially released a 2-DVD (Led Zeppelin) /3-CD (How the West Was Won) pack of goodies: a live juggernaut culling material from rare performances as well as landmark concerts, with video interviews and promo clips. Both releases are specially priced and relative bargains (the DVD lists at $29.98, the album at $26.98). Admirably, in the US alone, the DVD set shipped quadruple platinum, and the audio collection shipped a million. For more news, sound samples, screenshots, images and such goodies, check out Electric Magic. {NYTimes review}

WRFG, lunch and a capella

After a good night's sleep I lumbered off to the radio station again today morning {ref: last week}. No Pancham gems this time on the show thanks to some generally bad time management and long boring new songs ... The only time I even got on the air this time was for a plug for Chalo Ek Baar from Gumraah, one of Dad's favourite songs --- I remember Sunil Dutt on the piano lipsynching to Mahendra Kapoor's voice, but that's about it.

Chris and I hadn't seen each other for over a week and so we had lunch at the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club {review by Wai Gen Yee, a fellow labmate} in Little Five Points. The sandwich with generous chunks of beek seeped in mesquite with sides of baked beans and homemade BBQ sauce was over-filling. We followed this up with some shopping at A Cappella Books across the street (this store abounds in a lot of beat literature and out-of-print books). I gave in to two purchases: Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored by Richard Cole (although what I have is not the updated 2002 edition) and The Worst Rock-n-Roll Records of All Time by Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell. The latter is really howlarious. We followed this up with a trip to school to check email. I even got Chris to listen to two of my recent acqusitions, thanks to Renu. then some time at Starbucks discussing music theory, notable trends in Hindi film music, postmodernism and magic realism.

I spent the latter part of the evening working on some SQL before returning home to surrender to music and reading. I had a miscellaneous compilation of 80s music (mostly Bappi Lahiri) thanks to Mrs. Pandit and the compilation I got last Thursday: Asli Naqli (Laxmikant-Pyarelal)/Itihaas (R. D. Burman).

Music for the day

A-sides by Soundgarden is a good exhibit of their Led Zeppelin/Black Sabbath influences. My favourite would be track number 7 (how aptly placed) Outshined, which has an interesting riff in 7/4. Track 14, Burden in my hand is in the CGCGGE tuning {more on different tunings}. Another CD was a loan: Sentimental Duets from films (EMI/CD PMLP 5147). For trivia buffs this has the song Aaja teri yaad aayee from Charas, which has Anand Bakshi singing along with Lata and Mohd. Rafi (yes, a good song to have played yesterday, but Lata's shrieking is unbearable). The song I really wanted this CD for was Zamane mein sabse purani, one of the better Lata-Amit Kumar duets, from the Kumar Gaurav flop Lovers (scored by R. D. Burman, needless to say). The taal is hindustani roopak (7/8) and the raag, if I am not wrong, is pahaadi (other songs in this raag: doob maroongi main from the Shiv-Hari scored Sahibaan).

Musical windfall

Sam just lent me four CDs, taking pity I guess on my varied musical tastes.

• 20 All-Time Greatest Hits/James Brown


• The Blues is Alright Volume II


• Aretha Sings the Blues/Aretha Franklin


• Billie's Best/Billie Holiday

I also just received two CDs from BMG yesterday and collected them today: Led Zeppelin III and Coda. That completes my Led Zeppelin albums collection, except for The Song Remains the Same (which curiously is not in the BMG catalogue). There are of course the box sets and remasters, but the only reason to get the box set is "Hey Hey What Can I Do" and some other unreleased material. I am not into bootlegs thank you. Well, not yet.

A walk to the Georgia Tech Library got me 3 more CDs.

• The Art of the Theremin/Clara Rockmore
{previous Theremin post}

• Pioneers of Electronic Music


• The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage

Aural pleasure with Led Zeppelin

Received two CDs from BMG last Wednesday: Led Zeppelin (their debut) and Houses of the Holy (finally).

Led Zeppelin: The good thing about the CD remaster is that they included the original credits as well as the revised credits on the inner sleeve (which means that Anne Bredon finally gets credit for 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You'). The album opens with the spectacular rouser 'Good Times Bad Times' and segues to classics like 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You', 'Dazed And Confused' and the experimental fusion of 'Black Mountain Side'.

Just opened Houses of the Holy today. A great album betraying diverse styles: from the straight rock of 'The Song Remains the Same' to the aching 'The Rain Song' backed by an ethereal mellotron arranged against a progressive rock progression to the funky affectionate James Brown send-up 'The Crunge' with cool 9/8 drumming by Bonzo and rock-reggae on "D'yer Mak'er" closing with a funky guitar groove on 'The Ocean'. This marked the first time Led Zeppelin actually had a title for an album (of course, the title track never made it on this one but was released on 'Physical Graffiti').