There's just so much to write about this I thought I'd break it into two blogs - the Countdown and the Finale.
Cut to around mid-July'06: I meet Vye, a very dynamic and hard-working guy that I came in contact with while we used to perform in UTA till last year. He tells me he wants to arrange an Indian Ocean (www.indianoceanmusic.com) concert in UTA on August 27th, while they'll be on their US tour. We discuss a few things related to this and then he randomly asks me if we'd want to open for the show. I think for almost exactly 7 seconds and go "Sure...why not??".
Within the next 2-3 days, I make a few calls to the rest of our band members to confirm their availability. I call Mudi (who unfortunately for us, works in Virginia and not in Dallas) and ask him to book flight tickets to Dallas for the show. (Someone who's reading this and is looking for a smart, dynamic IT Business Analyst in Dallas, please get in touch with him :)
At this point, we have Pavel (lead guitars), Kalyan (keyboards), Sanjeev (drums), Mudi (vocals) and me (vocals, rhythm guitars). Three important issues ahead of us: We need a bass guitarist, we need a drum kit to practice with and a room to practice till the D-day.
Fortunately for us, as we kept going ahead with our practice sessions...everything interestingly seemed to fall in place. We kept asking around for a drum kit....a few friends tried real hard but things didn't work....till i casually mentioned this to a good friend Anisha, and she goes "of course, we have my brother's drum kit that's unused cos he's off in California...take it!"....and that was it...such a big relief for us. (thanks anisha!)
Getting venues for practice looked like a big issue to start with...well, till Vye and others from the organizing team helped immensely and booked a room in the University for all days till the show.
The biggest issue still was the bass guitarist. The toughest part here was to convince someone to play with us for free as we weren't gonna get paid for this show, and were doing it just for the exposure. Hard to believe, but this bit got finalized only days before the show when Shane agreed to play with us (thanks a ton shane and andrea...and to the "Janmashtami" celebrations organized by the Agarwal's where we actually met up for the first time to sing and to talk about this!). At that point,going only by what people said about Shane's talent, it wasn't surprising that he picked up the songs in only two sessions before the actual show!
So anyways, we decided on doing 4 songs in all...one popular number by Strings called "Ye Hai meri kahani" from the movie Zinda...and 3 of our original compositions, "Tumhari Yaadein", "Suraj Naya" (both performed earlier, liked by many) and a new one called "Jab Se Dekha Use", which now happens to be one of our favourites! can't wait to get a demo recorded...
We kept practising...kept practising...along with our busy schedules at work, etc. till the final weekend. Mudi came down, we practised some more....more sleepless nights, over-stressed vocal chords, lots of gargling, cups of turmeric powder-with-milk (a.k.a Haldi doodh).....till the D-day made its entry...
No comments:
Post a Comment