Dreams of Californication
Photo: Volodymyr Hryshchenkoa on Unsplash
A personal story of music and brotherhood: “Kau had also bought me the album before he left the country. Even though he would come back soon, it would turn out that us living apart in different cities would be a feature—and not a bug.”
If you met my elder brother Kaushik and I today, you would have no doubt that we’re siblings. But this wasn’t always the case. In our schooldays, the only thing Kau and I shared was our weak vision. We were varied in athletic abilities, academic success, and in our approach to authority and dispositions, which would almost make you think that we were separated by an entire generation gap—even if, both of us would qualify as ‘elder millennials’.
Maybe I am in the minority, but I don’t think that the way we tag generations is entirely accurate. You know the ones I am talking about: A loose aggregation of people, born around the same era, who have certain attributes/stereotypes associated with them.
Boomers? Rich and out of touch.
Millennials? Will only save avocados from burning buildings.
Gen Z? More woke or right-wing, but uniformly more annoying, etc.
But I think that, at least from an Indian context, a better way to classify people is based on certain marquee years and splitting into groups of people born before and after. In recent history, these marquees would be:
1991: Liberalisation
2003: First season of Roadies
2014: Congrats, you are now anti-national
I think being born before the first milestone was fairly definitive for Kau and I. Even though we grew up comparatively with privilege, I realize that I’m closer to a world that mirrors my grandparents’ childhood, than that of my own daughter.
Like that time my dad came back from his second international work trip where I was enamoured with a can of coke he’d brought for me as a special gift. For eight long months, the can sat in a glass showcase in the hallroom, placed besides a framed photo of the family at Lalbagh, a ceramic panda bear, and a memento from the Rotary club.
Over time, Kau and I expanded our catalogue. This was done in a way that was truly befitting for a future banker and lawyer: rampant piracy. What began as the occasional mixtape in a predominantly inherited collection soon became the overwhelming majority. We would bully extended family members into buying us blank tapes.
Until… there finally came a moment of weakness, on an exceptionally hot day in Bangalore (or ‘winter’ as they call it in Mumbai), I finally drank it. It tasted exactly like where it came from: Phoren.
As time passed, some of the perks of liberalisation became more common around our household. Like the BPL music system, which played audio cassette tapes. Initially we had cassettes which we had inherited from our parents and grandparents, a random sampling that included “ABBA: Dancing Queen”, “The Carpenters”, and “Sandhyavandanam: Live at Woodstock”.
Over time, Kau and I expanded our catalogue. This was done in a way that was truly befitting for a future banker and lawyer: rampant piracy. What began as the occasional mixtape in a predominantly inherited collection soon became the overwhelming majority. We would bully extended family members into buying us blank tapes. We made rounds of electric stores in Bangalore’s Jayanagar 4th block market for specific AUX cables that would allow us to record music from different sources. We borrowed any tapes we could lay our hands on.
All of this made our music taste fairly eclectic. One of our mix tapes could have Colonial Cousins, Savage Garden, NSync, The Beatles, and Bombay Vikings on the same side. The proportion of good music on these tapes also increased as my brother began listening to more bands, and then passed them on to me. We would even go through the pain of buying some tapes at the Music World or PlanetM on Brigade Road a couple of times a year.
Through Kau’s tutelage, I was able to skip a few steps in the average evolution of a South Bangalore boy who consumed English music.
Step 1: MTV Subbalakshmige barivolu
Step 2: Backstreet’s back…. all right!
Step 3: BRO ONLY HEAVY METAL BRO. METALLICA AND MAIDEN BRO.
Step 4: METALLICA TOO MAINSTREAM BRO. I NOW ONLY LISTEN TO LAMB KEBAB OF GOD
Through Kau, I got to know Pearl Jam. And Aerosmith. But the most monumental influence, by far, were the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Our first tape of theirs was the album, Californication, which we bought in 1999. RHCP’s music was unlike anything I had ever heard before. Thumping bass. Complicated guitar riffs and backing melodies. Thundering drum solos. And gibberish that was rapped/sung on top. We memorized almost every song on that album. In a world before Wikipedia, we even went deep enough down the rabbit hole to know that this band we had discovered had been around in some form or the other since 1983. We learned that only a few of their albums existed with this particular sound, thanks to Californication having the line up of the original singer (Anthony Keidis), bassist (Flea), with a relatively newer guitarist (John Frusciante) and drummer (Chad Smith).
