Finding Franklin

Every few months, I go on a Franklin's Tower listening binge. And since there are so many good versions of this song, I thought I'd try to list down some of the best.


Studio version
First time I heard this, I was stoned, nice and mellow, in Mapper's room. Blues for Allah was playing - and the cassette was slipped in when the first chew was being made. Most of Help/Slip was spent doing justice to the smokes, and by the time Franklin's came on, I was uniquely - receptive, shall we say?

Live

September 1, 1979, Holleder Memorial Stadium, Rochester
For a long time after I left IIM, I wasn't listening to much music. The internet was fantastic, but it was a time of discovery of other sites - and most of my time was spent using Altavista's image search and waiting for the photo features from Danni's hard drive to load. Then, one day, I attended one of those informal quizzes.  The guy conducting it played Terrapin station and made a reference to Leigh Hunt and asked for a connection. The only thing  I knew about Hunt was "Lo, Abou Ben Adhem's name led all the rest" And I didn't get any points for the Terrapin identification, because the whole Lady with a Fan segment was linked to Hunt's "The Glove and the Lion". Anyway, I went home, fired up my modem and went looking. This was in the pre-wikipedia days - even pre-google, where directories like Hotbot and Yahoo reigned supreme. Anyway, from there, I discovered that there were a number of sites that allowed you to download songs and sets - and one of them was GDLive.com. I'm not even sure if this is the version I downloaded - over several days and failed attempts - but I remember it was a concert from the seventies and that it was in Rochester. Anyway, here's this one, with a very satisfying mellow tightness to it.

March 30, 1990, Nassau Coliseum (Without a net version)

Another one from BITS. Here it's Brent Mydland's keyboards as much as Jerry's guitar that make the song. I really liked Without a net - and it was one of the first CDs I bought, trying to replicate the feel of listening to it one night in Pilani, sitting on the steps outside Macho's room in Mal - the last in the Pi wing. The notes would cascade out, complementing the light from a lone 40 watt lamp, the conversation would ebb and flow as we would look at the enchanter's cloak of the sky, velvety blue-black and spangled with stars like tiny silver sequins and let the music wash over us, washing us clean of the doubts and insecurities of young adulthood - for a little while, at least.

May 9, 1977, War Memorial, Buffalo

This one's a relatively recent discovery. No R & D done. This was when I had just started going to the gym - and I needed music to stop me from thinking how completely unfit I was - whether it was on the crosstrainer or the treadmill or wherever. I had a bar of fruitellas to keep the saliva in mouth and an IPod to stop me hearing myself pant. The in-gym music was mostly hip-hop - Akon's Right Now and Yankee Daddy's Gasolina and  a song which I always heard as "In the moonlight, all over India, We are the boss". It was a weird collection. To tune this out, I had Everybody wants to rule the world, a lot of OMD, Cale, Springsteen, Atho antha paravai, the Choral and other stuff. I also had this concert from 1977 - since it had a number of my favourite songs - Tennessee Jed, Big River, The Music Never Stopped, Bertha, Not Fade Away etc. But the Franklin's was always one of my favourites. I also knew exactly how long it was - and would measure how much breath I had left based on where I was in the song. Oh - and the bit at 5:11 was one of my favourites.

June 9, 1997, Winterland Arena
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner". In 1993-4, I was in IIM C and Kozhandai was in XL. He visited - either for some cultural thing - or just chumma. He brought with him a casette - it was, I think one of the green Meltrack C-90 tapes. On one side was the Jerry Garcia Band. On the other was this - Winterland 6 9 77. The whole thing just blew me away. Even with the cassette hiss and crackles, I knew I was listening to something special. Deal. The Music Never Stopped.  Estimated Prophet leading into St Stephen into Not Fade Away (fantastic) into Drums and back again into St Stephen. But the highlight was the fantastic Help/Slip/Franklin - especially with the high intensity ending and the orgasmic riff after "If you get confused, let the music play". I spent a long time trying to track it down - and when I did, it was every bit as good as when I heard first heard it.
Anyway - this is it. My favourite. And thanks, Ramki Muthukrishnan

And here's the whole concert

There are others, of course. Pembroke pines, off one of the early Dick's Picks

And this fantastic one from 1976, Alameida County Coliseum, the entire set is a thing of beauty.

