Heroes of Rock ‘N’ Roll, Uninterrupted

IN THE MIDDLE OF A SET, Randolph Correia, the lead guitarist of Pentagram, is lying on his back onstage. As the rest of his bandmates look on, torn between sheer panic and laughing fits, Correia wants the light bulbs switched off. Like most rock stars on a trip, Correia is no stranger to hallucinations. The eventful concert at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, some four years ago, earned him the moniker ‘Light Bulb’.

It’s only 4 pm and there’s a different kind of madness on a scorching afternoon in March. I’m at Correia’s suburban Mumbai pad. In the living room, a coterie of artists—musicians and designers—works quietly at their laptops. The 36-year-old guitarist looks like a picture of collected cool—no different from his usual stage persona—despite the fact that he’s been working like a man possessed and it’s less than two weeks to the launch of Bloodywood, Pentagram’s fourth album. Correia tells us that he’s played tracks from the new album so many times over that he’s ready to let them go.

He’s onto a mix of ‘Tomorrow’s Decided’, the final track, in his bedroom studio. Eight guitars are lined up against the wall in their cases, two Fenders stand proud and naked, a toy keyboard is shoved under a desk, a mini-xylophone over it, and The Rolling Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards’ autobiography is at arm’s reach from Correia’s computer. The unmade bed on the floor, which is just a mattress really, and some unpacked luggage suggest that Correia is a man on the move. Sure enough, the band will hit the road soon. The launch, which kicks off with the five-city Jim Beam Pentagram Bloodywood tour that begins in Mumbai, is slated for 22 March.

While tracks from their previous two albums Up (2002) and It’s OK, It’s All Good (2007) made up Pentagram’s set list, about a year ago the band unleashed a new track called ‘Mental Zero’. The track that was typically Pentagram, and sounded suspiciously like the band’s lead vocalist Vishal Dadlani’s diatribe against dumbing down, set off mass hysteria—an effect few bands with the exception of Indian Ocean can boast.

Anybody who’s been to a Pentagram show knows that the band comes unhinged like no other Indian act. Whether it’s explosive electro power pop (‘Rock N Roll’) or funk reggae jam (‘Rude’) or a fist-pumping anthem (‘Voice’), the band’s dynamite stagecraft makes sure nobody’s in their seats. Unlike most bands from the 1990s to now, which slotted themselves (classic rock, metal, death metal or even a genre as ambiguous as progressive rock), Pentagram has constantly evolved, refusing to be typecast.

They’re also unabashedly rock ‘n’ roll—they’ve slummed it out in railway sleeper class, looking for cola to go with rum and squeezing juice out of stolen mangoes when they could find no fizz, but they’ve also had stretch limos driving them around Estonia when they headlined the Sundance Music Festival as early as 2003. The drugs part we know already. Now for the sex. That’s easy. “There were only beautiful women in Estonia,” says Vijay Nair, then manager of the band who snagged them a spot at the festival. Dadlani once dropped a gem: “Music was invented to get laid.” There’s decidedly something sexual about their swaggering stage act. Of course, there’s the darker side to aggression that might be the norm in a rock ‘n’ roll band, but the band has managed to stay on the good side of the law. In a track called ‘Let Go’ from the new album, Dadlani refers to keeping it all together in these lines: “Keep clutching/ holding on/grabbing at the walls to get a grip/ but the floor is shiny shiny and wet and slickety, slickety slick.” It hasn’t been too tough for the band to keep it together, as Correia tells us.

For Bloodywood, the immensely gifted guitarist has taken charge of co-composing, recording, mixing and producing. “The fact that everything is DIY is fuckin’ brilliant. Normally, a band will record it, give it to the mixing guy, then hand it over to the producer and then give it to the mastering guy. Here, from me it’s going to the mastering guy. So doing everything together is quite manic and I’ve learnt how to detach myself from the different processes,” says Correia. He shares the perfect work plan that he scored over the past year. “Your brain has to become this other being—that’s good at cutting off and getting into this Zen zone. I’ve really enjoyed the last year, spending a lot of time by myself and realising these things on my own. I developed this strength of not being annoyed or irritated at things that don’t really matter. I tried to conserve my energies. So even when I’m out for a drink or a joint or a movie, I’d be preserving my energy to come back and listen to the album and see what it sounds like under the influence or after a movie. The focus was the album regardless of whatever else I was doing. I’d be channelling all the energies into the album. So the music happened with that purity of thought because it was a clean channel.”

