A Graceful Bonography


1977
I am five years old, sitting at a desk chair in kindergarten listening to my Elvis Presley tapes on the little cassette player they have there. On my lap is Louise. She’s five as well and my girlfriend. She pretends to like Elvis so she can sit on my lap. I don’t mind…

Favorite song: “Love me tender” (The King)


1979
I am seven years old and now I’m playing my Elvis tapes to the class during class activity hour. Some of the girls are dancing, trying to get the boys to join in. I am not dancing but reading aloud to them from my favorite book about dinosaurs but nobody seems to be listening. Pisses me the hell off…

Favorite song “All shook up” (The King)


1982
I am 10 years old and standing in an aisle of the local record store. I was given money to buy myself any LP I wanted for my birthday and now I am choosing between Shakin’ Stevens and Dolly Parton. I turn around, and there it is… The cover just jumps at me and I know it’s not going to be Shakin’ Stevens or Dolly anymore. My dad looks at the album I’m clutching in my arms as I proudly carry it up to the register. “You want to buy ‘The Number Of The Beast’ instead of the others? You’re sure?”

I am sure…

At home in my room I put it on my little white Ferguson turn table, I am entranced by the demonic cover and then I am BLOWN AWAY by the music. I listen to the damn thing over and over, drawing Eddie monsters and nodding to the drum beat until it’s bedtime (and well past).

Favorite song: “Children of the damned” (Maiden, duh!)


1984
I am 12 years old and at my first concert with two friends. Helix (“Give me an ‘R’ etc…”), outdoor stadium, nose bleed section, sun blazing and the three of us are banging our little heads while devouring the peanuts and chips we brought. Nothing to drink… After a while our thirst is of biblical proportions but we are afraid someone will steal our seats (yeah, right) so we grin and bear it rather than going to the vendors. When mom picks us up our throats are like rusty pipes, our ears are ringing and “we saw a drunk person”. 

Favorite song “Stay Hungry” (Twisted Sister)


1985
I am 13 and in England, enrolled in a language course for minors. Me and my best buddy Andreas have three whole weeks to be away from home and our parents for real for the first time. We live in a strange British host family that serves Spaghetti-O’s on white toast for dinner and that drinks heavily every night. What do we care? We are spending every waking hour either in the arcade halls or in the record stores banging away to WASP, Dio, Saxon and Judas Priest… When I come home my parents yell at me for not calling or writing once the whole time I was there. Oh, well… I had a suitcase full of metal (and for some reason a spiked club I bought at the London Dungeons) and I was ready to kick ass.

Favorite song: “I wanna be somebody” (WASP)


1986
I am 14 and meeting my dad at the airport. He has just returned from a business trip to New York. When he asked me and my brother before he left if we wanted something special from over there I think my brother said he wanted some stupid candy or something. Me? What did I want? Oh, nothing special… As long as it is Flotsam & Jetsam’s “Doomsday for the deceiver” that just came out that very month in the US and was the only album to ever be rated 6 out of 5 in Kerrang (Britain’s biggest metal magazine). My dad walked up and down every friggin’ avenue and street on Manhattan until he on his last day there finally found a copy and bought it for me.

After we had picked him up and arrived home he came into my room and gave the much awaited LP to me. He sat down with a glass of Scotch and a little bowl of peanuts, meaning to enjoy this exquisite piece of musical masterpiece he had struggled so hard to find. One minute into “Hammerhead” he gave me a disillusioned look and left. I think that was one of the last real father/son moments we had.

(Fun fact: I gathered all my friends to listen to the Flotsam & Jetsam album the next week and I declared to all of them: “Here! Listen to this bass solo in ‘Iron Tears’!!! This guy is good enough to be in Metallica!!!” Two weeks later Metallica’s Cliff Burton died in a bus accident in Sweden only to be replaced by Flotsam and Jetsam’s Jason Newsted. My friends still to this day think that is the spookiest thing they ever experienced and they always bring it up when we hook up.)

