From bringing out India’s first magazine dedicated to rock music to creating a platform for original compositions through his music festivals, Amit Saigal was the face of rock music in India. Vinay Aravind traces the journey of this visionary who came to be known as “Papa Rock”.
Rock music in India lost its stalwart and reigning patriarch, Amit Saigal, 46, on January 5 in an accident in Goa. In a land where the only kinds of stars are actors and cricketers, Saigal was perhaps India’s first certified rock star. Sometime-musician, founder and editor of RSJ (Rock Street Journal), organiser of the Great Indian Rock festival, the Pub Rock Fest series of concerts, and most recently the India Music Week, Saigal’s untimely death has left a void in the Indian independent music industry.
The journey started in 1993 in the unlikeliest of places, Allahabad. Twenty eight-year old Saigal had decided that he would start a magazine about rock music in India. In 2012, with the ubiquity of the Internet and amidst India’s burgeoning consumer market, where publications like Rolling Stone and Blender have Indian editions, it may be difficult to understand the sheer audacity of a plan like that. This was two years after India cautiously and grudgingly opened its markets to the world; before cell phones and personal computers were commonplace; before Coca-Cola and Kit-Kat were available in Indian stores; and a full decade before VH1 made its appearance on Indian TV. Saigal wrote, edited, and created the first edition of RSJ, and printed 2,500 copies of it at his family’s printing press in Allahabad.
The challenge then was distribution. So Saigal, and his then wife, Shena, took the magazine to college festivals in Delhi. They sent bundles of copies to musician friends around the country for free, asking them to do with it as they pleased. An informal distribution mechanism evolved, and then gradually, in the most improbable manner, this little publication started to gain a following among fans of rock music in India, from the North East to Kerala. Looking back, the content could be most generously described as ordinary, the production was cheap, and photo captions were always an unfunny joke, but to a population that had no access to any information about its favourite rock bands, RSJ was an absolute thrill.
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Saigal took his next big step in 1997 when he conceived and organised the first edition of the Great Indian Rock festival (GIR). Unlike the Independence Rock festival in Mumbai (which was at the time the only rock music event of note outside of colleges), GIR was unique because Saigal invited bands to send in recordings of their original music; songs by the selected bands were then included in a compilation album that was distributed along with the magazine. The bands were then brought to Delhi with the help of generous corporate sponsorship, yet another first in the Indian rock arena, to perform at the Hamsadhwani Auditorium in Pragati Maidan.
Before GIR, apart from stray efforts by bands like Rock Machine (later renamed Indus Creed) and 13 AD, there was little or no original Indian rock music available in recorded format. Most Indian bands focused on nailing cover versions of the classics, and the odd original composition would be apologetically slipped into their concert setlist sandwiched between Fool For Your Lovin and Smoke on the Water. With GIR, all of a sudden, Orangestreet from Delhi and Moksha from Chennai found an audience around the country for their original music.
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“There was nothing before GIR, nothing that actively encouraged Indian bands to compose original music and give them a platform where their music would be recognised around the country,” says Bruce Lee Mani of Bangalore veterans Thermal And A Quarter, which has, since its GIR debut in 1999, gone on to record and release four full-length albums and a number of singles.
GIR grew in size and impact year on year, and the quality of the recordings on the compilation improved from truly terrible to eminently listenable. The festival itself became a platform for international legends like Shawn Lane and Jonas Hellborg to play in India, and for Indian bands like No Idea and Orangestreet to get the opportunity to play at festivals in Europe and the United States, all of which was unprecedented at the time.
Saigal was not content with setting up one iconic franchise. In 2006, he proceeded to launch the Pub Rock Fest. As Jayashree Singh of Kolkata-based band Skinny Alley puts it, “After the 60s and the 70s, the culture of bands playing in pubs had almost entirely disappeared. The Pub Rock Fest changed all that.” Saigal took a vast array of bands of various genres and set up concerts in pubs around the country, not just in metropolitan centres but even in Tier II cities like Nagpur and Indore. What was until then a somewhat disorganised scene, finally had corporate sponsorship and a solid platform.
Saigal’s recent creation was India Music Week, a three-city series of concerts and conferences across multiple venues, where independent musicians from across the country had the opportunity to not just perform but to gather, network and discuss their lot with fans, like-minded people and professionals. The first run of India Music Week in 2011 was lauded almost universally as a success.
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In the course of all this, the magazine itself withered away, unable to command attention from Saigal who was involved with his concerts and festivals, and unable to compete on equal terms with wealthier and better-produced rivals. Although you will occasionally see an issue of the magazine on the new-stands, it is no longer being produced regularly. It would appear that Saigal realised that he could contribute more through his events than he could through the magazine; the legacy of festivals he has created and the bands that he has helped promote stands testimony to that. Sid Menon, a former employee of RSJ, says, “Rob Zombie said that every great riff has already been written by Black Sabbath; similarly I’d say that every music festival you see in India has already been thought of and created by Saigal.”
Apart from his contributions as an editor and an organiser of events, Saigal, referred to affectionately as “Papa Rock”, was loved by the community of Indian musicians. Rudy Wallang of Shillong-based blues-rock outfit Soulmate says, “He was a warm, generous soul who truly lived the rock-and-roll life.” Adds Singh, “His home was always open to us. It was an incredible home; it had this elastic quality where there was enough room and food, whether there were five people or 15.”
Like anyone who courted success so publicly, Saigal was not without his share of controversy. Whether it is about how he treated the bands that played at GIR, controversies about payments to bands and artists, or simply the personality clashes with promoters, it would be impossible to claim that Saigal was universally loved. But even his detractors do not hesitate to acknowledge Saigal’s vision, his sheer sense of daring, and the fact that much of what we now recognise as the Indian independent music scene owes its origins to one of Saigal’s ventures. Irrespective of how RSJ fares in the future, Saigal’s legacy as the “father of Indian rock” is secure.
