Jan and Gunnar
My little staggered path as a semi-professional guitarist began thanks to the brothers Jan & Gunnar Andersson. Unfortunately they have left the earthly life now, may they rest in peace.
It was because we were schoolmates and lived not far from each other. The brothers were very musical and had a practice room in the basement, equipped with an electric guitar, amplifier and drum set. Jan playing guitar and Gunnar drums. Very often it happened that you hung around and admired what they were doing. My father played guitar and had an old acoustic Levin that, despite my left-handedness, I learned some basic chords on. You know… Em, A, D, G, etc.
Santa, my Father and Jimi Hendrix
Now the flame was lit and I also wanted to play the electric guitar like Janne, so it was put on Tomten’s wish list. Christmas and Santa came and I will never forget that Christmas. Time stood still, my amazement and joy knew no bounds when I opened that flat, big, heavy package. A guitar case!!!!
I opened the lid and widened my eyes. Could hardly understand what I saw. A Fender Stratocaster … So understand the whole thing! Jimi Hendrix the guitar !!! So I had gotten a Stratocaster as my first guitar. It turned out that my father, who didn’t understand electric guitars, visited a music store in Luleå to buy my Christmas present. One thing he did know though and that was that there was a constant roar at home from that Jimi Hendrix who seemed to be regarded as some kind of godlike being by the son. So he asked if they had a guitar like that “Hendrix” used. Well, it turned out that they had. So the old man bought it and thought for sure that it was because of how expensive an electric guitar was. So if you can hear me up there somewhere Father, THANK YOU THANK YOU! Your Christmas present brought so much fun through life and gave me so many good friends.
Blisters on fingertips
Now came a period of intense training, every day after school and every evening. The fingers hurt and were decorated with blisters, but it was getting better and better. In fact, so much so that I had the pleasure of jamming in Janne and Gunnar’s basement from time to time.
Bernt Ek
Then it happened that I met Bernt Ek, exactly how I don’t actually remember, but it resulted in intense playing for several years to come. He played bass and could also sing. At first we sat with the blinds drawn (so as not to be disturbed by the eternal summer sun outside) in my room and made songs that we recorded. The first one we got was submitted to the radio program “Bandet går” and to our indescribable joy it was included and played on the radio. It was big! Unfortunately, that recording is no longer available, but I can offer a little taster.
Lennart Bergqvist
Time passed and I became acquainted with Lennart Bergqvist who quickly learned to play the drums. Now we could play as a band. Then a room was needed because a basement was not available in our houses. Lennart and I contacted the municipality, which kindly made the locally famous CYK’s dining room available. There we had to train and also have the stuff locked up. And we practiced, often and for a long time. It resulted in our band which we called Rain. We had a few gigs here and there. School dances, Kaskad, Föreningshuset and the like. There were also a few different drummers apart from the good Lennart. I remember Gunnar Andersson, Sven Wallgren, Kenneth Nelson and JanÅke Bondesson offhand like this. It all went on until I moved to Luleå and Bernt started with Grace or if it was WildliW (I don’t remember the order). Anyway, here are some pictures. As far as I know, there are no recordings.
Nightmare
A band I was in was Nightmare which consisted of, besides myself, Peter Majanen (vocals & guitar), Jens Isaksson (bass), Michael Jägerving (drums) and Jan Larsson (keyboards). We played, among other things, at Föreningshuset on one occasion. If there were more, I have forgotten. Here’s a taster from the training room. Sadly, I’m completely missing pictures
JanÅke Isaksson
Me and JanÅke and I sat quite a lot either at his house or at mine and tinkered with songs, some of which were later played by his band Westpoint. My part probably mostly consisted of playing the guitar if I remember correctly.
Here are two songs as examples of how it could sound
Glimståhls
For a year or two we had a band we called Ronald Glimståhl and His Flying Bomerangs. I think we stole that name from JanÅke Bondesson, who had moved out at the time (sorry JanÅke, I hope we can consider the crime time-barred now). Anyway, we trained in the now deceased Kenth Sohlman’s kitchen. He had a house with a really big kitchen like they had in the world. It was really fun and nice. In addition to myself on guitar, the band consisted of Kenth Sohlman (vocals and guitar), Urban Erixon (drums), Thomas Alden (bass) and my dear wife Lena on keyboards.
Ulf Forslund
The last thing I did together with anyone else was a collaboration with Ulf Forslund where we recorded some songs with him and performed acoustically on one occasion at Kalix Galleria. Ulf eventually moved to Luleå whereupon, for natural reasons, nothing more happened. Here are a couple of samples of our own songs from that time
The years go by
Over the years, I’ve dabbled in making small pieces, but nothing more has happened. It can be easily summed up in this video
I got a twitch just recently and accomplished this on my chamber. It is a cover of the song “The Man With The Hammer” by the group “Leech”