jd tara
in all the confusion and hassle i mentioned in the previous post, i couldn’t write about something pleasant (and unpleasant) that happened the previous week. the jack daniels tennessee backstage first annual indian rock awards. yeah… that’s the full lame name. why do these corporate sponsors have to take over every possible part of the event name? what could have been the riff awards, or just the indian rock awards, became this long-winded un-memorable tongue-twister. (they refer to it as the jd tara, by the way.)
anyway, it happened a day after a surprise party for sam at park baluchi, where i met up with some faces i hadn’t seen in ages. andy, pankaj, adil, gary, arpan and random others. almost everyone has moved on from the early starving rock days. except gary. but he’s still young.
the main awards ceremony was held a day later at elevate. and we were all in the vip section. posh! we even got to wear those supposedly un-tear-off-able wrist bands. and they were pouring jd on the house. being the whiskey man i am, i did not complain. hell… they even converted “half-beer” gandhi into a four-pegger. missed most of the awards on account of being a bar-prop. from what i remember, a giggly neha kapur and vir das gave out the first set of awards. with a random walk-on by zila khan. she got on stage, shook hands with the mc’s, said hi to the sound technicians, and walked off. when it was her turn to give out awards, she burst into song. sufi song. if i wasn’t drunk, i’d have laughed my ass off. she must have been on something, too.
and vir das is not funny. seriously. you don’t make himesh reshammiya jokes at a long-hair convention. we don’t get that kind of humour. and it doesn’t improve things by making seventeen jokes about him in one go.
performance-wise, pentagram blew my mind. again. parikrama did an all-original set (i think), a day after they opened for iron maiden with an all-original set. good going for them. motherjane, infinitely better than their last performance at cafe morrison. them clones… they’re consistent. bandish… well… i went out to buy cigarettes and socialize a bit.
but pentagram. fuck. they’re miles ahead of everyone else. the songs, the energy, the presence. especially the presence. that’s something bombay bands have always had over others… they look like rockstars, they act like rockstars, they get treated like rockstars. not like a bunch of bored call centre executives at their annual festival.
and the downside to the evening. two things:
- sam told me to wear a suit. i passed on the message to everyone else. bummed a coat off achint. felt like an idiot when i got there.
- i threw up when i got back. that ended my puke-free since ‘93 session. bummer.
