Sbeen A Long Tym Since I Rocknrolla

So it started as a common affliction. Six young men chased their first love (after girls, of course)…Floyd, Zeppelin, Hendrix, Purple, Maiden, you name it.  As in, to play them. Living the rock dream, working 16 hours a day, the band got in its first set of songs together, besides a strict set of rules (rules? do rock bands also have rules?). Yes, those inclu­ded ‘No alcohol before a show’ (you were shot dead if you wouldn’t drink afterward), being grounded, professionalism, punctuality, being humble…well, enough gyaan, now to business.

The early ’90s was not an era especially known to produce and sustain rock bands in India. We still had very little info on what was happening in the world, with our limited exposure, mainly through the friendly neighbourhood AIR and Doordarshan, and no internet! We just had plenty of pirated PRT audio tapes, a few vinyls and a saviour in the name of Pyramids, the first shop  as you descended into the netherworld maze of Palika Bazaar (the original ‘mall’ of India), down Gate 1. That was the only shop where you could buy loads of concerts on VHS—Beatles to Led Zep, Floyd to The Who, he had it all—and probably the only one selling ‘instructional videos’ for musicians way back then. Anyway, with whatever we had, we hit the trail, and on Sept 15, 1991, played our first gig, ‘Bandstand’, at Father Agnel school, Delhi. I remember that show featured four bands debuting, and the headliners were Black Slade (Dilip, our drummer from 1992 for about 20 years, was in the audience, headbanging).…

The deal was for 500 bucks, and trust me we’d never seen 500 bucks at one go back then! The gig went so well, and the organisers (Wilfred Hamrum and Stan­ley Vaz) were so chuffed, that they gave us 500 bucks each, are you kidding me, 3,000 rup­ees…“I’m the king of the world” (Yes, Titanic copied that from us later, but no probs we had enough money not to sue them)! So what star­ted as a four-month project suddenly changed for us, not coz of the money, but as we got one show, then ano­ther, then another...by the time we came to March ’92 we were doing our 40th+ show of our debut season, and on March 18, we played our first outstation gig, at REC Roorkee (now IIT). In terms of business, we’d raised our fee from 500 to 18,000 in under six months!

The same year, when no one knew anything like ‘event management’, we ended up doing BAN’NE’D AIDS, in September. This probably was the first AIDS awareness concert in India, at a time when everyone thought if a mosquito bites a person with AIDS, it infects all others it bites. So, we learned ourselves and ended up teaching a few thousand people about The Subject. We printed brochures do’s-and-don’ts pamphlets, distributed condoms, the works...we even got doctors and professors from AIIMS and LHMC to come and give small speeches. Of course, there was music as well, a few bands, and we did everything ourselves (with a little help from our friends), from financing, to permissions, sound setups, stage, security, you name it.

One of the best gigs we remember was on Dec 28, 1995, Mood I, IIT Bombay; that gig establis­hed us all India, and we’ve played Mood I god knows how many times since. It was that very day that we were told of a new thing called the “Internet”, and by Feb we had our first song uploaded on the IIT Bombay server. By 1997, we’d officially bought www.parikrama.com, and then on started releasing all our songs on the internet for free download. We’d actually thought of a model way back then very much like iTunes, just that all our fans were college kids and didn’t have the resources to pay us 10 bucks for a song (no Pay­Pal/Paytm/credit cards), only way they could send us was money order, which I doubt any self-respecting headbanger would’ve bothered to stand in a line for. So we said, good enough, let’s give them our songs for free, and if they like it they’ll call us for a gig, and we’ll earn many-manifold from there. This decision was the crux of our marketing strategy. (I guess we did do something right, as here we stand in 2016, still doing a good amount of gigs and, most of all, being relevant to the scene.)

Jump to March 2007, and one of the most important days of our lives, when we opened for our gods, Iron Maiden, in Bangalore. As we started our first song, we saw all of the band, left and right of stage, I mean, they left their AC green rooms to see us, no way man! We felt like small kids playing our first gig ever and I remember thumping our fists as we got off stage, and then the dream, within four days we got an e-mail for Iron Mai­den, they wanted to invite Parikrama to a UK tour. What started off as a show or two became an eight-show tour, with the mighty main stage of the Download Festival and the Brixton academy as well. In the past quarter of a century, we’ve played a few thousand shows, toured the world, the UK , USA (Kennedy Center), Canada, Africa, Russia, Dubai, Muscat, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bhutan, Nepal, the works.

Everyone says 25 years is a long long time, and I say we just didn’t get to know man, it really feels like we started yesterday, maybe they are right when they say you don’t get to know when you do something you love. Yes we love rock ’n roll, we live rock ’n roll and we’ll play rock ’n roll till we die with our boots on. Nuff said, now that we are 25, and legally of drinking age, let’s go grab a pint and celebrate Parikrama @ 25. Cheerz people...

Peace, treez and rock n roll!

(Malik is the organist/founder/manager of Parikrama)