hardcore swedish scenes vol. 2

By Robbie on March 24, 2010

1.  Long drives, low temperatures, 3+ metres of snow, icy roads. Near Stockholm, by the airport, the passing lane is mostly covered; two hundred miles north of that, most of the right-hand lane is gone too. The locals are seasoned winter drivers, though, and we see few accidents during the course of my stay. My homeowner's eye catches a lot of insulation issues -- unevenly melting snow on the rooftops -- in the aging but brightly-painted buildings along the roadside.

We grab lunch in little roadside cafeterias. The fare is limited, "ethnic food" in Sweden being pizza, and "health food" out in the country being as big a laughingstock as it is out in every country's country. "No doubt what is for lunch today!" announces my driver, Micke, in the melodious, gently halting, not-quite-idiomatic way that almost every Swede speaks English. He takes pride in all customs Swedish, and in serving as a personal ambassador for me as I sing my way up and down the nation. "Today is Thursday, and that can only mean -- pancakes and pea soup!" Today, actually, is a day ending with a "y," and that means, for a meat-avoider, another cheese sandwich and a slice of ethnic. Don't come to Sweden for the food.

2.  Billy Bremner, the creative and trickyhanded guitarist for Rockpile, the Pretenders, and many others, is giving me an impromptu lesson one afternoon. At the barbed-wire-enclosed roots-rock compound where we're both shacked up, play guitar is about all there is to do. Without my having to ask, he's showing me his translations of Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed passages (several good rock guitarists' styles are based on artfully inexact replicas of these two men's recorded solos). What Billy wants me to do isn't easy for me, a flatpicker. He hears little deviations in my repetitions of his phrases, to me irrelevant but to him crucial. That in itself is a good lesson for me -- cutting corners inadvertently and applying your own stamp aren't necessarily the same thing. When I get a phrase right, he's nearly ecstatic. He jumps up and down, he praises my quickness. He's one of my college-era heroes, and he's a good teacher.

3.  I travel no farther north than Pitea, only about two-thirds of the way up the eastern coast, but, at about 160 miles north of Fairbanks, AK, plenty far north for me, the farthest I've been. Away from the main highway up here, in the villages, the roads and walkways are in hibernation, and people get around on ski/walker devices that translate as "kinks." Old women tie their shopping bags to handles on the sides, give themselves a push with one leg, and off they go, not smiling but not grim. It is a Swedish trait not to complain.

4.  A dialogue between me and a villager. Me: "I've noticed that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavian is a bit of a stereotype -- plenty of dark-haired people up here." Him: "Yes, we have all kinds." Me: "Jews? Are there Jews here too?" Him: "In Stockholm, places like that, I guess." Me: "Oh sure. There must be at least a couple synagogues there, right?" Him: "Oh, absolutely." Me, doggedly pursuing the theme: "But no Jews in these little villages? None in your village here?" Him: "Oh, no. If they tried coming here they would be made...uncomfortable." Once again, "out in the country" is a universal. 

5.  Stockholm, where one-third of the population lives, is a gorgeous town. Again with the iced-over-ness though -- I truly don't understand how feeble or old people can possibly navigate the cobblestones on the sidestreets, which are steep and slippery and unpredictable. There's a big and splendid science-fiction store (books, comics, DVDs, souvenirs) in the old quarter where I drop a thousand kroner. I overnight at the Rival, a pleasant hotel owned by Benny Andersson of ABBA. The room offers a small library of CDs (including ABBA's). And a classic-era Swedish film theme runs through the hotel: the late Mr. Alf Sjoberg looms spectrally over my bed.

6. In a little hamlet where people have a hankering for American country music and alcohol, I am playing at the honkiest, tonkiest dive I've set foot in in years, and an attractive-but-tough-and-tattooed 21-year-old woman is flirting with me on the break. "Guess what I do for a living," she commands. Me: "College?" She: "I am a welder." Me: "Ah!" She: "I weld like any man. Better. I am, how do you say, apprentice of the best man welder at my factory, only one year, and now I am better than even him." Me: "That's nice." She: "People don't believe, looking at me. But I am tough. I am tough and I am one great fucking welder!" Me: "I believe you." She: [thrusts a packet of chewing tobacco into her jaw] "I do what any man does." Me: "Plainly." She: "I am no little tender girl." Me: "Maybe you're not a woman at all." She, bristling: "What do you say?" Me: "How do I know? You're so tough, you're so like a man -- maybe you are a man. I don't know." She: [steps back and spreads her hands across her fine body] "You look at this and say 'maybe a man'? How can you say this body is a man's? This here is all woman!" Me: "Prove it!" She: "How?" Me (pointing down): "Scrub this floor!" Conversation: over.

7.  Linda Gail Lewis! I am playing and singing on her record. I know where to play a solo because on the scratch version she's made with piano and drums, she says brightly: "Mister Robbie Fulks!" I play and sing, reading the lyrics she's inked in shapely blue cursive on a sheet of Best Western hotel stationery. Then she replaces her piano part, sitting at a digital keyboard in the control room. Digital keyboards posing as pianos usually sound pretty dorky, but something in her touch obliterates the difference between the keyboard and a dusty spinet sitting in your demented aunt's parlor. She has a style that is rocking, unpolished, simple, and brash. She tells me that she learned it on the piano at home in Ferriday, LA, and that she, like Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart, picked up Jerry Lee's style (which he himself made up out of his head and from watching the black guys play at the local dives) and modified it somewhat. Not to oversell this primitive style of hers, but it's actually a beautiful and rare thing to hear, no kidding. Everybody seems to be able to play great nowadays (you know?) but to play with such untrained, exuberant harmonic straight-aheadness and a confident -- no, bossy -- rhythmic pulse, to transmit that feel of the little longago house with the crazy brother and the forbidden black people's music happening down the road...that's something...and I'm not saying I'd trade Oscar Peterson's records for hers, but I think I'd trade the records of all the modern pianists who try to play like Oscar Peterson for hers.

