Träd, Gräs och Stenar – Träd, Gräs och Stenar
Anthology Recordings – Out Now
Sometimes it is good to realise how big the world is, and, paradoxically, how small. In my youth – and it is for others to decide if it was misspent, even, perhaps by not misspending it – in my youth I was lucky enough to have an eclectic taste in music at a time when the pigeon holes were quite large which, in fact, to many of us did not really exist. I could, and still do, move seamlessly from 12th-century Gregorian chant to 1930’s British dance band to folk to rock to hard-bop. The thing is, that period of the late sixties and very early seventies was one of experimentation with musical ideas, musical history and musical forms.
Now, here in the late second decade of the next century and looking back, this mix, this melting pot of that period is much more apparent, much clearer to see with the distance of time. The multitude of modern boxes into which we must push our musical forms seems so restrictive, so limiting that when someone breaks these rules, they are as likely to be ridiculed as to be lauded. Back then, things were different.
For example listen to Träd, Gräs och Stenar by Swedish band Träd, Gräs och Stenar which comprises of two live albums Djungelns Lag (“The Law of the Jungle” – ’71), Mors Mors (“Hi, How Are You” – ’72), and also Kom Tillsammans (“Come Together”), with unearthed, previously unreleased 1971/72 material. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience despite the fact that my knowledge of the Scandinavian languages is zero, except that is to say “tack”, learned from having watched Forbrydelsen. The music is a snapshot of what we might now refer to, i.e. pigeonhole, as psych folk, but has lots of things going on inside the 27 tracks that that will take 4 hours and 46 minutes to listen to. I had a lot of photo editing to be getting on with.
The band, whose title translates as Trees, Grass and Stones, were very much part of the left-leaning counter-culture movement in Sweden of the 1960s and 70s, though not necessarily as far to the left as some. It is possible that they were more interested in demonstrating the ability for people to get up on the stage and have their say than in demonstrating per se. Torbjörn Abelli recalls that the most important contribution he thought the band made was
Come together! Do it yourself! Arrange concerts!
WE, HERE and NOW!
Our music was a sort of ritualistic battle cry, a call for people to be free, follow their own rhythm, their own harmony: set yourself free from your oppressors.
Food was an important part of the whole thing, particularly for Bo Anders and Abelli. Concerts were not only about playing music but also about educating people about macrobiotic food, farming and political thought. All this wrapped in an itinerant life:
a bunch of rootless musical gypsies, a rock band that had no idea where home was or rather, a band that found a home everywhere and anywhere
The album is made up of recordings from the bands final year in its original form, from July 1971 to May 1972 and are, as far as I can tell, all live recordings, some not particularly good in their technical quality. That doesn’t really matter though as I think that this is overshadowed by the overall feeling of setting you back in that period of nearly 50 years ago. The opening track, Sanningens Silverflod (The Silver Flood of Truth according to the online translator) sets the scene perfectly with its guitar fade-in intro, setting a rhythm to work its way into you. There is a longer version later on that we seem to join part way through and is perhaps a tad lighter in spirit.
Some, such as I Ijuset av din dag (In The Light Of Your Day) just become rock of the age before descending into wailing and the fading until the couple in the audience clap. Some appear from nowhere. Ofullständiga rättigheter (Incomplete Rights) is not on the accompanying track listing but is a good example of the extended guitar solo, something not generally available in the period given the restrictive length of 12” vinyl. With the advent of the larger capacity compact disks and subsequent digital recording, we can now listen to these longer pieces as one and this is something that we should be grateful for.
The longest track on this set is Amithaba/In kilmer Gösta (Amitabha/In Comes Gösta) which at nearly 34 minutes perhaps needs some staying power but is a good demonstration that however prog such bands may be (and I don’t think that this band ever thought they were) they have rock at their heart when they break out of the lengthy improvisations and end up rocking like the best of them. But then … that doesn’t matter.
So, what value is this album? Well, actually it has a lot. It is a good slice of that mish-mash of music from a period when it was not important to be one thing or the other. Tribalism was a lot broader and possibly more concerned with political activism than with the sort of rhythm you favoured. It is also good to hear music that can be recognised as of its period and sits well alongside the British and American stuff we listened to at the time – even though we firmly believed that music only came from the UK and the US at the time; we didn’t know that Europe listened to its own bands. The album also offers a good view of the longer form of the rock track that we would have been denied at the time. And we also get two versions of their interpretation of the Rolling Stones’ Last Time, though I probably would not put that at the top of the list.
Feeling a bit like I’m now on Antiques Roadshow, I would say that this album is valuable to lovers of late sixties, early seventies rock/prog rock/psych rock, to lovers of Swedish rock history, and to those younger viewers who want to know what it was like when we met the extended rock guitar solo. It is also valuable, albeit a tad late in my case, to appreciate that the musical world was – and is – quite big, yet strangely quite small.
Available on CD/LP/Digital – https://tradgrasochstenar.bandcamp.com/