We were utterly hopeless, completely out of our depth, there was not a snowball’s chance in hell of anything coming of this, we wouldn’t even be good enough to perform at a school party, but although this was the reality we never experienced it as such. On the contrary, this was what gave our lives meaning. It wasn’t my music we played, but Jan Vidar’s, and it went against everything I believed in, yet this is what I trusted. The intro to “Smoke on the Water,” the very incarnation of stupidity, the very antithesis of cool, was what I sat practicing at Ve School in 1983: first the guitar riff, then the cymbal, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, then the bass drum, boom, boom, boom, then the snare, tick, tick, tick, and then the stupid bass line kicked in, where we often looked at each other with a smile while nodding our heads and shaking our legs as the chorus, played completely out of sync, took off. We didn’t have a vocalist. When Jan Vidar started at technical college he heard about a drummer from Hånes, admittedly he was only in the eighth class, but he would have to do, everything had to do, and he also had access to a practice room out there, with drums and PA, the whole thing, so there we were: me, first-year gymnas student dreaming about a life in indie music, but unmusical, on rhythm guitar; Jan Vidar, trainee pâtissier who practiced enough to be a Yngwie Malmsteen, an Eddie van Halen, or a Ritchie Blackmore, but who couldn’t free himself from his finger exercises, on lead guitar; Jan Henrik whom we would have preferred to avoid outside the group, on bass, and Øyvind, a happy, thickset kid from Hånes without any ambitions at all, on drums. “Smoke on the Water,” “Paranoid,” “Black Magic Woman,” “So Lonely” and, eventually, early Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” and “Hang onto Yourself,” for which Yngve had also taught me the chords. No singer, only the accompaniment. Every weekend. Guitar cases on the bus, long conversations on the beach about music and instruments, on the benches outside the shop, in Jan Vidar’s room, in the airport café, in Kristiansand. Later on, we recorded our practice sessions, which we carefully analyzed in our futile, doomed attempt to raise the band to the level we were at in our heads.
Once I had taken a cassette recording of our sessions to school. I stood in the break with the headset on listening to our music while wondering whom I could play it to. Bassen had the same musical taste as I did, so that was no use, because this was quite different, and he would not understand it. Hanne maybe? She was a singer after all, and I liked her a lot. But that would be too big a risk to take. She knew I played in a band and that was good, it gave me a kind of elevated status, but my status might crumble if she heard us playing. Pål? Yes, he could listen to it. He played in a band himself, Vampire it was called, played fast, Metallica-inspired. Pål who was usually shy, sensitive, and delicate to the point of being almost effeminate, but who wore black leather, played bass, and howled onstage like the devil incarnate, he would understand what we were doing. So in the next break I went over to him, told him we had recorded a few songs the previous weekend, would he have a listen and say what he thought? Of course. He put on the headset and pressed play while I anxiously scrutinized his face. He smiled and stared at me quizzically. After a few minutes he started laughing and removed the headset.
“This is crap, Karl Ove,” he said. “This is a joke. Why are you bothering me with this? Why should I listen to this stuff? Are you kidding me?”
“Crap? What do you mean crap?”
“You can’t play. And you don’t sing. There’s nothing in it!”
He threw out his arms.
“I’m sure we can improve,” I said.
“Give up,” he said.
Do you think your band is so great then? I thought of saying, but I didn’t.
“Okay, okay,” I said instead. “Thanks, anyway.”
He laughed again and sent me a look of astonishment. No one could fathom Pål because of his whole speed-metal thing, and the clueless side of him which made the class laugh, and which did not square with his shyness at all, which in turn did not square at all with the almost complete openness he could display making him unafraid of anything. Once, for example, he showed us a poem he had had published in a girls’ magazine, Det Nye, which had also interviewed him. Outspoken, brazen, sensitive, shy, aggressive, rough. That was Pål. In a way it was good that it was Pål who heard our band because Pål’s response didn’t mean anything, whatever made him laugh didn’t matter. So I calmly put the Walkman back in my pocket and went into class. He was probably right that we weren’t very good. But since when was it important to be good? Hadn’t he heard of punk? New Wave? None of those bands could play. But they had guts. Power. Soul. Presence.
Not long after this, in early autumn 1984, we got our first gig. Øyvind had set it up for us. Håne Shopping Center was celebrating its fifth anniversary; the occasion was to be marked with balloons, cakes, and music. The Bøksle Brothers, who had been famous all over the region for two decades with their interpretations of Sørland folk songs, were going to play. Then the center owner also wanted something local, preferably with some youth interest, and, since we practiced only a few hundred meters from the mall, we fitted the bill perfectly. We were to play for twenty minutes and would be paid five hundred kroner for the job. We hugged Øyvind when he told us. At long last it was our turn.
The two weeks before the gig, which was scheduled for eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning, passed quickly. We rehearsed several times, the whole band and Jan Vidar and I on our own, we discussed the order of our set list to and fro and back and forth, we bought new strings well in advance so that we could break them in, we decided what clothes we would wear, and when the day arrived we met early in the practice room to go through the set several times before the performance, for even though we were aware there was a risk we would peak too soon, we figured it was more important to feel at home with the songs.