This May will bring up 30 years of my band
Purple Rain and about 20 years of the time since I started out playing in a
band. I still remember the day when a couple of musicians who I knew primarily
as customers of my music store asked me if I would like to join a band. I had
barely learned to play a passable guitar and knew a few tunes on the piano but
nothing that would qualify as professional standard music. Yet they insisted I
give it shot. As luck would have it, they had a couple of weddings coming up
and were short a keyboard player as he had taken time off from music to finish
his studies. It was a case of “have keyboard? Join our band!”
A messy audition and a few disjointed
practices later I took to the stage as the newest member of the band Critics, a
name which came to be butchered by MCs and general public alike; the versions
ranged from crickets to creee…TICS making us sound like something off a dog’s
back. Those early days we played a few weddings and a couple of stage shows,
quite badly, if my memory serves me right. God bless those people and
especially my parents who were the first to the dance floor and only stopped
dancing when we stopped playing what sounded like a free for all at an animal
farm.
A year later came a change with our bass
guitarist leaving for foreign shores and the original keyboardist having
finished with his studies. The rest of the band was too nice to tell me they
wanted him back and to be fair, he was a proper keyboard player. After some
suggesting and decision making, I decided to switch to the bass guitar and made
way for his return. With the support of friends and family, we kept at our many
attempts at creating music. We were booed, praised and jeered at on stage. Once
we were even egged. I will never forget the sight as that first egg went
whizzing by over my head. I had barely registered what had happened when I
turned behind to see that the keyboard player had already stopped playing and
had started packing away his keyboard. Confused, I turned to our singer who
insisted we continue playing and kept singing. Splat!! was what I heard next as
an egg exploded on his guitar and all over him. Needless to say, we stopped
immediately and got off stage. The organisers were highly apologetic and blamed
it on some local politics although I think it might have just been about our
music.
Sometime later, a relative of mine came to
stay with us in Panjim and would sit in on our band practices, eventually
joining the band. He brought with him a sense of purpose and insistence on
practising all the tiniest details. Quite often he would invite more
established musicians to sit in on our practices and give us tips on how we
could better our music. All that hard work began to pay off and people were now
praising our music and ‘egging’ us on to do better. My sister also joined the
band and we used to cart the entire sound system in our family van. My father
would drive and the rest of us would help set up and pack the gear. Eventually,
we ended up changing the name of the band but those early days will always
remain in my mind.
