While I listen to a wide range of music, readers of the Favorite Music page on my website would have noticed that I’m partial to ROCK.
During my days in IIT Bombay (1980-1985), rock music was the in-thing. Apart from listening to the music itself, we would cram up a lot of information about the origins and histories of our favorite rock bands (mine being, then and now, ELP, Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd). Among the topics of interest were how the groups got their names, backstories of the pictures on the album jackets, the group members’ previous affiliations, the names of clubs and bars in England where they used to play before hitting it big, and so on. There used to be countless informal trivia rock quizzes all through the year in the campus and one formal one during the annual Mood Indigo cultural festival. These were the days before the Internet, so we had to rely on the only copy of a glossy rock encyclopedia that used to be floating around in the entire 550 acres campus to prep for these quizzes.
When I moved to Germany in 1999, I used to visit UK off-and-on. I’d wonder if I could finally visit all those places that I had read about in my graduate days. Unfortunately, by then, rock was no longer the mainstream music of England. I couldn’t get any clues on how to go on such a trip even after inquiring with local friends, colleagues and customers. Nor could I find any readymade packaged tours over the Internet at the time.
A couple of weeks ago during my current stay in London, I decided to try my luck again. I struck pay dirt this time! When I Googled on “London Rock Music Tour”, the very first entry was VIATOR, a tour operator in Europe I was familiar with from my previous trips in Europe.
The tour was rocking, as befits a rock tour! It was full of moments when, all of a sudden, formerly distant stuff came close and hearsay became personal!
For four hours of sheer pleasure and nostalgia, we were driven in a minivan around Central London neighborhoods including Mayfair, Chelsea, Kensington, Earls Court and Notting Hill, and took in lots of rock music history, especially Beatles, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, Oasis, Clash, Led Zeppellin and Queen.
We walked on the crosswalk outside Abbey House on Abbey Road, the same one that the four members of the Beatles had crossed some 40 years ago for the photograph of their album jacket.
We saw innumerable bars where the rock greats like Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton played in the 60’s and 70’s. According to our tour guide, some of these greats (that is, the few of them who are still alive) land up in some of these bars and break into extempore gigs even now, which is what happened the previous Tuesday when Mick Jaegger’s brother was on the stage at a bar and pulled Mick to the stage.
It was exhilarating to actually see the stone cow featured on the album jacket of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother perched atop a pink stone building in Chelsea!
The guide then told us to look to our right. We saw four chimneys. He explained that it was the Battersea Power Plant. Casually, he let it drop that we were seeing the same chimneys that were featured on the jacket of Pink Floyd’s album Animals! I was stunned!
On one of the side roads of Oxford Street, we got to see a blue plaque in honor of Jimi Hendrix. Our tour guide promptly handed out a petition to put up a similar plaque for John Lennon and requested the tour members to sign.
To round off the tour, we were driven past the houses of Syd Barrett, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Paul McCartney and Freddie Mercury. Had the garage door of Clapton’s house been open, our tour guide told us, we could have even seen his Lamborghini parked there!
Since the trivia surrounding rock makes it so great besides the music itself, I’ll leave you with a few trivial facts that our tour guide told us and a few trivial observations of my own:
- Many rock musicians attended university because they came from middle class backgrounds and their parents found it convenient to pack them off to universities which were free and even provided for living allowance to their students those days in England.
- The blue plaque honoring Jimi Hendrix is the only one on the walls of London honoring a musician.
- Even though our tour group of 16 people had to wait for a full hour outside the Hard Rock Cafe on Piccadilly for the tour guide and the minivan to arrive, not even one of them was plugged on to an iPod or any other MP3 player.
- 78 rpm vinyl records of rock music (especially Beatles) are apparently the costliest rock memorabilia today. Incidentally, according to our tour guide, all of them come from India, which is the only country where rock music was ever been published on 78 rpm.
- On the John Lennon plaque petition, our tour guide had asked us to enter not just our names and countries of origin (mostly USA, by the way) but also our ages. They ranged from 17 to 60. I was reminded of Neil Young’s song My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue): “Rock and roll can never die”.
When the tour ended, I asked our guide how come he didn’t show us any of the ELP hotspots. I was completely floored by his response. He said, “my girlfriend ran away with Greg Lake, and from that day I’ve shunned ELP”!
For just that anecdote, I’ll never be able to forget this trip.