Finally: The Gold Brick has been digitized!

This article follows the journey of Gold Brick into oblivion and back.

My dad was in Bahrain for a few years in the early and mid-80s, and although most of the things he brought back were confiscated by the Indian Customs officers at Bombay's International Airport, all the audio casettes he bought for my mom survived the bribery. I don't know where Munawar Recording Centre (MRC) is (maybe in Dubai), but God bless 'em. They had a huge collection of Hindi stuff - right from Mukesh and Rafi in the 50s to Asha and Kishore in the 80s. Of course we played each and every tape in the 80s on our then-recent double-deck tape recorder (With auto reverse! Beat that!) until an incompetent electrician decided to "fix" it, broke the auto reverse button, and then attempted to stick it back with some flour. Jeez. Things weren't the same again, because right in the middle of a song the tape would start playing a song the other side. Still, that was when I picked up most of my Hindi song knowledge, it was like a vintage Winamp or iPod ("Blast, what is it the kids use these days?" - Stewie Griffin).

We moved to Madras, and other than being addicted to Mukesh for a while ("Meh, making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel" - Bart Simpson), I lost touch with my roots and delved into so-called "Western Music". Though I would make occasional trips into the 80s, those casettes from Munawar Recording Centre occupied a dust-filled cabinet at home. Until, that is, I moved to Bangalore in 1997.

This was where I thought, for the first time since the 80s, that all the Hindi movie crap that I had watched/listened to actually came handy! References to dialogues, scenes and songs were actually useful! In fact, the idea for the Timepass Pages comes from those three years I spent at IISc.

Once on a trip back home, I rummaged through MRC's casette collection and found what I was looking for - a tape innocently titled "Hits of Aasha and Kishore Vol. 4", but then on the cover, instead of the singers' faces, there was a picture of Jeetendra and Sridevi under a tree. It was an instant hit in Bangalore, and I think it was Subroto who dubbed this casette "Gold Brick", because he said it was worth its weight in gold. Ever since then, we refer to this tape as Gold Brick.

Recently, I was in Princeton and managed to grab a hold of Gold Brick, brought it back home, and digitized the songs.

Someday soon, I might even scan the front cover and put it up on this page!

A little more about Gold Brick: This casette contains songs from Jeetendra's Padmalaya flicks, the ones he did that were mostly ripped off from Telegu films. K. Raghavendra Rao owns Padmalaya, I think? These songs were probably penned by Indivar, and the music is all thanks to Bhappida (of course!). It sounds strange that all the songs from Jeetu's Padmalaya era that I know are from a brief span of three years - 1982 to 1984. The movies being referred to here are:

Justice Chaudhri (1982)
Jani Dost (1983)
Mawali (1983)
Himmatwala (1983)
Tohfa (1984)

Justice Chaudhri was definitely ripped off from a Telegu movie. Maqsad, released in 1984-5, can also be counted among the above.

These movies featured the same people - Jeetendra and Sridevi and/or Jaya Prada in the lead, Kader Khan and Shakti Kapoor as villains (The exception being Himmatwala which had Amjad Khan for a change). It also featured the same song sequences - coloured clay pots and zillions of extras. The same kind of meaningless refrain in songs - be it tathaiyya tathaiyya ho, aa aa ooh aa eh eh eh, turu tara oh tara oh tara, mama mia pom pom or an innocent aah ooh, aah ooh.  And since these movies were inspired by Telegu movies, they had to have song lyrics that were double entendres. That and Bhappida's music when mixed with the meaningless noises (remniscent of Jeetu's first great song sequence, "Cuckoo!") results in magaanta that is beyond description, and I will not attempt to even describe it. OK, maybe a little! But it is better if you hear these songs and decide for yourself.

More soon...                                 

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