Ray of Might

She’s known for her wail of a voice and for the most effective incorporation of a harmonium into a rock band since”¦ well, ever. And today, on the seventeenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, she and The Voice and some band-buddies are getting ready to perform at First Avenue in Minneapolis.

It is a venue of warehouse-dimensions that’s been around since 1937. The building used to be a Greyhound bus station back then, but has since been re-imagined and re-purposed several times emerging eventually as a keystone of the music scene in the American Midwest.

First Avenue is a first stop for regional musicians on the verge of making it big. The Replacements, Soul Asylum and Prince all performed here early in their careers (the venue also makes an appearance in Prince’s film Purple Rain). On their first US tour, U2 is said to have written much of the album October during an extended sound-check at the club.

But tonight, it is Shilpa Ray and her Happy Hookers who have taken the main stage, opening for the Japanese psychedelic band Acid Mothers Temple. Ray is based in New York, where she holds down three jobs, working as a salesgirl and a doorgirl by day (“I love it,” she insists), and gigging by night. She and the Hookers have travelled here in promotion of their second album, Teenage and Torture, recorded at a studio (Seizure’s Palace) in Brooklyn.

The album is both punkish and bluesy, and on it you’ll find tracks about hookers and druggies and women with sexually transmitted diseases. Then there’s ”˜Requiem in a Key I Don’t Know,’ and a song that shares a name with a popular ladies’ razor brand (”˜Venus Shaver’). Throughout Teenage, you’ll hear Ray play the harmonium; a Calcutta-style harmonium actually – which looks something like a suitcase with drawers and bellows attached. She’s been playing it since childhood.

Ray grew up in a homogenous, working class neighbourhood in central New Jersey where people weren’t always sure what to make of her family. She has spoken openly about being bullied for instance, her home vandalised during the Persian Gulf War by townsfolk who mistook the Rays for being of Middle Eastern extraction.

She says she was a “bizarre-looking Indian chick” back then, and that her grades plummeted with the arrival of Nirvana (“Nirvana was a big fucking deal”). She credits her parents with introducing her to Indian music. SD and RD Burman and Hemant Kumar remain some of her favourite composers to this day.

I ask her about her relationship to India now. “It’s similar to a relationship with a boyfriend who won’t call me back,” she tells me. “It’s complicated. I feel very detached from it.”

And yet, there’s the harmonium.

Her parents are to blame for that too, she says. They discouraged her early interest in rock, and wanted her to learn classical Indian music instead. She did – but by sixteen, had secretly taught herself how to play Velvet Underground’s ”˜I’ll Be Your Mirror’ anyway.

“The first time I heard the Velvet Underground was when I started taking music seriously,” she explains. “They made it into an expression that encompassed more than making music; it went in so many directions and it gave you a world and an image and a taste and a feel through sound. And when I experienced that I realised it was something I wanted to explore.”