Rhythm House: The 68-year-old iconic music store in Mumbai is set to fade into memories

The first, somewhat hazy, memory of this 48-year-old who attended (which may not be the right word) a college bang opposite a 68-year-old music shop in the early-’80s is of its ‘listening rooms’. We weren’t potential buyers of any of the vinyl LPs stacked prettily on the shelves, and those booths were essentially for discerning buyers who wanted to listen to an album or three before buying.

The Curmallys of Rhythm House eventually found a simple way of dealing with us daytrippers, who preferred to cut class to put on the headphones. They broke down the listening rooms, and expanded the shop. This was anyway the time when vinyl was making way for cassette tapes, which in a few years would make way for the compact disc.

An Inescapable Call

Music downloads were still years away, and perhaps Rhythm House had its best years post 1991, when its clientele expanded beyond south Bombay cityslickers to the emerging middle class from the suburbs who worked in the city’s commercial districts, a few kilometres from the shop. A longish lunch at any of the restaurants in the Fort area was almost always ritualistically followed up with a visit to the shop, and the purchase of a few CDs. For musically-inclined folk from other cities who dropped into Bombay (it still wasn’t quite Mumbai then), a visit wasn’t complete without the pilgrimage to Rhythm House.

In 1994 — just a year before Bombay became Mumbai — the city, Rang Bhavan (a venue for rock concerts) and Rhythm House had their big music moment. Jethro Tull, fronted by maverick frontman Ian Anderson, was to play in the city, in what would be the first of many concerts, and collaborations, to come.

If the show at Rang Bhavan was a trip come true for the city’s Tull fanatics, meeting up with Anderson at Rhythm House, where he signed cassettes of ‘A Little Light Music’ (if one remembers right) along with bits of Tull memorabilia dragged in by the die-hards was doubtless the highest point.

The Curmallys had their biggest brand ambassador in a long time (although in the past The Police, Pandit Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussain had also visited the store; Rhythm House was as famous for its Hindustani and Carnatic music collections as for the Western genres).

When Anderson was back in what was decidedly Mumbai in 2004, this writer and a photojournalist at Business Today (where we plied our trade) got an opportunity to meet with the legend famous for standing on one leg and playing the flute, Krishna style, and taking off on one of his many raspy, surging solos.

In that interview, the by-then 58-year-old frontman had recognised that the music industry was “under pressure,” and that perhaps explained why he had started touring furiously. “Music downloads aren’t helping young musicians. You have to keep in mind that for every 100 acts, just one will succeed. So by downloading music, you aren’t hurting Mariah Carey, but the 99 other bands that can’t be heard,” Anderson had pontificated, adding that the era of “innocence and naivety” was long gone.

The Curmallys of Rhythm House would have been grimly nodding in agreement with Anderson. By the latter half of the 2000s, the store was beginning to feel the heat from MP3s, downloadable music (legal and illegal), Apple’s music store, subscription-driven services and the latest threat at that time – from organised retailers. Mehmood Curmally, director at Rhythm House, by then had realised that the future of the iconic store was in the hands of the middle-aged music aficionado, who at that time accounted for a little over half of his customer base. “Old Hindi film music, rock albums and music DVDs are what they buy, and I am hopeful that this niche will remain in India,” Curmally had told this writer for a feature he was writing in Business Today.

The Final Countdown

The Curmallys were trying new ways to get a larger share of the wallet of its niche audience. For instance, in 2007 they ordered 50 15-CD sets of the entire Pink Floyd collection, and DVDs of the Beatles’ second feature film Help!, along with which buyers could lay their hands on a 60-page illustrated hard-backed book with rare photographs of the boys from Liverpool. The price: Rs 5,000 a pop. The Curmallys were confident of finding enough takers for something “that can’t be downloaded”.

Rang Bhavan was shut down a little over a decade ago. Earlier this week Mehmood Curmally admitted to Mumbaibased tabloid Mid-day that “we have been considering closure,” although he didn’t confirm it. If he does put up the shutters, one wishes that, before that day dawns, one could enter the ‘listening room’ once again and listen to Jim Morrison wail. “This is the end, beautiful friend/This is the end, my only friend, the end/Of our elaborate plans, the end/Of everything that stands, the end…”