8.  The lumberyard next to the compound where I sleep has plastic sheets draped over its pallets bearing the name, logo, and slogan of the timber company. The slogan is: Wood For Life. For someone born into idiomatic English -- not to mention an ethnically multifarious and freewheelingly vulgar society -- things here are perpetually...off. 

9.  I travel to Gavle, an town of cozy dimensions and architectural radiance, for the second show of a two-show day. The first was in a folketshus in a speck-of-a-place-a-heck-of-a-place called Marma. Most of these country hamlets have a central, communal gathering-place, or folketshus, where pale taciturn people come to see whatever's on display and to shake off their 30-below blues. The elders and ne'er-do-wells in Marma and such places are quietly appreciative of my attempts to render American folk music, and I myself am appreciative of the chance to sit down before a Neumann condenser mike in a wooden, church-like performance chamber and concentrate fully on my fretboard. After a half-dozen of these, though, it's time to bust something out, and so it's good to play in this place, a pub in Gavle, where there are young people and adult beverages. I plug in, I make ironical remarks, I get a little Monday-night-football! And the crowd stays on top of things, in a rather uncrowdlike way; they listen quietly, clap loudly, and laugh easily where laughter is intended. They act nothing like the kind of young drunk people I'm accustomed to play for.

After my set I fall in with a British guy and two girls who are in their early 30s and have come to recession-heavy Sweden to start up a company whose mission is to train businessmen in the performing arts. Let Us Entertrain You, it's called. They also set up karaoke events. Lots of luck, I tell them. It's great talking to someone not from Sweden and someone who is a native English speaker. The talk tends toward slightly scabrous stories starring the pronoun "they" as "the population of Sweden." One thing about touring that has really come home over these two weeks is how much of it is not about the work. When I tour in America, it's always seemed to be all about the work, and mostly, it is. But what makes it fly, what sustains you, are the occasional, non-work-related amenities and grace notes -- the drink at the bar, the Indian meal, the old friend you catch up with while in town, the friendly stranger you meet. That's what I'm bereft of here, and why it's good being in Gavle, tossing back a whiskey with the entertrainers. 

10.  Every day in the compound I read a tale by Bernard Malamud, most of them from the 1950s, the era of his perfect, perfectly maddening Brooklyn grocery-store tales. Reading these amid 3-metre-high piles of snow in Skutskar is like being in the Sahara reading about the far side of Venus.

11.  I'm an American patriot. And I'm here to represent, you know? For instance, one time when I'm in someone's very orderly house I hear a conversation break out about the fine Swedish custom of removing shoes when entering a residence. "Do you have this custom in America?" they ask me, with much interest. I decide to take this at face value, instead of as what it probably is, a coded request to take off my sneakers. "As an American," I explain in an equally bright tone, "I get to do whatever I please."

However, it must be said that life in Sweden is in many ways better than life in the US. There is the folketshus. There is Stockholm, more beautiful than almost any American city. There is the architectural color palette. There is the no complaining. There is the no Jews -- when you have a book of 50 Bernard Malamud stories, you have quite enough Jews. From a professional standpoint, there are the sound systems and engineers. After my 9th or 10th gig, I realize that I haven't met a single soundman who is less than knowledgeable, professional, and courteous. Incredibly, they remember my set-up and mike preferences from last year when I was here. No lectures, life stories, or brain-frozen, eye-glazed churlishness.

But how about those taxes? An Iraqi-born, Soviet-raised hotelier in the little village of Bjurholm confides to me at the end of a long night, "Today I make two thousand kroner [about $277 USD]. The government takes 54%. [Pause for effect; I make a low retching sound.] Then I have to pay my workers and my utilities. What do you think remains?" I reply, "Negative money," and he nods, and pours me another free glass of expensive, heavily taxed Kentucky whiskey.

And how about those banks? When my promoter friend goes in to withdraw my pay for the tour, he has to tell them why he's withdrawing all that. You have to tell the banker the source or destiny of any deposit or withdrawal over a small figure. How silly and meddlesome is that? "My friend, he likes to yell loudly in the bank, 'I am travelling to Poland and spending this on some whores," he says, giving me the envelope of cash. "But I just told them, family vacation."

A basic paradox about Sweden comes to me while I'm sauntering through Skelleftea, another pretty town on the E4 highway up north. "Sauntering" is actually not the right word for what I'm doing -- stumbling through the blustery streets with my hat pulled low and tears blinding my vision -- but it is close to what the natives are doing. They are walking in twos and threes along the town center, carefully negotiating corners where slick patches shine on the sidewalk and pipe-organ chunks of ice are tottering from awnings. Their expressions are pleasantly impassive as they pass well-tended little shops full of bright dresses, candies, lattes, and books. "Excellent manners in the face of absurdly inhospitable conditions," I think. Coincidentally, The New York Times comes out later that day making much the same point in an editorial titled, "The Hard And The Soft," about the character of Norway, winner of nine Olympic gold medals in Vancouver, and birthplace of Jan Baalsrud, the World War II resistance hero. Anyway, the 4-word abstract of my 15-day stay in Scandinavia is Great Manners, Ugly Weather (which must be why it feels halfway like Chicago).