On the Diablo hamster wheel

Just finished playing Reaper of Souls. So when I say "finished", I mean I finished the campaign as a Crusader - the new class that's part of the Diablo expansion, went into adventure mode, finished all the bounty missions for each act once and visited 5 Rifts.
Oh. I got through all this on expert difficulty.

For those who don't know much about Diablo - which is practically everybody I know, apart from two of my nephews - When you start playing the game, you can choose one of three difficulties. Normal, Hard and Expert. The you unlock the "Master" difficulty. Then, you are probably ready to play the game. Because after Master come the real difficulty spikes - levels Torment 1 to 6.

So expert difficulty is as kind of a misnomer. It stands for "at this level of difficulty, you probably know which buttons to press when, but you still haven't figured out which skill combinations do the most damage. Your gear is probably terrible, just a bit higher than 'disastrous' and 'abysmal'"


The game is divided into acts - the core game has 4, and the Reaper of Souls expansion adds a fifth.

 

I'm just throwing this in because of the sheer ridiculous amounts of awesome involved

The story is - well - there are demons, there are seven great evils, five of whom you already killed off in the previous game, and you take care of the two that remain, here. But due to a P2C2E, the titular baddie - who was killed once in the original Diablo and once again in Diablo 2 comes back and gets killed again. To get to him, you cut your way through hordes of monsters, elite monsters, unique and super unique monsters with a bunch of capabilities that range from the irritating to the deadly.
The demons, unsurprisingly, take their names from the usual sources. Since they kicked off the franchise by calling it Diablo - which is again a Spasnishification of the devil and comes from Diabolos - which is greek for The Daily Mail - sorry, its greek for slanderer, they're pretty much stuck with that. But the usual suspects are there from the Talmud - Lilith, Duriel - which is supposed to be Hebrew for "God is my home", Azmodal, Baal, Belial from the Lemegeton and Mephisto - either from Faust or from the 8th circle of D & D hell. And there are the angels - who either follow the "el" naming convention - Malthael, Tyrael, Auriel, Itharael or the Harry Potter curse convention - Imperius, Inarius, Cruciatus - oh wait - that one isn't there, so far.

But angels and demons are an aside. The original game defined the hack and slash genre, and since I'm playing this on the xbox, its now a button-mashfest.  You select a monster with the left trigger, and keep clicking 'A' to damage it. If you're feeling particularly adventurous, you can click 'Y', 'X' and 'B'. And squeeze right trigger while you're at it. And there are lots of monsters. Lots and lots of monsters.

Some mobs are even bigger - but thats how it looks. You can't even see your character

The key thing about the game, the thing that ensures your survival, is gear.
You have weapons and you have armour. Weapons and armour come in multiple categories. There's the normal stuff - which has one attribute: Armour for - well - armour, damage for weapons.

Then you have the magic items, in prefixed or suffixed, in blue text.

After that comes the rare stuff. The text is in yellow, there are more magical properties.

And then there's the stuff that you grind for. The stuff that you spend hours and hours on, killing the same monsters over and over again, hoping to see an orange spire of light rising from the ground, hoping to see an orange star on the minimap. That's a legendary. The legendary item is usually just a little better than the rare gear you have, but once in a while you get a beauty.

So, I found this sword - it was level 70 when I found it, and did around 2400 damage. But that wasn't the great thing about it. The killer was the "Chance to summon a demonic slave". Not only does the demonic slave pop up every now now, but he is linked to you by CHAINS OF FIRE, and those chains do massive damage. So you get your enemy - or mob between your demonic slave and yourself, and watch the chains BURN through your foes. With this, I was able to graduate from killing wimpy zombies on normal to Rift Guardians (really bad bosses) on Torment.