The best takes were the first ones, remembers Correia, and while composing and songwriting took place in three stages over the past one and a half years, the album was quick work by the band’s standards. The life of a rock ‘n’ roll band might seem bohemian, but is far from it, he explains. “We’re city people. And we’re fucking Bombay city people. We’ve gotta be really good at our game if we have to survive doing what we wanna do. It’s kinda like that whole ninja fuckin’ vibe. In short, we’ve learnt to work really fast, cut down all the bullshit and the extra thinking about making music, political views and artistic insecurities and get down to doing the album.”

Dadlani, a Twitter addict, recently announced on the microblogging site that Bloodywood is Pentagram’s best album by far. Correia describes it as a guitar album that sounds more rock than any other album that he’s worked on till date. “All the songs revolve around one particular guitar sound. I found the groove after working on it for a week and started rearranging everything we’d written around that sound. And it’s everywhere—it’s on ‘Love Drug Climb Down’, ‘Must I’, ‘Identify’ and ‘Nutter’. There’s a lot more emotion, lot more rawness that goes back to the early Pentagram sound,” says Correia who joined the band when he was 17. Shiraz Bhattacharya, the band’s 37-year-old drummer who founded the band in 1994 (it didn’t have a name for the first three months) recalls how they found Correia. “We were searching for a guitar player and somebody suggested this young kid who had really big hair and always hung out at Razzberry Rhinoceros.” Juhu Hotel’s discotheque, better known as Razz, has now gained repute as a legendary dive that supported live rock music in the city back in the 1990s. All kinds swarmed Razz—wastrels, scribes and artists. “We asked him to audition for the band and he said, ‘I’m also auditioning for another band. I’ll come and check you guys out,’” says Bhattacharya, mimicking Correia’s boyish baritone back then. “He checked us out, checked the other band out and came back and told us, ‘I’ll play with you guys.’”

Correia has also been instrumental in shifting the band’s initially heavier bordering-on-metal sound to what Mumbai metal band Scribe’s lead vocalist, Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy, describes as the “electronica meets rock mutative vibe” of their second album Up. Correia, along with Clyde, a former band member, worked on Up for six years. “There was something very punk about Up that hit you between the eyes,” says Krishnamoorthy. Punk it was because till 2002, when Up released, no band had dared to drop electronica and rock on the same stage. In fact, the band’s bassist, Papal Mane, admits he hadn’t heard of The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers until Correia introduced him to them. It helped that Pentagram has always been unapologetic onstage, even if Dadlani shows up with a cheat sheet of lyrics to do versions of hip hop tracks that the band has never performed before, infusing some of its own manic energy into the crowd and feeding right off it when it comes back from them. It’s a cycle. The band remained as visceral and aggressive, challenging audiences with the new sound in Up. And while most fans stuck on, some fell out.

Three years down the line, the band and its fans had more serious grounds to be upset. The infamous microphone stand-throwing incident at Mosh Mania, a rock show that was organised by Pentagram’s manager Vijay Nair in 2005, is hard to wipe from memory. “My apology went out to the crowd and that kid Jash who was hurt. He was a fan and I regret hurting that kid. But some asshole threw a 2x4 plank studded with spikes at Papal and missed his head by an inch. Papal didn’t see it. It whizzed past his fuckin’ head,” says Dadlani, reliving the episode in shock even today. “That’s when I threw the stand. I should have been more responsible about it and found that guy.”

It may as well be what ‘Human Failings’, a song that Dadlani wrote for the latest album, is about. There’s a line in it that goes: “Experiences are a bunch of mistakes.” “That’s a brilliant definition that I heard somewhere. It’s not specific personal stuff. It’s deeper,” defends Dadlani, who made peace with Pentagram’s audience the same year when he publicly apologised for the incident at I-ROCK, a rock competition that was once the biggest stage for Indian rock bands and audiences. By the time It’s OK, It’s All Good, the band’s second shot at electronica, released in 2007, it wouldn’t be incorrect to assume that the band had not only won most of its fans back, but emboldened other rock bands such as Medusa to explore the electronica route and sizeably expanded its own fan following. Dadlani, to his credit, relentlessly works every section of his audience, be it a thoroughly uninterested crowd out just for drinks at Hard Rock Café or fisherfolk from Khar Danda, a Mumbai suburb, until they pop a lung with him. Nothing deters Dadlani from showing his audience a good time. He fractured his knee while performing at blueFROG in 2009, but the show went on and he showed up on crutches a few weeks later for the launch of the music networking site MySpace at Bandra Fort.

