What Author Ajay Mankotia Learnt From a Lifetime of Chasing Rock ’n’ Roll

Ajay Mankotia is the kind of rock fan who buys concert tickets six months in advance, shows up four hours early, and, when that still isn’t enough, walks around to the rear entrance and asks a film director for a music test to grant better viewing access.

His new book Not Just Rock ‘n’ Roll makes it abundantly clear that the obsession has yielded dividends that most can only dream of, employing a similar narrative flow as his 2003 book Bollywood Odyssey: The Singing Taxman’s Journey Into Film Music, which covered Hindi film music.

The book — a first-person deep dive into the history and music of several of rock’s most influential acts — is the culmination of a decades-long project that began, as Mankotia tells it, almost by accident. “I heard my first international song when I was four or five years old in Calcutta,” the former Income Tax commissioner-turned-author says. “It was ‘Ya Mustafa‘ by Bob Azzam. My father had got this gramophone record-changer, and this is the first record we had. I was very fascinated by the amalgam of French and Spanish and Arab lyrics in the song.” His father, an Air Force officer, subsequently returned from a U.S. training program bearing albums by the Beach Boys, setting Mankotia up for an introduction to rock and roll.

Not Just Rock ’n’ Roll comes across as both a biography of a diehard, longtime music fan through the pre-digital era and a journal of stories from backstage at concerts, along with a bit of commentary on prevalent trends. The research for the book is more anecdotal and experience-driven than something gleaning info from biographies and documentaries. He describes an upbringing marinated in music — his mother was a singer at All India Radio, and his uncle was a music composer at the same institution — which gave him both an early facility with sound and an understanding that music was something to be analyzed. By his college years, he was tracking down import records, borrowing albums from batchmates whose fathers had returned from abroad, and developing what he calls a “real fascination” for progressive rock in particular: Jethro Tull, Uriah Heep, Yes, King Crimson and Genesis, among others.

“I never listened to music in the background. I give it complete respect. I listen from the first to the last song. Every chord, every bassline, every hidden sound.” Outside of collecting records, Mankotia spent years attending concerts.

The process of compiling the book meant drawing together decades of articles he had written for various publications, photographs he had accumulated, and interactions he had carefully preserved in memory. “I started writing articles about all these bands for various publications, with photographs. And then finally I thought of bringing all these articles under one roof — my take on the bands, my analysis of the music, certain nuggets of information not widely known, the photographs, and some of the Indian connections.”

What became clear in writing the book, he says, was how much he’d had to leave out. Many of his actual conversations with musicians were simply too detailed and too long to include in full. “I haven’t been able to write the entire talk that I had with them, because then it would have been a very, very long-minded kind of discussion,” he admits.

He describes sitting with Robert Plant and Jimmy Page and going deep into “Stairway to Heaven” — the meaning of the lyrics, how the opening riff developed, how the structure moves from delicacy to enormity and back again. “They would indulge me… They knew they had come across a great fan, so they were very patient and explained it,” he says.

Back in Versailles in 1988, Mankotia was in Paris on a government scholarship and had bought a ticket for Pink Floyd’s concert at the Château de Versailles months in advance, stretching his budget to its absolute limit. He arrived four hours early but ultimately found the forecourt was already packed. “I said, this is not the way I see it. I paid so much money, and I’m not such an indifferent kind of fan who would see it from such a distance,” he recalls.

So he and a friend walked around to the rear entrance — the one reserved for band members, crew, and technicians — and encountered an unnamed film director of the band’s concert. Mankotia explained how they had come from India, they were the biggest possible fans, and they needed a proper vantage. The director’s response was quite surreal. He told them to come back after he’d had a bath. He cycled off to his hotel. They jogged alongside.

“He gave us a Pink Floyd test, which we maxed,” Mankotia says. The reward was two film crew passes hung around their necks (whose scans we see in the book). They were escorted through the rear entrance, placed in the middle of the front row, and after the spectacular show, they went backstage, had dinner and drinks with the band, and Mankotia had a long conversation with David Gilmour.

The Jethro Tull connection followed a similar logic, if a slightly different route. Before a Tull show in Paris, Mankotia got talking to a crew member while waiting outside hours before the doors opened. He began throwing out facts about the band — including mentioning a collaboration album between Ian Anderson and the London Philharmonic Orchestra that the crew member had never heard of. The man checked, confirmed the album existed, and was sufficiently impressed to hand Mankotia a backstage pass. “I spent such a long time with Ian Anderson, and that was the first time I met him.” It would not be the last. Anderson even contributed a testimonial for Not Just Rock ‘n’  Roll — an endorsement Mankotia describes, without any apparent exaggeration, as the biggest honor he could have imagined.

Mankotia is clear that this era of artist and fan interactions is over. “What’s happened now is like airports — security at every step,” he says. “There’s no way you could meet Coldplay or U2 or Taylor Swift when they come to India. No question.” He contrasts this with the days he met Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones when they came to Bombay in 2003, or Deep Purple. “Those were more days of innocence. There was not so much security, and one could, through the good offices of the organizers and sponsors, meet them. But mostly I’ve met them due to my own initiative.”

That shift is why a book like this matters. The conversations he had with Plant and Page, with Gilmour, with Anderson, with Brian May (which came from speaking to the Queen guitarist’s chauffeur about Freddie Mercury’s Indian lineage) and Rick Wakeman (from Yes, at a show in 2003 in Croydon) and more — these are irreproducible now.

Building his collection followed the same relentlessness. He describes walking into HMV on Oxford Street in London and buying the entire Frank Zappa catalog in one go. “The guy at the counter was shocked. He said he’d never seen someone pick up an artist’s entire catalog — and that too of Frank Zappa, the most niche artist you can think of.” For Manfred Mann, whose records were hard to find even abroad, he worked through Amazon. For Neil Young, whose prolific output demanded constant attention, he maintained a regular purchasing habit. The goal throughout was completeness — to understand not just the hits but the whole arc of a body of work.

After running through all his international sojourns, Mankotia also makes it a point to add a brief history on the Indian music scene that’s thrived outside the confines of Bollywood. “I heard a band play English music live for the first time in Chandigarh in the late 1960s. I was 12 years old. My father was posted there as an Air Force Squadron Commander,” he writes in the book. The band was called The Shockin’ Blues, covering everything from the Rolling Stones to Elvis at social gatherings.

Mankotia layers his personal experiences with commentary, from attending gigs at New Delhi’s Pragati Maidan to becoming a DJ at the Cellar discotheque in the late 1970s, and reflecting on discovering artists like Susmit Bose, Indus Creed, and Parikrama, all the way to singer-songwriters like Prateek Kuhad and Akshay Chowdhury.

The result is a book that is a memoir, musicology, and an archival project all rolled into one. The personal experience and the analytical intelligence are presented side by side in a conversational tone. Whether or not you share his reverence for the canon he covers, Not Just Rock ‘n’ Roll is the product of a life spent listening with unusual intentionality — and going to unusual lengths to understand what he was hearing.