Tusk force

>> Former High Dial Rishi Dhir returns
with his new band Elephant Stone

ELEPHANT MAN: Rishi Dhir

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“After doing the High Dials for 10 years, the joy in it was lost for me for a while,” says Rishi Dhir, the bassist and on occasion sitar player of the local band he’d co-founded, originally as neo-mod trio the Datsons, a decade ago. Without acrimony, he plainly states, “I always told myself if I’m not having fun, I’m not going to do it. That’s why I left the band, and why I’m starting this—because I’m having fun again.”

The “this” at hand is the rich, gentle, psychedelic folk-pop of Dhir’s new project Elephant Stone, named after a Stone Roses tune, with a nod to Ganesh, the Hindu deity of wisdom. It started as a solitary, homebrewed outlet for Dhir following his resignation. The first song he created, “The Straight Line,” betrayed his fancy for Ananda Shankar’s sci-fi sitar funk of the ’70s. With assists from fellow rock ronin Jon Cohen and Robb Surridge, a former Dear and Dial respectively, and a long-distance dash of Madchester care of Christian Madden of British friends the Earlies, the tune came out a titan, as a visit to the band’s MySpace page will prove.

Devastatingly, Dhir won’t be trotting out “The Straight Line” when Elephant Stone makes its live debut on Wednesday as a robust septet—“Friends kept telling me I should put a live band together, so I asked those friends if they wanted to join.” Dhir does however promise a couple of other sitar-based numbers. In fact, the band boasts a second sitar player, Stephen Venkatarangam, who like Dhir takes up the regular six-string at times.

Not that there’s any shortage of guitars. Aside from Surridge on drums and Robby Fraser at the keys, the band has five fretboard strokers—Dhir and Venkatarangam, as well as High Dial Robbie MacArthur, Steve Smith and Richard White—keeping things lush and lustrous. Smith even totes a 12-string—how eight-miles-high is that?

Dhir hopes to record this summer, with plans for the debut disc on Toronto’s Sunnylane label, a name appropriately suggestive of sweetness and light. “People have said there’s positivity in my lyrics,” says Dhir. “Maybe I’m like a motivational singer. You can only write what you know, and the type of person I am—it may sound cheesy, but all I know is love, really.”

With Spoon River at Divan Orange
on Wednesday, March 19, 9:30 p.m.