The 38-year-old vocalist walks into the Correia residence later that night. Munching on vada pao, Correia and Dadlani suggest some changes to the album artwork. “The lyrics look better in lowercase,” says Dadlani. “Don’t do gaandmasti with the photos on every page. Let some of them look natural,” Correia says to his friend Ravi, also the designer. Both Correia and Dadlani are the more vocal, opinionated members of the band, often clashing with each other. Nair admits that Dadlani and Correia are known to bicker over the weekend typically like husband and wife and get back together.

Dadlani’s right arm bears a newly acquired tattoo that reads: “In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty.” Lines from the Bob Marley track ‘Rat Race’. A Marley-inspired Dadlani wrote one of their most popular tracks, ‘Voice’, for Pentagram’s past album It’s OK, It’s All Good after watching a documentary on the reggae legend. “Rita Marley was talking about how Bob Marley was a voice to his people. I was trying to say that we didn’t have one,” explains Dadlani, whose recording studio in Bandra has an entire wall dedicated to a painting of Marley that bears an uncanny resemblance to Dadlani. Bloodywood’s Rastafarian number, ‘Must’, is already a concert hit and opens with a frenetic riff that transports you straight into a Quentin Tarantino flick.

Most of the songwriting for Bloodywood was done impromptu on the microphone or when Dadlani dropped in at Correia’s home after winding up his film music work for the day. “All of it has been written in five minutes. There was no sitting down to write with a pen and a pad. If you threw me something to write on, I’d just write,” says Dadlani. ‘Technology–I Get You’, for instance, partially takes its title after the loop that Correia used, and Dadlani made up the lyrics as he sang along to the loop in his studio. “I had no idea what I’d sung. I had to transcribe it once I was done and thought ‘What the fuck have I written there?’ It’s the freakiest song on the album. Shekhar (Ravjiani) told me that I sound like I shot up when I sang this song,” says Dadlani. However, the song has no link to technology. “I’m talking about people I know on this song—creative folks, artists,” says the vocalist, refusing to take names.

His insomnia went down in verse in ‘Nocturne’, a U2-esque track with anthemic guitar lines. “I haven’t slept properly in almost two years now for not more than two hours a night, max three hours. On a really good day, five hours. So the night begins to weigh very heavily on you. The night. The quiet. I mean, how much TV can you watch? Then you kinda live with the silence, think about shit that you wouldn’t normally think about. Like how you take everything in your life for granted,” he says. The lines, “The moon plays shadows on the walls of my head/And the stranger shapes form of the words that were said or left unsaid,” wrote themselves on one of those nights “when I was awake and sitting in my balcony, and saw the moon do that little dance on the fucking sea, I was going over I everything I said. Whether they’re friends or family, there could be misinterpretation; someone may not understand what the fuck you said. At that point in time, that moonlight on the fuckin’ ocean was throwing all that at me.”

Dadlani recalls growing up with fairly uncoloured views on music, so it’s easy to understand how he straddles making music for Bollywood and its unbalanced twin Bloodywood. “RD Burman shared equal shelf space with Led Zep in my father’s music collection,” he says. It’s also what he describes as a “beautiful shutdown” when it comes to songwriting for the band and what Correia reasons Dadlani yearns to do “because he’s not writing to a brief”. At 19, Dadlani knew he wanted to cut loose from his family’s construction business. And Bhattacharya was looking for a guitar player to form a band for a one-off show called Fun Ball. Bhattacharya cracks up at the memory even today when I meet him at a café in Bandra. “A common friend introduced us. I needed to form a band for this Fun Ball at Navy Nagar organised by kids for their parents. So Vishal was the guitar player and Shekhar played the keyboard. The lead singer couldn’t sing. We started playing, and knowing Vishal, who couldn’t take it any more, went up to him and told him, ‘Listen you can’t sing, so don’t. Let me sing,”’ says the wiry drummer and ad filmmaker.