But the bosses are incidental. The storyline is incidental. Its about gear. Grinding for gear. Hoping that the next piece of equipment will be better than the one that you have. Raising the difficulty, fighting bosses, entering rifts and hoping you'll see that star on your minimap. It's the distillation of consumerism, it's the addiction reflex, and I've been playing the game more or less non stop for the last couple of weeks.

Facebook 10 books thing

OK. Facebook trend 10 book thing

The Enchanted Wood, Enid Blyton

Seetha got me the 1971 edition with the green cover when I was 6. I was enchanted. Jo, Bessie and Fanny discover the wood, meet the angry pixie and Dame Washalot, Moonface and Silky, the Saucepan Man and Mr Watzisname (Kollamoolitumarellipawkyrollo – I even remember his name) and climb to the top of the Faraway Tree. Dame Slap’s school, Silky’s clock, the Red Goblins and the Land of Birthdays – Hooray!

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

After reading the Hardy Boys from The Tower Treasure to The Firebird Rocket (with the exception of No 16 – A Figure in Hiding) and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators (Up to The Mystery of the Magic Circle) I was looking around for another series.My cousin suggested Sherlock Holmes. I found the A Scandal in Bohemia very ho hum – there was no villain, there was very little in the way of action – but the next story was The Adventure of the Red-Headed League. Jabez Wilson, “It’s no use John Clay”. Ears pierced for earrings. “To look at the knees of his trousers”. By the time I hit The Speckled Band, I was hooked.

The Corfu Trilogy, Gerald Durrell

Seetha used to get a magazine called Finding Out. It was a Brit magazine, and appa must have got it for her. Sometimes, it would carry book extracts. One such was this. One day, Seetha came back from the British Council with My Family and Other Animals. I said “Oh. Gerald Durrell,” very knowledgeably. She asked how I knew who Durrell was. I said “He’s a commentator for the BBC”. She started laughing, and kept laughing until I showed her the copy of the Durrell story. She told me I should read My Family and I did. And all the others as well.

The Guns of Navarone, Alistair Maclean

“The match scratched noisily across the rusted metal of the corrugated iron shed, fizzled, the burst into a sputtering pool of light, the harsh sound and sudden brilliance alike strangely alien in the stillness of the desert night.” As a first line, this must rank up there with “It was a dark and stormy night, the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind…” But I didn’t care. Mallory, Miller, Andrea, Casey Brown, Louki and Panayis and poor doomed Andy Stevens, unafraid at last. I read it through the night, took it to school the next morning and finished it.

Salem's Lot, Stephen King,

I wasn’t a big fan of horror. I read King to fit in. That was until I finished the second chapter of Salem’s Lot – before the chills really kicked in. What pulled me in was Susan Norton’s mother. Mothers were either ignored – or reasonable authority figures – in most of the books I’d read so far, but Susan’s mother was petty, occasionally spiteful – and so goddamn real. Then there was the line about a father meeting his daughter’s boyfriend “a man who dangled his daughter’s potential defloration between his legs”. Then little Danny Glick comes back. Barlow ages in reverse. And anyone can die – and does.

Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett

“I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.” The Continental Op, Ladies and Gentlemen. Accept no substitutes

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

I woke up at around 11. I had a packet of Charms and half a T of smokes. I made some js and went down to Sky. For the rest of that golden day, I stayed there, surviving off chai and joints, and giggling helplessly to myself on the lawns. People came and went. Groups gathered and disbanded, but I was deep in the Heart of Gold, bistromathics, Infinite Improbabilty Drives, Frogstar fighters, Magrathea, Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts, Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters, descendents of Genghiz Khan, the deaths of Agrajag and Wowbagger the infinitely prolonged. That day, everything else was an SEP

Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

This one is easy - I have at least four copies of this book, all in various stages of disrepair caused by constant reading. It's also tough because I'm using this in the place of Night Watch, Reaper Man, Moving Pictures, Soul Music, Neverwhere, Stardust, The Graveyard Book, American Gods, Ocean - in fact, most of the books by both pterry and Gaiman. But still, you have Aziraphale and Crowley and one of the best descriptions of eternity ever

“I mean, d'you know what eternity is? There's this big mountain, see, a mile high, at the end of the universe, and once every thousand years there's this little bird-"

"What little bird?" said Aziraphale suspiciously.