I would later learn that this sort of flux was almost nothing compared to some of the other bands out there. Another band that my brother would get obsessed with later on was Jethro Tull. When I opened the inside sleeve of their greatest hits CD, I saw an image of the profile of the lead singer surrounded by a galaxy of 18-20 people who had floated in and out of the band over the decades. I have only seen something similar in my life much later when I had the misfortune of working in successful Indian startups.
(Arey kar lo: Founder ne bola hai.)
Photo credit: Deepak Sridhar
For RHCP, this particular lineup elevated the sum over the parts. It’s like attaching Vadivel to Prabhu Deva, or serving egg bhurji with a little bit of pav bhaji masala sprinkled on top. It just works better.
We got our hands on more of RHCP’s back catalogue in the coming years. Some of the older stuff was painful, but their second album with this lineup, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, was almost as good as Californication.
After Californication, we would have to wait till 2002 to before the band dropped another album. A lot had changed in these intervening three years. Kau and my tastes in music diverged a bit: While Kau moved towards more classic rock and indie rock music, I had exposed myself to gangsta rap, which is as relevant to a childhood in JP Nagar as MS Subbulakshmi is to one in Inglewood, California. We hadn’t been in the same school for two years. Kau was old enough to legally vote, and he had moved to Mumbai for his undergrad at Xavier’s.
Living apart for the first time, I had finally grasped the meaning of that old proverb: Distance Piracy makes the heart grow fonder.
We had upgraded our medium of choice and equipment to CDs, with a newly acquired burner. Our brilliant scam to justify this purchase was to convince our parents that it would “help us study better”.
And this had happened in parallel with us discovering and abandoning Napster (sucked), Limewire, which we later replaced with Kazaa, and other software that would burn CDs into mp3s. The same energy that was earlier expended on tapes and writing notes on the cover had now been transferred over to cooling the CD burner after overuse. Fan it like it’s a Mughal emperor, macha!! We wrote track lists or notes on the CD itself with a marker. After Kau moved away, we employed our parents and grandparents as mules to transport some of these CDs back and forth on the Udayan Express.
But we were just minor players in a burgeoning trade in South Bangalore. I had a friend, Bharat, in Hindi Tuition, who had taken to burning and selling CDs with Dragonball Z videos to classmates. One day, this friend received some unexpected feedback from the irate father of one of his customers.
Kau and my tastes in music diverged a bit: While Kau moved towards more classic rock and indie rock music, I had exposed myself to gangsta rap, which is as relevant to a childhood in JP Nagar as MS Subbulakshmi is to one in Inglewood, California.
“Hello”
“Uh, hi uncle”
“FRIENDS MUST DO FRENSHIP NOT BI-NESS”
Maybe it was all this business that had triggered feeble attempts even in India to combat piracy. Ads would play at the beginning of movies which tried to dissuade you from pirating stuff with a cartoonish protagonist who was dressed like a burglar, who was committing different crimes. It went something like:
You wouldn’t rob a bank.
You wouldn’t rob your office.
You wouldn’t steal a car.
Privacy is a crime! Would you steal a movie or a music album?
Fuck ya, I would.
This is not to say that all of the CDs we had were fake. My taste in music had evolved further, thanks to my occasional visits to see Kau in Mumbai. The first thing that happened was discovering Indie bands from India that he had heard live in college, like Pentagram and Zero from Mumbai, Motherjane from Kerala, and Thermal and a Quarter from Bangalore. Kau had procured some of their music at gigs, and I got my hands on some CDs through a magazine subscription to RSJ.
And of course, he took me to Rhythm House in Mumbai, a store that seemed to have more gravitas than the ones in Bangalore, where we picked up By The Way, the new album by RHCP. We recognized that, at least for the Chili Peppers, we would always make the effort to buy their music—un-pirated, original. This album was different from the ones before it. More melodic. More experimental. And less light-hearted. Kau and I had different favourites from the album: he liked “Throw Away Your Television”, while I preferred “The Zephyr Song”.
Our commitment to RHCP would only become more impressive with changing times. The music industry had read the tea leaves, based on the breaking bad piracy empire strengthened by millions of others like us. Audio CDs were phased out by mp3 players. Before Kau finished his degree, we each had been given an iPod.
This one also for studies only, Ma. God promise.
