Long time friends do cheat / behave strangely and it's not always about money.
People from Kolkata may know of a band "Krosswindz", a very small band which started by a guy called Bikramjit Banerjee ( known as Tuki) and 5 of his friends. And unfortunately/ fortunately I was one of them ( a skinny very tall kid with long curly hair just out of school)
We managed to get a record deal with a small local audio record label called Asha Audio, and published a 8 song record "Poth geche Benke"..."the winding road"
Of course it flopped, but we broke even and made some very small profit. We did some small gigs in Jadavpur Engineering college, Calcutta Medical College etc.
I was flat broke at that time and due to pressure of medical school quit the band and moved on.
Now after almost 30 years, found that Krosswindz has a wiki page!! It's the band we started ( I was the youngest of them)!! But strangely other than Tuki, there's no mention of other members...which is perfectly fine as we left long ago.
But what's not fine is that our first record is available in Spotify and Tuki took credit for all the instruments, even lyrics!! In reality it was Neil and me who wrote almost everything in that album. I'm still in touch with Tuki and he never told me anything!!
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=RD4kWKmqqx7Lk&playnext=1
This is that record, it even has our photographs on the cover!!
It doesn't matter at all now, I have played in much larger and ofcourse better bands as my skill sets improved with practice. But it was my first studio experience...and though the lyrics are really immature and often cheesy and cringy..these songs were mine...wrote them all...they worth nothing, but somehow it hurts. They all were at least 5 years older to me and Tuki was full time musician, he knew about copyright and all those shit. He is a gifted guitar player for sure ( they all were technically better) but they only played covers.
It was Boni ( the vocalist) and me who thought we can write our own music and play it in gigs.
Years later, I was still in Kolkata, Tuki called up and requested me to rejoin. I went to their practice pad...but it became a completely different band..his wife Chandrani was doing the vocals, and they were playing Bengali folk songs ( after seeing the commercial success of a shitty band called Bhumi) and he was trying to incorporate soft guitar solos with whatever rubbish they were singing about. Had to tell that I feel no connection with this kind of music ( I grew up in a city...knew nothing about Bengali folk culture and had no interest) But there was no drama, we never fought and spoke to both Chandrani and Tuki even the last time I was in Kolkata over phone.
He never ever told me that our first shitty record is in Spotify and still generates some revenue.
The 1990s were a heady time in India. Liberalisation was just taking off, the tech boom was beginning and Indians were waking up to more choices than before. This was also a time when indie rock bands were coming into their own, amplified by platforms like MTV, Great Indian Rock festival and...
m.economictimes.com
The band got some recognition years after the first record, but not for their subsequent folk records. I've checked Spotify, it is still the first record that got significantly higher number of streams.
God knows I am not jealous or anything for not being credited as founding member of some small obscure Bengali rock band..just sad.
Now the real shocker...
Guess most / many of you have heard this song. I didn't till very recently...as I am not at all into Hindi music.
Now listen to this,
Sounds familiar?
This Bengali song was written by a genius... Gautam Chattopadhyay...our beloved Moni jethu. Believe it or not, they were probably the first Indian "band"....Mohiner Ghoraguli.
en.m.wikipedia.org
In that wiki picture you can see a guy playing flute...he is no more with us...Raja Banerjee...my beloved baba (dad)
Anyway, Moni Jethu wrote that beautiful song and gave that diary to my father. After dad passed away, my mother kept that diary very securely.
Moni Jethu's son is a drummer ( Gaurav/ Gabu) he was a toddler when we recorded this song ( it was the last song of Krosswindz's first record)
Moni jethu never cared for any copyright issues and gave us permission to record it without asking for a single penny ( he was struggling with his lifelong demon of alcoholism) he just gave it away because he always treated me like his own son ( he and my father were lifelong friends)
Now after many years, some Bollywood guy approached Tuki to use that song in some movie... Gangster or something. Tuki hold the copyright of our first record and sold that one particular song to that producer for a huge undisclosed amount of money.
Gabu ( Moni Jethu's son) by that time was a pretty good drummer ( he is super talented... genetics) and he got really pissed when he heard that hindi version of that song. But he couldn't do anything legally.
Even my mother was shocked...the hindi version of the song is written and performed very very poorly. James the Bangladeshi guy who sung it, is a terrible singer and that truly great song turned into a horrific bollywood stamped garbage.
This is how dirty the music industry is in India, where a singer like Arijit Singh is considered God. He can't even play a 3 chord song live properly. These people will rot in hell. We make fun of mumble rappers, but most Bollywood music I've heard is no better. No engineer can fix a terrible performance.
If you guys find some time, please compare the two versions. The hindi one didn't even pay a decent guitarst to do the lead stuff. Some average keyboard player played Orange Street Samples "Siterdelic" on a ****ing midi keyboard...and he/ she tried to emulate the slide with a mod wheel or pitch bend or something similar found on cheap ass midi keyboards.
The simple bass during intro which I changed at least 50 times before the final version is completely missing ( as most Bollywood bass player can't play anything other than locking with the drummer...they simply don't know how to use the bass other than providing a base rhythm with the drums and rhythm guitar) and that irritating voice of James...yeah..yeah.. doesn't make anything heavy/ emotional. And those lyrics!!
It was a song of emotional disconnect between people (not lovers) despite having all the options ( the first line in Bengali means, the whole world has been shrunk to a television, two people watching it together but they forgot how to communicate meaningfully as they are lightyears apart in their mind, despite such close proximity)
When the song was written, there was no internet, no social media...only television and cable TV just entered ( many of you were probably not even born)
Moni jethu was not an ordinary person, he was a hardcore communist but realist at the same time. Each and every song he penned down 45 years ago, is still very much relevant ( probably more now). He hated love songs but wrote a few, but those are not typical mushy songs, most of them are open to interpretation right from straight sexual/ physical attraction to giving up everything and completely surrendering to the other person at a spiritual level.
He wrote few beautiful songs about the city he could never leave...Kolkata.
It's a pity that most younger generations of Bengalis ( even musicians) haven't heard the first true rock band from India.
They ( including my dad) behaved like true rebels...showing up drunk/ high on stage, thrown out of All India Radio's recording room, resulting in a mini riot. I was not born at that time. Heard crazy stories from mom after baba passed away.