"This little bird I'm talking about. And every thousand years-"

"The same bird every thousand years?"

Crowley hesitated. "Yeah," he said.

"Bloody ancient bird, then."

"Okay. And every thousand years this bird flies-"

"-limps-"

"-flies all the way to this mountain and sharpens its beak-"

"Hold on. You can't do that. Between here and the end of the universe there's loads of-" The angel waved a hand expansively, if a little unsteadily. "Loads of buggerall, dear boy."

"But it gets there anyway," Crowley persevered.

"How?"

"It doesn't matter!"

"It could use a space ship," said the angel.

Crowley subsided a bit. "Yeah," he said. "If you like. Anyway, this bird-"

"Only it is the end of the universe we're talking about," said Aziraphale. "So it'd have to be one of those space ships where your descendants are the ones who get out at the other end. You have to tell your descendants, you say, When you get to the Mountain, you've got to-" He hesitated. "What have
they got to do?"

"Sharpen its beak on the mountain," said Crowley. "And then it flies back-"

"-in the space ship-"

"And after a thousand years it goes and does it all again," said Crowley quickly.
There was a moment of drunken silence.

"Seems a lot of effort just to sharpen a beak," mused Aziraphale.

"Listen," said Crowley urgently, "the point is that when the bird has worn the mountain down to nothing, right, then-"

Aziraphale opened his mouth. Crowley just knew he was going to make some point about the relative hardness of birds' beaks and granite mountains, and plunged on quickly.

"-then you still won't have finished watching The Sound of Music."

Aziraphale froze.

"And you'll enjoy it," Crowley said relentlessly. "You really will."

"My dear boy-"

"You won't have a choice."

"Listen-"

"Heaven has no taste."

The True Believer, Eric Hoffer

The only non-fiction on this list. It may not be fashionable to read Hoffer anymore, and there will be critics who say that most of his stuff is anecdotal, not scientifically proved by carefully selected statistically significant samples, and is more truthiness than truth. But as far as I'm concerned, Hoffer was fucking amazing when it comes to hitting it out of the park. Eg: "The less justifed a man is in claiming excellence for his own self,The less justifed a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause." or "A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is a threat to the worker's sense of worth. Any social order…which can function well with a minimum of leadership will be an anathema to the intellectual."

---

That's the trouble with lists. You have to leave so many things out. No Sam the Sudden or Right Ho Jeeves or Spring Fever, no LA Confidential or The Big Nowhere or White Jazz. No Big Sleep or Farewell My Lovely. No Storm of Swords  or Game of Thrones. No Pickwick Papers or Alice in Wonderland or The Four Just Men or The Saint or The Dark Knight Rises or Watchmen or V for Vendetta or Pride and Prejudice or The Razors Edge or Tintin or Asterix or The Toff or On Her Majesty's Secret Service or Goldfinger or Casino Royale or Captain Blood or Some Buried Caesar or And Then There Were None or Roger Ackroyd or Little Women or Jennings or William or Karamazov or ....

Heart

I'm dying. We're all dying, and I think I'm just doing it a little bit faster. There's this tickle in my chest, a familiar and unwelcome feeling.  I had a bypass three years back. But it looks the problem it was meant to fix hasn't gone away.
It's like being in a car where the brakes don't work and the accelerator is stuck. The tank is full and the road is twisty and you just hope you can hold on before things go boom.

Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and Me

Pocahontas has always been one of my favourite Neil Young songs. But when Johnny Cash sings it, it gets so much better.