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Woodstock meets underground
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There was rock and the works: wannabe groupies, hurled abuses, wild hair, and schoolgirls holding lit cigarettes that didn't meet their lips even once...
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Nervrek ian intense moment. — Photos: K. Murali Kumar
WHEN LONG hair is macho, death is celebrated and insanity is normal, you're in a rock fan's world of logic. When an angry message has to be conveyed, what better way to do it than by passing it off as thrash or death metal? In that sense, there was a lot of rage at the Pepsi & Hero Honda Campus Rock Idols, which, according to the organisers, is the "biggest ever college rock competition of its kind in India". At the South Zone finals here in Speed Zone, bands from Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore took (or shook) the smoke-filled stage.
Rock as heavy metal
Not surprisingly, every band had interpreted "rock" as "heavy metal". Most of the audience was thrilled about it too — it's not every day that you get to watch teenagers run about stage, and yell into the mike in a well-practised deep-throated voices "from hell".
Praneeth, vocalist of Hyderabad band Wreckage explained: "It helps if you sound like the bringer of death. And the black clothes make you look depressed and Gothic." So was it all part of the act? Very offended at my logical conclusion, Praneeth forgetfully dropped his onstage Yankee drawl and slipped into sweet Hyderabadi English: "Our band is a tribute to Megadeth, so we want to look like them. So if it means growing long hair and getting stared at on the roads, we'll do that. It's all for the music, man... "
Most bands stuck to popular covers — Megadeth, Mettalica, Sepultura, Dream Theatre and Iron Maiden. But Chennai band Powder in the Ashtray mixed some Red Hot Chilli Peppers and even did "Stayin' alive" sans the falsetto. The section of the audience that wanted to head bang stuck their tongues out in disgust at this experiment. The band however, couldn't give a damn: "We'll just play numbers we enjoy playing. People are shocked that our vocalist smiles! They think we're soft, but we don't care." They thought the best band in the contest was "of course, the other Chennai band NerveRek".
But the one that went on to win the South Zone finals was Milican's Oil Drop, the largest band around with eight members, including a female vocalist. All from R.V. College of Engineering, every member of the band stood out from the crowd that day — no unkempt, matted tresses, no goatees, and the guitarists were actually wearing formal shirts. They laughed when asked if the off-the-street well-groomed look worked for them: "Our parents would throw us out of the house if we looked otherwise! See, we practise a lot, we have lots of original compositions, we have good equipment and a close-knit band. We don't need to fake accents and put on I-hate-the-world attitudes." They like to call themselves "normal class-toppers who play music". As opposed to other originals played that evening ("Marijuana", "Hate-pride-lust" and "Satan saw me" were the medallists), the winners' "Fade away" and "8 to 5" were like breaths of fresh air.
The judges — guitarist Konark Reddy, Raghupathy Dixit from Antaragni and Jagadeesh of Radio Indigo — were surprised at how much noise the bands were capable of. "Each band member plays well, but their parts are not defined clearly. So everyone just ends up playing all together in a mess," said local guitar legend Konark Reddy. They had all decided to give standard points for audience reaction. Not knowing how futile it was, every vocalist was filling musical voids with "ARISE!" and "Bangalore, are you ready to ROCK?!".
Screaming Synapse
When Synapse, a local band and the last go on stage sang "Fear of the dark" by Iron Maiden, it performed like no other band that night. Leaping all about the dark stage, jumping off from huge speakers, throwing water at the front-row headbangers (they got away with it because the ones drenched were friends)... they stopped at nothing. Raghu cracked up as he noticed that the guitarists jumped in the air at the drop of a plectrum.
Synapse strutting its stuff.
It was a rocking evening all right, but you didn't know whether to laugh or clutch your head at the whole Woodstock-meets-underground-Satanic-cult attitude. There were schoolgirls holding lit cigarettes that didn't met their lips even once, and they truly believed they were groupies. Many guys walked around with half-shut eyes to announce to the world how stoned and ready to write that masterpiece. Seventeen-somethings singing themselves hoarse about wild, drugged nights with "a woman of the wind" was quite surreal, but when asked about it, they giggled that imagination was all they were high on. Strange relief, that.
R.M.
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