INFLUENCES III: TUNING INTO TIME (Or is it the other way round?)

Draping my bare torso in a bedsheet with my ears and mind transfixed on Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, I realize that there are few pleasures in the world that match the crescendo of drumming on blank notebook sheets. I can hear the lighter twang of the cymbals if I control the pen’s release as it hits the fluttering page. My right leg descends on the mattress compensating for the bass drum with metronomic precision (and inscrutable percussion, which passes off as pedal distortion to my plugged-in ears).

With Led Zeppelin, every instrumental connoisseur and poseur can take his or her time to unplug or plug, as the solos are long and harmoniously divided. While I am engrossed in making the seven-piece air drum set sound like a horse’s hooves in Kashmir, the air-guitarist could be tuning his imaginary instrument as he wonders about wanking off Down By The Seaside. The keyboardist could be having a puff In The Light while the mumbling vocalist contemplates scripting a new language with the Bron-Yr-Aur solo strumming on like a shrew.

I do not share the air-guitarist’s vision though. For me, air-drumming wins hands over masturbation in bed. Even if I am naked. Even if one of my earphones malfunction as In The Light reaches its zenith of instrumental harmony. Even as the notebook I am tapping my ecstasy on loses its spine and then its pages like school kids in a queue.

Bands have occasions they are best heard, that could be as different as their respective sounds. Led Zeppelin is best taken on a nightly flight with the streetlight releasing yellow scintilla for you to stare at the blank ceiling. The Beatles ought to be served on a cloudy winter afternoon as you walk down the alley thinking about backpacks, books, beer crates and the remaining better things in life.

Linkin Park seems to take on new meaning for me every time I croon it in the bathroom, especially after a frenetic day at work. In The End, particularly, is almost dermal with its vibes. As the soap suds attempt to cleanse you of the grime and the stress, your hair follicles begin to tingle you while swaying like Mexicans to Chester’s chants. I first heard Linkin Park on a rainy day at school. Back then, umbrellas and raincoats were the most despised of things every time we had a drizzle – next only to tiffin boxes and algebra assignments in the scale of abhorrence. Wetness has somehow stuck with Linkin Park for me, in a certain Pavlovian way. It is like olives and brandy; I have to be dripping to appreciate their Meteora.  

There comes a band in every life that acquires the status of a blues-shedder. You may listen to it umpteen times a day, yet you still end up craving it droopy-eyed in long, dreary classrooms. Hormones, freckles and indifference – everything finds solace in its refuge. For misfits growing up in a cloistered city, that band is Nirvana seven times out of ten (The other three will probably oscillate between System of A Down and Megadeth, if male, or Avril Lavigne and Westlife, if female). The best thing about grunge is that you keep finding a better way to ingest it with time, just like couples who keep finding new positions (and things) to spruce up their sex lives. Nirvana might be an essential ingredient of inhaling weed today but back then, Cobain growling in his hospital frock straight out of Reading, was my vision of Christ personified. He saved a withered soul trying to make sense of the rigmarole of conjugal relationships, from fading into oblivion.

                                                        

                                    JUST DON"T COME ONTO  ME..PLEASE

These days I have been listening to a lot of The Strokes. They are bohemian in a way other bands can only aspire to be. Every song of theirs is a form of picturesque indulgence. Listening to them, you can almost see yourself being engrossed in office work while wondering if this is it, or consoling a bishop of the fact that New York City Cops are tough on paedophiliacs. The Strokes are like those food staples that mothers keep piling in kitchens to satiate forever-famished husbands and children. Meant to be devoured at any time of the day with the garnishing of your choice.

No music anthology of mine can ever be complete without a whiff of Dire Straits and Green Day. Knopfler has a knack of appealing to the countryside in you; you conjure up visions of dozing on a hammock by the bonfire as fireflies around you keep humming the rhythm chords. As for the perverts from St.Jimmy’s cradle, they made me believe in the power of being a basketcase. If not for them, one would never have realised that we have a neurotically constitutional right to croon in imaginary concerts perched atop a bathtub. Or that, the best known form of catharsis involves generating oral percussion while crossing busy traffic intersections. Led Zeppelin, air-drumming and the mastery over masturbation – would all have remained unexplored without Green Day.

For now, I can see a horse trampling on my ceiling with a Black Country woman riding it. She seems to be hollering, unaware of the fact that she is going out of tune to the beat of the horses’ hooves. Bloody hag.