It’s the rite of passage for practically every musician: you emulate your heroes. You learn their songs intimately—melody, chords and words (if any). You temporarily adopt their styles and their techniques. Then, when you feel secure enough to express yourself, you go on to create your own. Most bands across the world begin as cover bands. Like the Rolling Stones, to name just one among thousands.
In the mid-1980s, the music scene in India was quite different from the current indie explosion. I had just been recruited to front a band of ragtag collegians who called themselves Rock Machine. I had seen them play once and was particularly impressed with their version of Pink Floyd’s ‘Time’ from the seminal psychedelic rock album Dark Side of the Moon. The memory is distinct—Mahesh Tinaikar wearing an oversized red oil-rigger’s boiler suit, standing rooted to one spot as he blazed David Gilmour’s lyrical guitar solo note-for-note on a black Gibson Les Paul look-alike. I couldn’t have imagined at that moment that just a few weeks later I’d be joining this band that I was digging so much. Careful what you wish for, dreams really do come true.
It was an all-covers scene those days. India’s socialist policies ensured that bringing down an international band of any renown was next to impossible. So audiences expected the next best option: Local bands proxying for those absentee spergroups by playing their chartbusting hits. If you were in a band, you’d better learn up those tunes, no matter if the fourth-generation cassette transfer was so muddy you couldn’t understand what the singer was warbling. Let phonetics substitute for words.
But old habits don’t die easy. There are still those who cheer for chart-toppers (of the Top 40 kind) and there are some venues that almost always demand it. So, how to get around the pejorative? You invent a new way to say it.
(This story appears in the May-June 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)