The 2nd and 3rd photo (from the top) are of producer Elliot Krowe and promoter Venkat Vardhan

Europe in India. 

We made television not rock concerts. 

Well, no one at our shop had ever produced any rock concerts. Except Elliot Krowe. Who led into the most unusual project in Fred/Alan’s history. 

Elliot, a college radio buddy of ours, was on our team. He’d spent his early days (and his post-Fred/Alan career) running the lighting operations of dozens of giant concerts, having started with 70s stalwarts Blue Öyster Cult. 

Alan’s apartment landlord at the South Street Seaport introduced us to Venkat Vardhan, an Indian acquaintance who wanted to promote the first ever rock concert in India. Venkat knew what he wanted the result to be, but other than that, he didn’t even know what he didn’t know. There was no band booked, a vague idea of the location, and… well, not much else. 

Elliot put the entire thing together. Which, trust us, was not a simple affair. He figured out how to book an appropriate act –Europe, a Swedish hard rock band that had recently had a breakout with their album “The Final Countdown"– along with the complicated logistics between North America, the European continent and the Asian continent. To give you an idea what was necessary, to get the sound and lighting support into a country that had never done the kind of show that the group  required, meant flying literal tons of equipment across the frickin’ North Pole! 

After the reconnaissance trips, when the actual concert was booked –coinciding with the 1988 American Thanksgiving holiday– Alan and his girlfriend, and a Chauncey Street documentary crew*, tagged along. Here are some of Elliot’s and Alan’s recollections. 

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Elliot: In September or October 1986, Venkat Vardhan contacted Fred/Alan for help organizing an outdoor rock concert in India. Venkat’s brother Shreepad, studying in Oklahoma, knew Alan’s landlord, who figured our MTV connection might be useful. 

In November 1986, I brought Fred/Alan’s Mark Tomizawa and a small recon team to visit Bombay (now Mumbai) to scout locations and hold meetings. Over the next 18 months, multiple site surveys were conducted, with communication mainly through telex and phone. The initial plan was to hold the concert at the Cricket Club of India, a downtown stadium ideal for the event. Pride India, a charity for housing and healthcare, sponsored the concert, making government approvals easier to secure. 

Negotiating for artists was challenging. India had no prior concerts of this scale, and promoters had a poor reputation for production value and payment issues. After numerous possibilities, confirmations, and cancellations, the band Europe headlined, with Nazareth as the second act and local band Rock Machine as the opener. 

Originally scheduled for October 1988, the show was delayed to November 26 due to issues with Reserve Bank permissions. Scheduling conflicts forced a venue change to a “new” soccer stadium on Bombay’s outskirts. Once all funds were transferred and production equipment flown in, our team arrived two weeks early. 

Wait! What? The venue was disastrous. The stadium was 75% built and abandoned. Grass had been burned down days before, homeless families occupied dressing rooms, and utilities were off. In two frantic weeks, we cleaned the site, turned on water and electricity, and built a bamboo stage, fencing, and barricades.

Coordinating utilities, law enforcement, and concert infrastructure was exhausting with inexperienced local staff. The event was also a crash course in modern concert production and security for everyone involved. 

…..

Alan: My memories of our Fred/Alan trip to bring rock and roll to what is now Mumbai are mostly personal. My presence was largely ceremonial and my duties minimal — to shake hands at a welcoming meeting, and to watch the concert at the rustic, unfinished stadium. 

I remember it was already evening on the day we arrived when we got the idea to go see the field where the concert would be staged. We arrived after dark, and since there were no lights, we saw only an endless expanse of blackness. Somewhere in the distance was the sound of a loud motor. We couldn’t see what it was. As the sound got closer, a tiny red dot became visible. It seemed to just hover in the sky. It wasn’t until it was quite close that we could see it was the glowing end of a cigarette, in the mouth of a man mowing the field in total darkness in the middle of the night.

Our friends at MTV had tossed some money in the till to shoot a promo spot with Europe’s lead singer, so I wrote something and we shot it days later before the concert. All I remember was that he was at a payphone. I don’t think it was very good. I don’t think it ever aired.

I was often startled as we traveled through the city to see no signs of the culture we knew outside of India. Very distant places in the world still have Coca Cola and Levis Jeans. Not what was then Bombay. At least, not on billboards or ads at the newspaper stands. Another sign that to be doing what we were doing with a rock band that had global recognition was extremely noteworthy. 

Without familiar touchstones, we immersed ourselves in the Indian way of life. With a few days off between our project kick-off and the concert, my girlfriend and I had time to explore Jaipur and Udaipur, cities in the Rajasthan with ancient roots. We had made flight and hotel reservations back in the U.S. and everything was set, but we were completely unable to book a flight back from Udaipur to arrive before the concert. We wrote it off as something we’d solve when we were on the ground. 

The flight to Jaipur was hours and hours delayed, and we arrived sometime after 2:00 A.M. A row of taxis were waiting. We snagged one, and our very cheerful driver started on his way. We had heard our trip coincided with the annual Puskar camel fair, and we asked him the best way to the event. He told us it was two-and-a-half hours away, and the best way to get there was for him to drive us. We told him we wanted to see the city first, and he suggested that the best way to do that would be for him to drive us. It seemed that whatever we wanted to do, the best way to do it was for him to drive us. 

