must be hormonal reactions, cause i feel the urge to get mushy for a bit...


A TRIBUTE TO THE ROLLING STONE.

I still remember that day when I was eight, sitting on the bed struggling with my long division homework when my father came into my room with two cassete tapes he had just bought. One was by the Rolling Stones and the other by Eric Burdon's The Animals. Both bands were part of the famous British Invasion of the 60s and 70s which saw a host of Brit musicians taking the music world by storm. The Stones were, and still are, the archetypal Rock band while The Animals were part of the 60s psychedelic counter-culture music revolution.

"Have you heard of them?" he asked earnestly.

"Like every eight year old should already have the pleasure of?" I thought to myself.

I told him no. For heaven's sake, I was still at an age where I was playing with action figurines. Still occassionaly peeing in my pants. Crying every morning at the thought of going to school. I probably had ten friends in the world, at most; and that is a generous estimate. How on God's earth would I have heard of the Stones and the Animals?

After wiping off the bemused look on his face at the thought of a spawn of his never having heard of the Stones, he proceeded to play their tape on the cassete deck. I remember having my mind blown away by the Stones' music. The first track on the cassete was the Stones' classic "Paint it Black". These guys were singing about having no colours in the world and painting everything black. For an eight year old, that was the coolest thing you could ever hope to hear! Yes. I had a very early exposure to evil and darkness.

I remember having a watershed moment then. The longer the tape rolled on, the more I felt cheated by those old coots at school who only exposed me to the likes of Cliff Richard and Tom Jones during music lessons. Blimey! There was more to music and culture than I have thus far seen! My father just sat there by the speakers singing and wailing along to all the songs and giving me brief run throughs of the historical and lyrical significance of almost every track that played. I remember sitting there in awe raving to myself at my father's brilliance. I know that I was still at a very impressionable and naive age then, but the man was spewing metaphysical narratives about an Animals song called "Little Red Rooster", for cryin out loud!

Most men would point to puberty as the turning point in their childhood life, where they stopped being boys and started bracing themselves for manhood. I pinpoint my turning point to that moment in my room. And I thank my father for having the sense to expose me to this explosive world of counter-culture music at such an early age. To be honest, I was already getting a little sick of singing those kookabara-type songs they were stuffing into our heads in school. These songs rot your mind to a stand still and make your guts turn inside out and in again.

But then again, as cliched as it may sound (hey, I don't give two tosses, frankly), I have always noticed that my dad was different from everyone else's. This was the man who stood at one corner laughing and watching as my then 6 year old big brother made funny faces and spanked his own backside in front of a school Prefect after the latter told him to stop playing by the drain. Dad was not one to teach us to be rowdy trouble makers just for the sake of busting people's balls off. But while he preached meekness and respect, he also taught us not to be a dumbass and follow authority just because everyone else was doing it. Enquiry of the norms was his way.

A taxi driver by profession, I remember him taking my brother and I along to work just to show us the value of earning money for a living. He'd make us sit quietly in the cab, my brother in the front seat and myself sprawled at the back. I couldn't have been older than four then. Dad would go along with his normal routine and pick up passengers, though usually just the solo ones since my brother and I were already taking up space in the cab. Everyone of these poor passengers must have had a traumatic ride, because my brother and I would just sit still silently and give each of them these up-and-down probing looks. If their ride lasted for half an hour, then it was half an hour of that shit. Poor souls.

Dad would also sit with us at the dinner table and hold fascinating discussions on topics that ran the gamut from theology to politics to music and culture. Not a big deal, 'cept for the fact that it started when we were both toddlers. As you can probably conjecture by now, we weren't too interested in his lectures. We'd sooner be watching "Fraggle Rock" which would usually be showing on TV while daddy's lectures were going on. His point in the exercise was to promote a spirit of intellectual enquiry from a young age. I would go through life encountering stuff he used to tell me when I was younger and smile to myself in reminisce. An example is a theory he once related to us when we were kids, about the origins of the word "asassin". Accordingly, based on his account, the word was derived from the Persian "hashishi" (hashish) after the practice of a warlord in pre-modern Persia who would reward his hit men with hash for killing members of the Persian royalty. At that time, I thought that he was just full of bull. Not after I read the exact account in the papers in recent years, though.

The old man is hitting sixty these days. He still drives a cab by night. His hair is thinning and one of his front teeth just dropped off. Funny how an old photo I found of him during his younger days springs to mind at this point, an image that has been casted permanently in my head. That image of a long-haired Javanese hippy decked in bell bottoms and a tye dye t-shirt, holding a fag with his left hand and a hot chick with his right (my mother, of course) will always linger in my mind.


To the man whose name I'll carry till the day I die - thank you.



... and the Stones still rule.