Bhattacharya, like the rest of his bandmates, is easy to talk to but is perhaps the most entertaining storyteller. “I didn’t want to go to college. Vishal didn’t want to work at his dad’s office. So I thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s form a band,’” he says. He too realised early that he needed a side project to keep Pentagram alive. “After a couple of years of playing, I got really tired of the band. You start a business, you invest time in it, you give it three years or fours years, and when there are no returns coming in, then you shut it down, right?” he asks, artlessly. “But we decided we’ll play for passion and do other stuff for making money. Till date, with the kind of lifestyle we boys have, we can’t live on what the band makes,” he says, turning his head to admire a leggy woman in a dress walk past the café. Pentagram today charges Rs 200,000-Rs 250,000 per show, a mind-boggling figure when compared with what bands fetched in mid-1990s. Back then, most bands made Rs 5,000 a show or, if they werelucky, Rs 10, 000.

The 1990s were also a time when audiences demanded only classic rock or metal covers and wouldn’t have bands performing more than two or three originals. Pentagram changed all that. “We started writing originals from day one. Even in a 10-song set, we used to do five originals. And one day, we just decided, ‘Fuck that shit, we’re gonna do our own stuff.’ When we had enough material had to do a 1.5-hour set, 80 percent would be originals and 20 percent would be covers, but our versions. No point playing it note to note,” says Bhattacharya. True to date, when Pentagram does a cover of U2’s ‘Desire’, it owns the version. Fanboy and Scribe vocalist Krishnamoorthy, who attended his first Pentagram show when he was still at school, admits that Pentagram introduced him to Rage Against the Machine, an iconic, iconoclastic American rap metal band. “If all you wanted was to do a good show, there was a way to do it back then, but Pentagram always tried something that no one else did. The idea of being fearless onstage and making every second of your stage time count are things for bands to learn from them,” he says.

It’s this spunk that saw three straight wins at the annual rock contests held at IIT Kanpur (Synchronicity), which is where it all began, followed by IIT Delhi (Blitzkreig) and IIT Bombay (Livewire). “We were shitting bricks at IIT Kanpur because we were a small band,” says Bhattacharya, “The band travelling with us—Psychic History or Side Kick Factory or whatever it was called—was fully geared with Pro-Mark sticks (one of the best brand of drumsticks) and gloves. It’s also hilarious now that they wore bicycle shorts and had women who were crying when they dropped them off at the station as if they were never coming back. We were like, ‘Dude, what the fuck, big band and all.’ There were some 35 bands competing at IIT Kanpur.” And maybe 30 bands in Delhi and 30 in Mumbai. “So once we won all three in a row, we felt we could do something with the band.” An album deal just reaffirmed that they were onto something big. However, Dadlani has always had unshakeable faith in the band. “We’re the best fuckin’ band in the country.” To him it’s a gospel truth that has led him to defend that Pentagram will only play as a headlining act at any rock festival featuring Indian bands, an attitude that has irked other senior bands. “That’s the way it is,” says Dadlani, asking us to point out a band that delivers a bigger bang for the buck. When the band performed at the Glastonbury Festival in 2005, it was not only the first Indian act to play there but returned with more conviction in its act. “The White Stripes? We saw them. They’re shit live,” says Bhattacharya.

Of course, Dadlani’s daredevilry has brought the band treacherously close to being accosted by the army and elevated them to super-rockdom at the same time. Nair reminisces about “an epic concert” at IIT Roorkee about six years ago. About 6,000 students had gathered at the show and struggled to find space to stand. “There was a distance of about 150 feet from the stage which was empty, with some chairs for VIPs that remained unoccupied,” says Nair. Dadlani wanted the audience to be allowed to occupy the space and when the institute’s dean paid no heed to his request, there was no holding him back. “Vishal began swearing at the dean onstage and the much-provoked audience cheered him on.  The dean was an extremely influential man, who literally ran the city along with the army,” says Nair. When the dean stepped on stage and cut the concert short, Nair knew they had to exit at breakneck speed. “I remember running onto [the] stage. That was the fastest pack-up in Pentagram’s history—five minutes. The Helga’s Fun Castle boys helped us, and we were running out of the college before we knew it. The students formed a human chain around us and ran after us.” It didn’t end there. Nair had to work swiftly to book the band into a new hotel, so that they could remain underground until it was time to leave.