The library of music we had built over the years found its way into iTunes, and then onto our devices. Tool. Rage Against the Machine. Audioslave. Metallica. Jethro Tull. Alice in Chains. Pearl Jam. Nirvana. And RHCP, of course. These devices housed libraries that we could only dream of. But this aggregation came at the cost of the little details, like our scratchy handwriting or the hours we would have spent arranging the tracks a particular way. Or even the patience to listen all the way through an album now that you had the ability to skip to the songs and the parts you liked the most.
But in 2006, an outlier. Stadium Arcadium, RHCP’s new double album. Kau, now a year into the workforce, bought it for me. Each CD of the double disc was the colour of a different planet and came with a free poster of the band, which I promptly put up in my hostel room on the outskirts of Bangalore. That album would see me through the first two terms of college, where I quickly realised that I was going to be much closer to the bottom rather than the top of my class. (It also cemented my friendship with some of my closest friends today.)
My memories of Stadium Arcadium are bittersweet, because it would be the last album that the lineup we liked would put out for a long time. Their subsequent breakup seemed permanent and rancorous. So was ours: Kau had also bought me the album before he left the country. Even though he would come back soon, it would turn out that us living apart in different cities would be a feature—and not a bug.
But there have been bright spots, like us living together in Mumbai for a few months before he moved back to the U.K., (“I’ve been around the world, back from Bombay.”) or that time when I visited London in the summer of 2016. We had a picnic with Puliyogare, hot chips and champagne at Primrose hill. (“Take me up and down on Primrose hill.”)
Through this 15-year period, Kau and I lived in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, London, Hyderabad, and Barcelona between us. In this time, we collected degrees, jobs, loans, 20 kilos or more, varying amounts of facial hair and multiple stamps on our passports. And we both ended up with better halves who shared our love for travel, food and live gigs.
While Kau and his partner were going to gigs like Radiohead, my wife and I were watching Ratatat at The Humming tree in Bangalore. That gig was the last live one I attended for a while, thanks to the pandemic kicking in—with a pandemic pregnancy as icing on the cake.
There was one more bright spot from the pandemic: Kau and I were back in the same city for a brief period. It was around the same time that the Chili Peppers got back together (with the lineup that we actually gave a shit about) to release the album Unlimited Love.
Soon after, we inevitably split again when I moved to Toronto, only to find out a few months later that RHCP was performing live a few kilometres from where I was staying. After dithering till the day of the gig, my wife and I ended up buying tickets (with babysitters employed, too).
This was a moment to be shared between us. Sending him grainy clips from a concert on Whatsapp truly brought our relationship—powered by piracy—full circle.
I could barely contain my excitement as we took the street car to a spot a short walk from the venue. This was our first live gig in four years. We lined up at one of the entrances to the Roger Stadium along with a crowd that was so varied in age it could have been called '50 Shades of Shahid Afridi. We walked to our seats that were about a hundred feet from the stage, overpriced beers in hand.
It felt like we had spent thirty per cent of the cost of our livers in one night. And then a guitar riff began to play…
And boy, was it worth it.
It was the beginning of a super tight set, from the lineup that I loved, less than 100 feet from us. Keidis on vocals, Flea on bass, Frusciante on guitar, and Chad Smith on the drums. We heard all of my favourites: “Otherside”, “Dani California”, “Soul to Squeeze”, “Throw Away Your Television”, “Under The bridge”, “Around The World”, and “By The Way” as an encore.
Although I and the band had aged considerably since I first heard them, the gig had all the hallmarks of a great RHCP gig (besides the fact that half of the set featured them with no shirts on.) Thumping bass drums, indulgent guitar solos and the closest thing you can have to a Jugalbandi involving a bassist and a guitarist before a song begins.
We sang along, recorded clips, and sent them to people we knew were fans.
This was just a week before Kau’s birthday. He had seen RCHP earlier, too, live in London. But this was a moment to be shared between us. Sending him grainy clips from a concert on Whatsapp truly brought our relationship—powered by piracy—full circle.
And the years passing have taken us further and further away from the India and Bangalore we knew at liberalisation or before, when both of us were born. I know this makes us sound old—but even the Chili Peppers have been around longer than we have.
***
Deepak Sridhar was born in and has spent most of his life in Bangalore. He began writing in earnest while unemployed during the pandemic, and has written two books: Home for the Hallidays and One and half. He has been accumulating comedic material with stints as a corporate lawyer, biryani delivery boy and full time Bangalore bar uncle. You can find him on Instagram: @hallimims.