Favorite song: “Disposable Heroes” (Metallica)


1987
I am 15 and sitting in a rehearsal room with five women in their 50’s and a blind teacher who’s talking to the wall. My parents finally folded and bought me a guitar and enrolled me in guitar classes. The ladies are all playing classical acoustic guitars. I have a black electric Harmony Explorer with white spider web graphics on. My Ibanez amp makes the old ones frown… What do I care? I am rocking out “Tom Dooley” and “House of the rising sun” with a grin from ear to ear.

Favorite song “The Possession (King Diamond)


1988
I am 16 and on a chartered bus transporting drunken metal heads back to our city from a concert somewhere. I think it might have been Iron Maiden… I don’t know any of the people I ended up next to on this ride so I put on my sunglasses and try to go to sleep. This absolutely gorgeous metal chick in her mid 20s sits down next to me, drunk off her face, and starts feeling me up. She is not realizing I’m just a kid and I’m not about to blow my “cover” by saying shit so I just sit there and smile and nod mysteriously with my ugly Ray Bans on while she talks about blowjobs and what she wants to do with me. At one point she’s in my lap, grinding her lower parts to mine and life is good... until her friends rip her out of my embrace yelling “Eeewwww! He’s just a little kid Sarah!!!”

Favorite song: “Heaven Can Wait” (Iron Maiden)


1989
I am 17 and throwing the party of the decade in the little hellhole town I’m living in. (whole story once posted elsewhere and can be read again HERE in its entirety, should you care to do so). Cops, biker fights, floods, Whitesnake-covers, blaring alarms and hypothermia… Good times.

Favorite song: “Winter’s Call” (Badlands)


1990
I am 18 and sleeping my day away in high school. My best friend and lead guitar player is sitting next to me, freaking me out by drawing something he proudly calls his “Rye Circus”. A tent with a lot of lines criss-crossing… I am silently praying his mind won’t snap entirely until after we have the record deal. (It did eventually and I still grieve the loss of the best guitar player I ever had and the world will never hear.)

Favorite song: “Scared” (Dangerous Toys)


1991
I am 19 and strutting my stuff down the avenue like a Mad Max drag queen. King Shit of Tinseltown has nothing on me… Hair sprayed to the sky, plate boots, black suede jacket with fringes, cowboy hat with silver bells… Now if only I didn’t live in Sweden I’d be all set. I kind of stick out like a Christmas tree in a Jewish apple orchard. How the hell I got laid that year I will never know… (And yes, they were all girls too.)

Favorite song: “Sad But True” (Metallica)


1993
I am 21 and working in a guitar store in Gothenburg. I fix people’s instruments, sell strings, make coffee for the boss and help him file away papers. The store manager is a guy in his 50’s from Chile. He teaches me the classical guitar and shares words of wisdom. I still try to live by them… Especially “Me cago en dios y la reputisima madre que lo pario!” Came in handy on so many occasions… One of the other guys in the store is the best bass player I have ever heard to this day… I am still the only one who knows that. After a few months I move into the office where I now help the boss full time with paper work and money laundering. I spend all my nights playing in bands and going to clubs. I know all the guys in all the Gothenburg bands and I know all the sidewalks outside all the clubs.

Favorite song: “Under a glass moon” (Dream Theater)


1997
I am 26 and sitting in MY chair in MY office at MY guitar company. Europe’s largest wholesaler of acoustic guitars and I am the general manager. Me. I make the deals, set the prices, meet the people and travel the world. Factories in Spain, conventions in Germany, vacation in Italy. You want to sell an acoustic guitar in Scandinavia? You have to talk to me and hope I like it. I love my job and I love my guitars and I spend all my hard earned money on the damn things too. Have a Charvel Surfcaster in every color ever made. That and a buck will get me a cup of coffee today. To furthermore amuse myself in my free time I start managing metal bands. First friends’ bands for fun, later I become really good at it.