And when there was no accommodation, the band didn’t hesitate to doss down on benches inside classrooms, says Papal Mane, Pentagram’s reticent bassist and the most sober soul in the band. “This was the time when there were no budgets to travel by flight. But I remember all of us rushing from the railway station to board a flight when we realised we couldn’t fit the bass drum in the train,” says Mane. I meet Mane during a shoot for Rolling Stone India at Mehboob Studios. ‘Tomorrow’s Decided’ is playing in the background here as well. The band’s in a mood to fool around and constantly rib each other. Dadlani breaks into a semi-Lavani as the beats turn harder and dancier.

“Do you really need to talk to me? Vishal and Randolph are the spokespersons,” says Mane guilelessly. Mane and Correia, friends from the JJ School of Art (Mane studied commercial art and Correia fine art), joined the band at about the same time towards the end of 1994. “Before I joined, Vishal used to sing and play bass,” says Mane. “I played the same thing that every other band played back in college—Metallica, Megadeth.” Bhattacharya describes Mane best: “He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t womanise. He doesn’t do anything. He only drinks chai and maybe scares old ladies and little kids secretly.” After a concert, Mane will most likely be back in his hotel room, tucked in bed watching Sun TV, a South Indian channel. “It’s damn good fun and bizarre,” says the 36-year-old Maharastrian who does not get any Tamil, of course. Nair refers to Mane as the band’s stabilising factor. “He neutralises all the aggression in the band.” When a crazy fight or what Nair calls an “epic situation” crops up, he knows that he can count on Mane to pacify his bandmates and share a laugh with later. The towering musician could be intimidating if he wanted to, but is far from the volatile rock star that Dadlani is. In fact, when Brit rock band Porcupine Tree performed at IIT Bombay in 2009, Mane was lurking around the queue trying to make his way in like a regular fan who didn’t have a ticket. Never once did he pull out the Pentagram card. “If I had to pick one guy to be alongside me in a fight, it would be Papal. He’s a crazy motherfucker and I mean this in the best possible way,” says Dadlani.

The key to enduring 16 years without a line-up change is an unspoken rule to not trespass upon one another’s professional and personal boundaries. “Luckily, all of us are very sharp,” says Bhattacharya rather matter-of-factly. “So we figured [out] who’s good at what and don’t interfere in each others’ territory. If Randolph’s producing it, he’s doing it. He’ll come and make us hear the track and I might suggest some changes to the drum parts, but that’s it. Vishal does the writing. Me and Papal just keep it all together.” Bhattacharya, given his filmmaking background, also oversees stage lighting and videos. Independent music entrepreneur Neysa Mendes, who began her career as a publicist for bands with Only Much Louder tells us that Pentagram was the first band she worked with and shares a dynamic she picked up: “If you’re pitching something to the band, the chances of it working are higher if you have either Vishal or Randolph agreeing to it. If both of them oppose it, there’s no way you’ll be able to take things forward.” As always, Correia breaks it down simply. “We’ve stayed positive from the beginning and the mediator has always been the space we give each other. None of us compromises but we’ve got so good at letting each other be, it has helped us get stronger and better at what we do,” he says. Dadlani is a little more sentimental: “If families functioned like this, people would be better adjusted to the world at large and themselves. It’s the truth.”

What makes a great band? Correia says Pentagram’s taken a fairly simple route. “We just believe we’re a good band—with all the discipline (eight-hour rehearsals), all the fucking homework, all the understanding of the music,” he says. And if a band evangelises anything other than the truth, it won’t be heard for long. There’s a prophetic track called ‘Paper Toys’ on Bloodywood. “I wrote it because the whole world seems to be heading for a refresh-screen moment. Did you know that it snowed on Lahore on February 26? It has never snowed there in human memory. It’s coming around, all of it. All the shit that we put out. It’s like the sea,” says Dadlani. The song can’t get any closer to life, even as Japan stands ravaged by man and nature.