The next morning, despite the late check-in, we were down early for breakfast at our hotel, a former palace. We looked across the lawn and there was our driver standing proudly by the car. When we had eaten, he brought us on his personal tour of the city, including stops at some particularly special jewelry and fabric merchants. I’m rather certain one of the ways they were special was that they maintained a special relationship with our driver. 

When we had had our fill of touring, we started on the road to Pushkar. It was a startlingly desolate route. Mostly what we saw was barren earth. Occasionally we would pass a man with his camel. I remember only one establishment where we stopped to eat, and possibly for fuel. I remember our driver wanted no food. 

The camel fair was a feast for the eyes. An annual event, it draws thousands who trade livestock, sell their colorful rugs and other goods, and participate in sporting events. What we didn’t fully understand was that it is also an important pilgrimage site, and that the fair marked the week when religious rituals are observed. Everywhere we looked we saw something new and extraordinary, and when we had seen enough, we found our driver, standing by his car and smiling at us. It was another two-and-a-half hour excursion back, of course. He was cheerful the entire way. 

We had an early flight out to Udaipur. Guess what the best way was to the airport?

The following morning at the airport we paid our driver, tipping him enormously. The entire bill including tip was $60. Funny what you remember. 

Our trip to Udaipur was even more eye-popping. The Lake Palace Hotel was built in 1743 as a summer palace for the Maharana and is cleverly designed to appear as though it rises straight out of the water in the middle of Lake Pichola. It’s easy to describe what you see as you approach by boat, but almost impossible to describe the effect. It is a stunning monument to wealth and opulence. We booked an incredible suite that may have been 4000 square feet. It was on multiple levels. It had wrap-around terraces that seemed the size of basketball courts. The bedroom featured a cloistered bed nook with a ceiling just a few inches above our heads, utterly festooned with erotic paintings. We had definitely gotten on a plane and gone somewhere.

But there was still the pesky issue of getting back. We learned that flights were scarce because of the pilgrimages. This was peak travel season in India. Even our attentive hotel clerk had been unable to secure flight reservations, and recommended getting on the boat and going to the airline office in town where we might have more success.

The airline office was little more than a single room on an upper floor in an office building. We went inside and saw a long line that snaked around and around until it reached a single man at a small desk, an open ledger in front of him and a pencil in his hand. It took quite a while to pull up at the desk but by now we were used to long lines everywhere in India. We told him what we wanted, and he wrote our names and ages in pencil into his ledger. I’ve never understood why they needed our ages. When he was done, he smiled up at us. “Okay,” he said. “You are on the waiting list. Number 43 and 44.” It took a moment for the information to sink in. “This plane has 19 seats, correct?” I asked. Yes, he said. “And we’re number 43 and 44 on the waiting list?” I asked. Yes, he said. ‘So there’s no chance we’re getting on this flight, is there?” “No,” he answered, smiling, “no chance.” 

Back at the hotel, our sympathetic clerk told us the only option was the train from Ahmedabad to Bombay. Ahmedabad was close to four-and-a-half hours away. 

We were on the road early the next day, and at the station spent hours and hours trying to get train tickets. We went from counter to counter. Our names went on list after list. My girlfriend was still suffering from some food poisoning contracted earlier in the week and was not looking well. Finally, the only nice man in the station said to me, “Tell me… are you a Christian man?” I wasn’t sure what the right answer was, so I tentatively answered “Y-y-y-es?” He had spotted the manager of the station and walked us across the floor to meet him. I’m not sure what the clerk told him, but the man whipped out a pencil and without a word signed a form. Suddenly there were train tickets for the all-night train back to Bombay. 

We hadn’t eaten. Nothing at the stalls looked particularly safe. That same nice clerk told us we could buy a meal at the employee cafeteria, so we found that room and ordered. Mine was the curried cauliflower. I remember it because at some point while we were eating, it dawned on me that it was Thanksgiving back home. This was one of the most appreciated Thanksgiving feasts of my life. 

23 years later, I was at Housing Works Bookstore for our twice a year street fair [Alan volunteers there weekly] and this kid Keith – a financial analyst – was there through the morning moving stuff out to the street. He finished up and asked me if we had show tunes that hadn’t come out yet. So I brought him to the sub basement where we always have plenty of show tunes.

He was in heaven grabbing West Side Story and Evita and everything else - maybe 25 albums. Sketches of Spain and some other jazz. He’s telling me about listening to music with his father, who traveled a lot and brought home albums.

I asked where in India, and he said Bombay. I told him I was there when we produced the first rock concert in Bombay. He asked, "Which one?” “Europe,” I told him. “oh my god,” he tells me. “I was there!!!”. He was in seventh grade. He was crying, he told me, because it was the first time in his life his very strict mother let him do anything.

There’s 1.2 billion people in India. I met one we touched.

…..

The documentary footage we shot at the show –never edited, never finished– was posted on YouTube in 2024. There’s a new comment posted on the videos at least every week. 35 years later!

Elliot: 

On November 28, 1988, the concert went surprisingly well. Of course, there were last-minute fixes, but 45,000 attendees enjoyed a great music presentation in a safe, entertaining environment.

*Documentary footage was shot with a team led by cinematogapher John Hazard, some rough edits made, but never finished. The photos here are some funky screenshots from the original VHS tape dubs.