PART 7 OF 10: RENDEVOUS WITH RAHUL

Okay, here is a confession. If someone were to hold a gun up to my head and coerce out my Honest Top 10 SPB songs, I wouldn't look past my 'Emergency Balu-Mottai' playlist stored on my iPhone. It would be as simple as that. Of course, if I were in a more considerate mood (who is, with a gun on his head, one may ask?), I would perhaps throw in an honorary MSV or AR Rahman number, but even that would be highly unlikely. I am the real McCoy when it comes to SPB-Ilaiyaraja fanatics.
Otherwise (with no gun pointing at my head), I consider myself to be a person of highly eclectic musical tastes (sorry for the immodesty): I listen to old Hindi film songs till the tape gets stuck in the player; I am an ardent Jagjit Singh bhakt; my head bobs equitably to Mozart's Symphony No. 40 as it does for ML Vasanthakumari's RTP. I didn't eat for two days when Abba split; I love The Beatles and Dire Straits like I love chole bhatura and parota-korma.

But then, when I am depressed, left licking my wounds from scars at work, or just plain bored, all my carefully nurtured musical magnanimity and cultivated tastes go for a toss. My inner Balu-Ilaiyaraja fundamentalist core, rears its head and does a rudra thandavam. Balu and Ilaiyaraja are to my soul what my mom's pepper rasam and sutta appalam are to my stomach.

But then (again) - I say this with a grave expression on my face - I have a blog to run. I can't keep waxing eloquent about this ingenious duo and bore my billion prospective readers. It is also unfair to Balu if I don't expand his canvas a bit beyond his fellow Pavalar band brother. For instance, how about his beautiful acquaintance with RD Burman (aka RDB aka Pancham)!
Balu absolutely adored RDB. When he was a fledgling singer, it was RDB's music that had helped him earn a living. The songs of Aradhana and the hits of the RDB-Rajesh Khanna-Kishoreda trifecta were captivating the entire nation. Balu and Ilaiyaraja had capitalized on it and performed RDB's songs to such effect that the Pavalar band began to be called 'Aradhana-fame, Pavalar Brothers'! It helped them build a brand and perform over a thousand shows under that banner.
Okay, one clarification for the finicky first-benchers. Aradhana was an SD Burman creation. I am aware of that. However, it is said that SDB had gotten sick during the making of 'Aradhana' and that RDB played a major part in composing and recording the music for this movie (the sensuous 'Roop tera mastana' was a direct RDB composition).

These were the sizzling seventies. It would have been tough to live during these times and not be swept off your feet by RDB's music. Balu was no exception to that. He first met RDB during one of his live shows in Madras, in the mid-seventies. The sound system in the auditorium didn't work well and Balu lent his own for the show. But it was not until 1983 that he first sang for RDB for the movie 'Shubh Kaamna'. The movie was a remake of K Viswanath's Telugu movie 'Subhalekha' - Megastar Chiranjeevi's first movie with K Viswanath. Balu sang all the songs in that movie and 'Baaghon mein khile hain' was perhaps the first one that he recorded. It is a very good song penned by Anjaan Bhattacharya.

Balu had related in an interview that when he first recorded for RDB, he was left starry-eyed meeting Pancham's legendary band members, many of them eminent musicians in their own right.

RDB scored music as an independent composer for the first time in the 1961 Mehmood-starrer, 'Chhote Nawab'. But it was not till the seventies and the advent of the hippie era that he really came into his elements. Through his everlasting hits with Rajesh Khanna and Kishore in movies like 'Kati Patang', 'Amar Prem', and 'Mere Jeevan Saathi' (the trio were thick as thieves and collaborated in forty-two films), the sensational hippie-era foot-tappers in movies like 'Teesri Manzil', 'Hare Rama Hare Krishna', and 'Yaadon ki Baaraat', and the evocative music of 'Aandhi' and 'Parichay', he irreversibly changed the musical sensibility of India: from the grandly orchestrated, classically based music of the fifties and sixties, to the peppy, rhythm- and chords-based pop music of the seventies.

The Bombay film industry was always fertile ground for talented orchestra musicians. RDB further enriched the milieu by spotting brilliant talents and inducting them into his league of extraordinary people. Manohari Singh (his main arranger and saxophone, bansuri, clarinet, trumpet, and mandolin player), Maruti Rao (arranger and tabla and tumba player), Ranjit Gazmer (Maadal), Amrut Katkar (tabla, reso reso), Homi Mullan (poly-percussionist), Franco Vaz (drums), ,Kersi Lord (accordion), Devichand Chauhan (dholak, tumba), Bhanu Gupta (guitar), and Tony Vaz (bass guitar), to name a few, formed the legendary "sitting team" of RDB. Half a dozen of them would become composers in their own right in future years.

It was this team of musicians that Balu was thrilled to meet when he recorded for RDB. After all, he had heard them a countless times, along with Ilaiyaraja, and replicated their music on stage shows to much acclaim.

The song I want to feature here is from the 1985 Ramesh Sippy multi-starrer 'Saagar'. RD Burman was fading away by then. The movies that he had scored for over the last few years had serially flopped. The merciless film industry sidelined one of the most brilliant talents to have emerged in the Indian music scene. Just like that. The musical score of 'Saagar' showed, however, that the yesteryear magic of Pancham had not faded away one bit. The movie was best known, then, as Dimple Kapadia's comeback vehicle and for Kamal Haasan's theatrics. It had flopped at the box office. Today, thirty-five years after its release, the three-hour-plus movie is a torturous watch, in spite of flashes of the Ramesh Sippy brilliance. Even Haasan's performance that was much acclaimed then seems so contrived. The two things that have stood the test of time are: Dimple's beauty and RDB's music. There are seven songs in the album and each of them is a melodic masterpiece, embellished with RDB's sinewy acoustic guitar, the joyous accordion, the strains of the violins, the horns and the sax blazing in all glory, and of course the top notch singing by Lata, Asha, Kishore, and Balu.

The movie is set in a fishing village in Goa where a beaten-to-death love triangle plays out between the characters enacted by Dimple, Kamal, and Rishi Kapoor. The scene for this song is set in the restaurant owned by the ravishing Dimple, as a drunk Rishi and Kamal break into spontaneous dance and song, with one hundred other men. RDB summoned his all-time favorite singer, Kishoreda to sing for Rishi and chose Balu's voice for Kamal. As far as I am concerned, it was the song-casting coup of the century. The joie-de-vivre singing genius of India meets the multi-faceted, euphonious master from the south. In fact, all of Kamal's songs for the movie (the lovely 'O Maria' and the poignant classic 'Sach mere yaar hai') were sung by Balu.

There was a hitch during the recording. The week before (this song must have been recorded in 1982 / 83; 'Saagar' was long in the making, for around two-and-a-half years), the fifty-four year old Kishore Kumar suffered a heart attack. However, when you listen to Kishore sing in this song, you wouldn't know that this is a guy that is recuperating from a heart attack. His voice is as electrifying as ever. Around the time that the movie released (1985), Kishoreda announced his retirement with much fanfare and vowed to return to his native town, Khandwa, in Madhya Pradesh. Within a couple of years, he passed away at the age of fifty-eight. It was the end of an era and a void too big to fill.

As for Balu, what can one say? I can't picture anyone else singing this song. Someone that could have matched up to the stature of Kishoreda, and be that perfect voice of Kamal Haasan. Not a chance.


 
If you are interested in further reading, please click on the India Today article below from May, 1985 below to read about Kishore da's retirement announcement.

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