Meat Loaf's iconic Bat Out of Hell Album cover.
If I had anything to brag about in my youth, it was that I was the first guy in town to own the entire Pink Floyd collection. A remarkable achievement, considering most of their albums weren’t even released in India at the time, and my parents barely gave me any pocket money—definitely not enough to buy a cassette tape. So I call them gifts from the Gods of Psychedelic Rock.
Two others in town made the same claim. One was blatantly lying—he had a few and just knew the rest of the album names. He later died of an overdose. The other copied my collection and then claimed, to all, he was the first. He became a rock band vocalist, who organized a Pink Floyd tribute concert "The Wall" in the city - pocketed all the proceeds, not paying other artists and contractors, and fled to Mumbai, where he is now some kind of music director.
Anyway, I soon dropped the boast—not a single girl was impressed, and most had no clue who they were, while most people invariably followed up with, “So... do you do drugs ? Smoke Pot ?” Over time, I found blindly claiming to love everything "Floydian" came off as a bit pretentious. Besides, I actually preferred listening to Manfred Mann’s Earth Band.
Take the lyrics from Solar Fire, for example:
“See the morning dancer crossing the sky
Turning gold to amber, travelling by
He must know the answer, he must know why
Looking for an answer—look to the sky.”
A hypnotic psychedelic mantra, echoing a primordial prayer to the sun—questioning the ephemeral and mostly meaningless human existence. Looking for an answer—look to the sky.
Somewhat unintentionally, I even started looking like Manfred Mann: long hair, sideburns, round glasses, bell-bottoms salvaged from musty chests and suitcases of friends and relatives, worn by uncles in the ’70s. Music blared from my tiny stereo throughout my waking hours, and different songs got tagged to specific episodes, moods, and thoughts.
Late nights were spent fiddling the dial of an old Philips tube Shortwave radio under the guise of studying. A memorable catch was tuning into Radio Zimbabwe playing Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa — maku mama-say, mama makossa...at 2 AM.
My cassette and later CD(downloaded MP3s not store bought albums) collection grew copious over time—many of them rarities. As a result, I always had a string of amateur and professional musicians making a beeline to my place, even though I never learned to bang a table in rhythm.
Then came satellite TV, beaming MTV. The neo-hippy look made a comeback, thanks to bands like R.E.M., peace symbols, flowery shirts and all, and suddenly a bunch of kids started resembling me, forcing me to start dressing “normal” again. It wasn't Almost Cut my Hair any more - I did cut my hair.
And yet, the habit of mapping life’s chapters to music stuck. Ironically, most of those songs were written or sung before I was born or while I was still in nappies. In late-80s, early-90s Assam, I was a deliberate cultural misfit—a 70s counterculture comet, lost on a jagged path, 10,000 miles off course and 20 years too late.
Love life during youth—or rather, heartbreak—was always defined by Whitesnake’s:
“Here I go again on my own
Going down the only road I’ve ever known…”
But honestly, that was for peer consumption and unjaded teenage bravado.
I spent years pining for a college classmate, imagining her to be J.J. Cale’s "Sensitive Kind". My heartstrings wailed along with Santana’s guitar, and sank into slow despair to the Rasta beat of "I Don’t Wanna Wait in Vain," realising that she never felt the same.
In darker moments of solitude, I wiped away silent tears listening to Joan Baez’s Ballad Book (the Child ballads), or even earlier rarities like River in the Pines or Man of Constant Sorrow —their emotional weight rivalled only by Frank Patterson’s mournful Danny Boy or Cedric Smith’s dramatic rendition of Carrighfergus, hallowed by Loreena McKennitt’s etheric soprano in the background.
There was even a brief Chris De Burgh phase, but it ended as quickly as it started when the Lady in Black (that's what she wore on our first date), left me for a Colonel twice her age. Listening to Missing You after that felt like mockery, but it wasn't The last time I cried.
Adult heartaches—usually involving considerably younger muses—made Patrick Kavanagh’s Raglan Road the recurring anthem of my love life. Immortalised by The Dubliners, Van Morrison, and even Mark Knopfler:
“On Raglan Road of an autumn day
I saw her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare
That I might one day rue…”
Eventually, coming to the conclusion that, indeed - Love is just a four-letter word.
Ever the political radical in thought, if not in action, I found a kindred spirit in Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms with:
Through these fields of destruction
Baptisms of fire
I've witnessed your suffering
As the battle raged higher
A journey that culminated with The Partisan—adapted from Anna Marly's legendary French anti-fascist ballad La Complainte du Partisan — on Joan Baez’s anti–Vietnam War protest album Come from the Shadows. The Leonard Cohen version could never give the same goosebumps.
Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing
Through the graves the wind is blowing
Freedom soon will come
Then we'll come from the shadows
Songs that ended up as part of revolutionary compilations for some friends who claimed ties to the militancy that scarred the state in the ’90s - or that's what they said.
The pacifist in me, meanwhile, clung to Pete Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone—though I always preferred Joan Baez’s haunting German version, Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind. Given that neither of us actually knew the language (as Joan herself once admitted in a TV interview), I felt my choice was completely legit.
However, if there’s one song that sums up my life—The Real McCoy—it’s Life is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back by Meat Loaf. Most of the MTV generation would know him due to the widely popular and equally meaningless 90s rock opera hit, "I will do anything for love, but I won't do that", whatever That implied. Gen Z probably discovered him only because he died a few years back.
I was already batshit crazy for his 77 debut Bat Out of Hell, complete with its insane album cover art - since school. (Yes… I have it on vinyl, too.) For a person who could never memorise a single poem, I knew the complete words of "Bat out of Hell," and the scandalous "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" - both the male and female parts. Which made my claims of being dyslexic and having ADD highly suspect, to say the least.
Life is a Lemon was originally released as a single and later added to the more popular—but, let’s face it, significantly inferior—Bat Out of Hell II.
Why does it resonate with me? Because really, what could sum up life—or more specifically, my life—better than this:
“It's all or nothing, and nothing's all I ever get
Every time I turn it on, I burn it up and burn it out
It's always something—there's always something going wrong
That's the only guarantee, that's what this is all about
It's a never-ending attack
Everything's a lie and that's a fact
Life is a lemon
And I want my money back.”
Parting Note: I finally made time to figure out who or what is Coldplay. Well, bollocks. Not only did I find their music insipid to the point of revulsion, but if forced to attend their concert, I’d probably end up hugging someone else’s wife too - out of sheer boredom—preferably someone younger and prettier. Give me a Fourplay concert anyday...
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