The room, a cavernous sarkari convention centre hall with fluorescent lights, did not promise much. There was a bar set up on one end and a band playing at the other. The Shillong Cherry Blossom Literary Festival was hosting one of its dinners there. It did not make for the most exciting of settings but after two years of pandemic, human company and wine were welcome.
As I was about to leave after dinner, the band announced a surprise guest. Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma had been hanging out in a corner unbeknownst to most of us. Now, he wanted to jam. 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’. It was a curious choice of a song for a Chief Minister but he looked like he was having a good time.
And then for an encore, he launched into ‘Summer of 69’.
Second flush
‘Jana Gana Mana’ might be our national anthem, but ‘Summer of 69’ is no less an anthem in parts of the nation. A BBC reporter friend in Kolkata first drew my attention to it. “What’s with Indians and ‘Summer of 69’?” he asked.
It’s not like we grew up with many of the cultural markers in the song — five-and-dime stores or drive-ins. In most of India, if anyone sang “That summer seemed to last forever,” it prompted more dread than dewy nostalgia.
Yet, the song somehow burrowed its way into our psyche. 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”. ‘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.
Bona fide miracles
Other songs fit into the same classic bracket — ‘Hotel California’, ‘Another Brick in the Wall’. But Bryan Adams kept coming back to India, rekindling the fire. 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.”
In 2018, Adams, then aged 58, was touring India for the fifth time. Cheapest tickets were about ₹2,000. The online portal Scroll.in points out that his 2010 album Bare Bones was a hit in India and a dud most everywhere else. 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.
We’ve added Bhangra dhol beats to it and Manipal University reworked it into a school anthem with some Hindi lyrics thrown in. The song has worked bona fide miracles. 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. “Five days it was only ‘Summer of 69’ and nothing else,” he said. Then, he smashed an amazing 241 not out.
Adams probably didn’t realise it but when he sang about the “young and restless”, it made the youngsters of pre-liberalisation India think he was singing just to them. Adams has said he chose the title “because of the sexual position” but the song itself sounded clean-cut enough to pass parental scrutiny while allowing the young people singing along to feel slightly naughty. And it remains a paean to a simpler world before MTV and VJs exploded on the scene and we started feeling slightly embarrassed about the things we once considered cool.
As Sangma got off the stage, I asked why he chose that song. “I didn’t,” he laughed. “They made me sing it. I don’t know why it’s still so popular.”
But, perhaps, it’s not such a mystery. Once, its posture of teenaged rebellion with a six-string made us feel cool. Now, we sing along because it strums up nostalgia for teenage crushes, that band with the “guys from school” that never got far, sex jokes, and most importantly, the “best days of my life”. In short, it has become the perfect ballad for the middle-aged school alumni WhatsApp group.
The song tells us “nothing can last forever”, but ‘Summer of 69’ has come close.
Sandip Roy , the author of Don’t Let Him Know , likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.