![]() “Five days it was only ‘Summer of 69’ and nothing else,” he said. Sachin Tendulkar once said that when he was going through a lean streak during the Australia tour of 2003/04, he listened to ‘Summer of 69’ on a loop. At a time when few big names came to India, Adams came soon after his Grammy win and India has remained doggedly loyal to him and made ‘Summer of 69’ its own.ĭhol beats to it and Manipal University reworked it into a school anthem with some Hindi lyrics thrown in. ![]() The online portal Scroll.in points out that his 2010 albumīare Bones was a hit in India and a dud most everywhere else. In 2018, Adams, then aged 58, was touring India for the fifth time. For the great classic rock groups, an India tour and its tax logistics were just not worth their while but Hazra says, for acts like Bryan Adams or The Scorpions, “with an expiry date in their main market (the U.S.), this was squeezing the lemon to push the CD sales.” But Bryan Adams kept coming back to India, rekindling the fire. Other songs fit into the same classic bracket - ‘Hotel California’, ‘Another Brick in the Wall’. ‘Summer of 69’, a song from 1985, with its refrain about “the best days of my life” fits right into the nostalgia for those ‘good old days’ where their access to the West, often via the aunty in London, gave them cool cachet. Writer and rock aficionado Indrajit Hazra thinks that today’s middle-aged desi rock listener was part of “the second flush of people who used their musical taste as a shorthand for being liberal Anglophonic elites - especially, and fundamentally, in contrast to ‘Hindi film music’ listeners.” The categories were not necessarily water-tight and mutually exclusive, the binary was false, but that group remains a shorthand for a kind of “cosmopolitan liberalism”. Yet, the song somehow burrowed its way into our psyche. In most of India, if anyone sang “That summer seemed to last forever,” it prompted more dread than dewy nostalgia. It’s not like we grew up with many of the cultural markers in the song - five-and-dime stores or drive-ins. “What’s with Indians and ‘Summer of 69’?” he asked. A BBC reporter friend in Kolkata first drew my attention to it. ‘Jana Gana Mana’ might be our national anthem, but ‘Summer of 69’ is no less an anthem in parts of the nation. It was a curious choice of a song for a Chief Minister but he looked like he was having a good time.Īnd then for an encore, he launched into ‘Summer of 69’. Whether or not one agreed with his politics, there was something cool about a Chief Minister strumming his guitar and belting out ‘I Want To Break Free’. Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma had been hanging out in a corner unbeknownst to most of us. It did not make for the most exciting of settings but after two years of pandemic, human company and wine were welcome.Īs I was about to leave after dinner, the band announced a surprise guest. The Shillong Cherry Blossom Literary Festival was hosting one of its dinners there. There was a bar set up on one end and a band playing at the other. Sarkari convention centre hall with fluorescent lights, did not promise much.
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