Träd, Gräs och Stenar
Sweden's greatest psychedelic band tells their story
What if the Velvet Underground, the Grateful Dead, and Faust were all stages in the development of one group? Well, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, a collective of Swedish musicians underwent an evolutionary arc much like that, and their journey from Pärson Sound to Harvester/International Harvester to Träd, Gräs och Stenar (Trees, Grass and Stones) can be traced across about a half dozen fascinating albums that have drifted in and out of print but are absolutely worth searching for.
It all started in 1967, when several members of the Swedish pop band Mecki Mark Men split off to form Pärson Sound, an experimental psychedelic unit. The lineup included Bo Anders Persson on guitar, Thomas Tidholm on vocals and saxophone, Urban Yman on violin, Arne Ericsson on cello, Torbjörn Abelli on bass and Thomas Mera Gartz on drums. They never released any music at the time, but years later some archival recordings came out on a double CD that revealed them to be heavy, droning psych with lots of keening reed lines and high-volume violin sawing. If you like the Doors’ “The End,” the Stooges’ “We Will Fall,” and the Velvet Underground at their most ritualistic, this stuff will probably hit you just right.
After just about a year, the band changed their name to International Harvester, and recorded their debut album, Sov Gott Rose-Marie (Sleep Well Rose-Marie). This was a completely different thing. The group members were all affiliated with the Swedish “progg” movement, which was not related to prog rock in a musical sense; it was about left-wing politics and using art to move society forward. The album features 13 tracks, many of which are quite short and aren’t conventional rock songs at all, they’re recordings of people chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” or “the prime minister can’t read, the prime minister can’t write…” Even their actual songs are recorded crudely, and sound like attempts at an electrified version of Swedish folk music. The whole thing is a political gesture, very redolent of its time but not that much fun to listen to out of the context of late ’60s Sweden.
On their second album, 1969’s Hemåt (Homeward), they shortened their name to Harvester and concentrated on songs — some heavy and droning, some lurching and hard-charging — rather than theatrical agitprop. But they were still pursuing a kind of left-wing nationalist agenda; most of the music was recorded in a café owned by the youth league of the Swedish communist party, and it’s deliberately crude and unpolished, sounding at times like it was captured with a single microphone. The album includes a seven-and-a-half-minute, half-speed version of Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” that’ll make your head swim. But honestly, they were best appreciated live, which nobody outside Sweden would ever have known had they not put out a 5LP box set, Remains, in 2018 that included both their albums and three additional LPs of live material from various gigs in 1968 and 1969. The live material is moody, shambling, and trance-inducing, with the band riding slow-motion riffs for up to 25 minutes at a time. (Some of the shorter tracks fade in, like they were edited from much longer jams.)
At the end of 1969, the group changed its name again, becoming Träd, Gräs och Stenar. They also lost several members, stripping down to a quartet of Persson, Ericsson (who moved to electric piano), Abelli and Gartz. Their self-titled album, released in 1970, opened with two covers: an eight-minute version of “All Along the Watchtower,” played and sung as though from underwater, and “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” on which they rode the song’s fuzzed-out riff for 11 minutes, turning it into a jam that reminds me a little bit of the Grateful Dead circa 1969, or Creedence Clearwater Revival’s bombed-out take on “Suzie Q.” The second side contains four originals, the best of which is the ultra-fuzzed-out garage-punky “Tegenborgsvalsen” (“The Tegenborg Waltz”) and the worst of which are the two acoustic folk jams, “All Makt Åt Folket” (“All Power to the People”) and “Svarta Pärla” (“The Black Pearl”), which are throwbacks to their International Harvester days, and not in a good way.
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On their next album, Rock För Kropp och Själ (Rock for Body and Soul), they added a second guitarist/vocalist, Jakob Sjöholm, to the lineup, and moved a little further in the direction of conventional, bluesy boogie-rock. The album’s title track and “Våran Vila” (“Our Rest”) might appeal to fans of Swedish early ’70s hard rock act November…unfortunately, Rock För Kropp och Själ came out on vinyl in 1972, was reissued in that format in 1989, and has never been released on CD at all. The group released two live albums, Djungelns Lag (The Law of the Jungle) and Mors Mors (slang for Hi, How Are You), before calling it a day. (They reunited in 1995, but Bo Anders Persson left the group in 2008, Torbjörn Abelli died in 2010, and Thomas Mera Gartz died in 2012; Sjöholm is the last “original” member left.)
In 2016, another archival project came out — a self-titled 3CD (or 6LP) set combining Djungelns Lag, Mors Mors, and another double LP’s worth of previously unreleased liveage given the title Kom Tilsammans (Come Together). It’s available on Bandcamp, and as with International Harvester, the live material presents the band at their best. There’s one more live disc, Gärdet 12.6.70, available, recorded at a free outdoor festival; it’s loose and ragged, but has a lot of energy, and the audience response is exuberant, to say the least.
The whole story of Pärson Sound, Harvester/International Harvester, and Träd, Gräs och Stenar — and the Swedish underground rock scene more broadly — is told in a new book featuring contributions from all the band members, and a vast array of newspaper clippings, gig flyers, album art, photos from the musicians’ personal archives, and much more. It provides deep and revelatory context for everything that was going on artistically, politically, socially, and personally in the various members’ lives and really gives you an insight into a scene that was boiling over creatively and coming into conflict with the broader society (but in a generally polite, reserved, Scandinavian way). You learn that these were smart, thoughtful musicians who had an interest not only in rocking out but in changing how people regarded the society in which they lived. There’s some discussion of Pärson Sound performing at the opening of an Andy Warhol exhibition in Stockholm early on (Warhol himself was present), where you can almost visualize the idea to bend and subvert pop forms to their own purposes forming in their heads.
At the same time, they were never as explicitly political as American bands like Jefferson Airplane or MC5; as Abelli explains, “At a gig in Gävle in the early Seventies, a really pissed-off guy came up to me during the break and asked: ‘Why don’t you agitate! You have this huge opportunity to stir up the masses, and you only sing about the moon.’ I tried to explain to him that we were not good agitators — we let others take care of that. At best, what we can provide is a rebellious attitude through music. It is built up by us with those present in the room — we want to formulate moods where you dare to change things.”
The book came out in Sweden in 2022; the English translation, which has just come out, is published by Anthology Recordings, the label that has reissued Djungelns Lag and Mors Mors and released the 3CD set I described above. It’s a fascinating story, and a really beautiful object, 400 pages of underground rock history that’s barely known in the US. Click here to buy a copy.
That’s it for now; see you next week!