by Michael Abedin
All my songs basically say the same thing:  ‘Thank you God!’   – Miten

A beautiful young German girl from a spiritual and musical family meets an Englishman – a  former sex, drugs, and rock and roll musician who’s opened for the likes of Lou Reed and Fleetwood Mac – at the ashram of a controversial guru in India.  They fall in love, make music together, and become internationally known recording artists and world travelers with no real home, riding the wave of joy and spirit at the heart of their music.
Sounds like a film proposal.  (There’s a DVD, actually.  Watch for the review next month in Austin All Natural.)   Miten, by all accounts, was well on his way to being the Next Big Thing in the music biz in England after growing up in London in the Sixties as Andy Desmond.  Like Mick Jagger’s reclusive rock star character in the 1968 film Performance, he apparently looked at his image a bit too closely and a bit too long, and the demons that drive that lifestyle fled him.
A friend gave him a book by the controversial Indian spiritual leader Osho, and he sold his guitars and left the world where “I stood beneath a white spotlight that obscured everything from my sight.”  He moved into a spiritual community in England populated by the Orange People, as the devotees of the Indian spiritual leader Osho were called because of their sunrise-colored robes, and became a devotee himself – a Sannyasin.
While all this was going on in England, a young German girl was doing the active meditation exercises that her mother brought home from Osho’s ashram in Pune, India.  She had classical music training, but, more than that, she had heard the ancient sounds of the powerful and haunting Gayatri mantra that her mother chanted when she was in the womb – her introduction to the planet, in a way.
By the time she was in her pre-teens, she was on her way to Pune with her father’s permission to become a Sannyasin.
 
Meanwhile, back at the ashram.
Andy Desmond traveled from the Osho community in England to Pune, where he became Prabhu Miten, the spiritual name given to him by Osho that means “Friend of the God Within”. By that time, he says, it couldn’t have been more appropriate – he’d turned his back on music and submerged himself in the life of the ashram. 
              As he healed from the pains of his previous life, though, he started to pick up a guitar again, and without what he calls his “music business censor”, his new songs reflected his new life. Filled with beauty and simplicity, they were “like a miracle – a key to the heart and a door into Presence.”
              Saturday nights were celebration nights at the Ashram, and Miten became the leader of Osho’s musicians.  Presence, it seems, had another gift for him. A beautiful young German girl, a massage and cranio-sacral therapist and Shitasu practitioner, offered him a Shiatsu treatment.  Like a great love will often do, she seemed to come to him out of the blue, and they immediately felt at ease with one another – but they had stood at each other’s side a year earlier, when Miten picked her to be in a photo for the ashram’s band. 
Her spiritual name was Deva Premal, “Divine Loving” – and their hearts very quickly united in a divine love. 
Miten, however, had no idea that his German girl could sing, until he heard her singing along one day while he played his guitar.  They began doing harmonies together – and she was, as they say in the music business, part of the band.  They left the ashram in 1992, a couple of years after they met, and went on a seventeen-year tour that’s still in progress today.
A yoga magazine writer has called them “the Johnny and June Carter Cash of sacred music”, and the magic that flows between them on a stage is, in its own way, as powerful as the fire that passed between Johnny and his lady every time they stepped on a stage.  For a long time, though, their recordings were primarily known to yoga schools, massage therapists, and other Sannyasins.
 
Enter the mantra.
In 1997, they recorded The Essence, which includes the Gayatri Mantra.  Fittingly, it was recorded in Deva’s mother’s apartment in Germany where she was born, after months of listening to the Gayatri during her mother’s pregnancy and years of chanting it each night before bed without really knowing what she was doing.  (She really kind of wanted to be able to bring her friends over to watch TV, she says.)
              The Essence opens with the Gayatri, and if you can listen to the first om and the twenty-four Sanskrit syllables that follow without feeling a little rush of kundalini up your spine, pull out your dipstick and check your awareness level – you might be a quart low.  The mantra is so ancient and powerful that it’s said to have acquired its own level of sentience, and what better way to bring it into personification than with the voice of a deva – the Sanskrit term for what we might call an angel.
              It’s unusual for Americans to find out we’re not the center of the universe, but when they released The Essence in 1998, Miten told the Yoga Journal, “we were unaware of America’s yoga movement.  We hoped a few Sannyasin friends would use the album during massages.”  Instead, White Swan records picked it up and it went to the top of the New Age charts.  (Yes, there are such.)
              It also marked a shift in Deva’s singing. Although she’d been performing with Miten, she still hadn’t really found her own voice until she found it in the Gayatri – according to one Austin fan, though, her voice blossomed to a new level at a performance at the One World Theater a couple of years ago, when Miten came down with a case of laryngitis and she had to carry the whole vocal part of the show.  Tears flowed, it’s said, in the audience.
 
The sound of no hands clapping.
Tears might be a regular occurrence when Deva and Miten are onstage, but applause isn’t.  They respectfully ask that the audience refrain from showing their appreciation by clapping after a song or a chant, and show it instead with silence.  “This is really one of the main reasons why Miten and I sing – to bathe in silence.  It’s what keeps us on the road.  For me there is nothing more precious than having sung with an audience, ecstatic with bliss, and then entering the deep silence that the mantra brings…”
              If memory serves, though, Miten consented to a little spontaneous applause during a show last summer in Dallas, after he ripped through a run of blistering virtuoso blues guitar. You can take the blues out of the guitarist, it seems, but you can’t take it out of the guitar – and there was probably a bit of blues at the record label when Andy Desmond left the reservation and turned into Prabhu Miten.
              After the Dallas show, while signing CD’s, Deva remembered doing a radio interview in Austin, where they were asked what first attracted them to each other.  “I had this wonderful spiritual answer ready, about how we’d connected on such a high level – but before I could say anything, Miten said, ‘Sex’.” 
Indeed.  Guys, even spiritual guys, will be guys.  Maybe he was channeling Andy.
Here’s what Miten told Yoga Journal about his music and his life.  “Our music is a celebration of life.  I want people’s hearts to explode and their eyes to fill with tears of joy.  I want them to run out in the street and hug the first person they see. I want the music to support them in their sacred moments – meditating, making love, sitting in traffic jams.”
No wonder they caught on in the U.S. They’ll be right at home in Austin.
 
Deva Premal & Miten will appear at Unity Church of the Hills, 9905 Anderson Mill Rd., on Thursday, November 19 at 7:30pm.  Tickets and information at www.unityhills.org or charge by phone at 1-800-514-ETIX (3849).
CD’s and DVD’s at www.DevaPremalMiten.com