Favorite song: “Livin’ Easy” (Richie Kotzen)


1999
I am 27 and walking down the catwalk at the European Tattoo Championship where I am competing for Sabine Gaffron with the work she did on my arms. Just over a thousand bikers in the audience screaming obscenities and I am feeling kind of cool, flicking them the finger and winking at their girlfriends… Sabine, the tattooist, paid for my trip here, my hotel and all my expenses so I don’t mind helping her out, flexing my non-existent muscles on my scrawny rocker arms. She wins the gold medal and I get a diploma to show my grand kids one day… The announcer interviewed me on stage when we won and she asked “Was there a lot of blood, sweat and tears going into these?”. I said “Yeah… Blood was mine, sweat was Sabine’s and the tears were my mother’s”.

Favorite song: “Millionaire” (Brass Monkey)


2000
I am 28 years old and standing right below Big Ben watching the countdown to the new millennium as told by laser projected digits on the black night sky. The streets of London are closed to traffic for the first time since WWII and millions of people are partying the old thousand years away, welcoming the next… I am itching all over and I can’t wait for the next millennium to kick in. You can only sell so many guitars and manage so many shitty bands before you are as stuck in a rut as with any other job. I am ready to move on… Fuck this shit. I am staying in London…

Favorite song: “Hello Goodbye” (Hardcore Superstar)


2001
I am 29 and I am carrying a drunk Indian by the name of Samet out to the last rental car in all of Canada; a banged up Windstar. We’re stuck here in Halifax because of the Sep 11th disaster. I was on board a United flight on my way to New York to see the love of my life and we were in New York air space when tragedy struck and were re-directed to Halifax to await further notice.

The story is well worth telling on its own and I will at a later time. I promise... It's a twisted tale of love, mini-bottles of Grand Marnier, Canadian military, refugee camps, making a run for the border and velvet teeth. And all through this my fiancee thinks I was on the plane that was downed in Pennsylvania and that I'm dead as fuck. Later... I promise...

Let me just tell you the happy ending.

It’s only after two days and three nights of weird adventures with the super nice people of Halifax that we are given the clearance to be the first plane to re-enter American air space since the tragedyt. After a lot of commotion (which include trying to ditch the rental car we got as a mean to make a run for that elusive border) we make it onto the plane and finish a flight we started a couple of days ago. As we are about to land the stewardess asks the passengers if anybody has an American flag we can hang out the cockpit window as we tax on to the gate. (Since we are the first ones back there are all kinds of media and stuff covering the event…) We have nothing, but then one of my new found brothers in misery remembers that he has a pair of boxer shorts in the Star Spangled fashion and thus it happened that on September 13th United Airlines flight 957 landed with a cargo of smelly stragglers, flying a pair of underpants out the window. And so it came to be that I finally got to set my big old Swedish foot on American soil for the very first time and finally be united with my future wife. A trip to remember if there ever was one...

Favorite song: “King Of New York” (Quireboys)


2002
I am 30 and saying “I do” to my beautiful wife. I have become all the things I feared as a kid. All grown up and shit and serious, but loving it… I am working in one of the bigger places in the music business on the American East Coast and making connections in my new home land. I meet a lot of odd people and I meet a lot of wonderful people. I go to every show and every gig on Long Island and make a profession out of discovering new bands. I haven’t touched a guitar since I moved from Sweden and I am getting itchy fingers…

Favorite song: “Older” (George Michael)


2004
I am 32 and thoroughly disgusted with the state of affairs in the American music business. It is lacking in quality, integrity and intelligence and I will take it upon myself to change it. At least as far as the metal market is concerned… By starting this smaller website with a bunch of fucked up weirdo friends I am taking the first steps to make things right again. There is no reason this new generation should put up with the shit they are being fed. If they are too fucking stupid and too fucking pacified to speak for themfuckingselves, then I’m sure as fuck going to…

Favorite song: “Terminal Show” (Motorhead)


2004
I am still 32 and writing this. My daughter is sitting in my lap and we’re listening to Elvis on the stereo. I think life goes full circle so it can sneak up on you from behind and kick you in the ass to show you what is really important after all.

Favorite song: “Can’t help falling in love with you” (The King)