Unlike the double-CD Paerson Sound, Sov gott Rose-Marie is a reissue of an official LP release, with a bonus track; Trees, Grass & Stones’ first release.

The CD booklet contains a highly interesting text by Magnus Haglund, called The History of Paerson Sound – International Harvester, and Harvester, plus some really nice pictures, which brings home a real sense of the times. Haglund’s text shows some real live insight and understanding of what was happening, like, for instance this quote, relating to the piece I Mourn You:

Another Hagman comment:

Dies irae was part of the Requiem Mass until the 1960s. It deals with the day of God’s Great Wrath, i.e. Doomsday. In Trees, Grass and Stones’ (well, International Harvester’s) version, it’s a brief, repetitious figure in the brass, starting off loud and then slowly receding and finally fading out in the distance, while the most common and familiar of Swedish small birds sing their familiar songs, archetypical for us Northerners. I hear the chaffinch, the willow-warbler and others, and though I don’t hear them, I can feel that they’re there: the pines!
When the Dies irae is heard like this, it takes on a Viking Age shroud, perhaps because of the loud, repetitious brass calls, in the vein – as I imagine them, romantically! – of old bronze lures.

This is an old song written by Fredrik August Dahlgren (1816 – 95). It was part of a lyrical drama entitled Varmlanningarna (1845), with music by Andreas Randel.
The text of I villande skogen – the short part of it that the group sings here - goes:

It’s a very romantic, folkloristic, archaic kind of text, typical for the 1800s, about herding cattle in the forests, and about true love. Here Trees, Grass and Stones deliver the song in a held-back kind of singing, almost hushed; the birds mentioned in track 1 (still present here) sounding much louder than the singers – who sing unaccompanied, save for the afore-mentioned birds (and the pines!)

A frantic, pounding, throbbing rock song, carved out of time with mind, with nails – rock carving music, burning minds music: relentless… but very short, like rock songs of the old era of 45 rpms. It’s like the band is playing with this roundabout three minutes idiom. Perhaps they are! Thunderous rain on the window! A crow ducking under an apple tree. “Play-fuckin’-loud”-music!

Late July crickets, so high up in the pitches that you almost don’t register them, and cars passing by on a road: only then the music emerges, in a thumpy, spinning and swaggering melody that makes use of various kinds of very sparse percussion, like cow bells, bongos and triangles (I think). A brief, melancholy, inward song – just like those moments of absentmindedness in the tall grass of late July, when summer in Sweden is ripe, when summer is culminating, and the crickets talk to themselves as the wind travels through the fields.

The text says it all:

Well, ok, maybe Tage Erlander wouldn’t-couldn’t do that, because he was getting quite old – but his successor Olof Palme probably could! I saw him on TV after he was killed, dancing Greek folk dances in a Greek village, caught on a villager’s old 8-millimeter film camera.

Wow, reminds me of Vietnam demonstrations I attended – and commercial jingles in Dallas, Texas! The set-up is impressive, i.e., the sound of drums – big drums – and frantic choral speech is impressive. You can hardly remain still, and you want to join in the shouting!

The text simply consists of the name Ho Chi Minh, yelled:

– exactly that many times!

The heaviest drums sound like Japanese Odaiko drums. They probably aren’t but the sound is large and heavy! Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh!

I have to explain why I find similarities to Texan jingles. I used to live in Texas, after I got married to an American lady when I was bicycling across the US from New York City, heading for San Francisco in 1978. Half way I got married… and that spoiled the biking. On the radio in Dallas – the origin of the Dr. Pepper beverage – I kept hearing a jingle that stuck in my head just as good as that Ho Chi Minh bit:

…and the shit sticks till this day! Scary, huh? Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh! Drink Dr. Pepper!

I wonder why the band recorded songs like this one. It’s a real mystery. Of course, they had no idea what would make them legends, and what kind of music would carry them down the decades – but this sounds like some mild Peter & Gordon pop song from 1960s’ England, the England of Carnaby Street, Mary Quant and Twiggy – and those dedicated followers of fashion. “It’s only love, sha-la-la sha-la-la-la-la…”

Another really bizarre bit, starting with a soundscape from an Asian or maybe African village, with villagers talking in an unidentifiable lingo while herded animals are detectable in the background. You can feel the smell of dust up your nostrils, and the urge for the waterhole some ways off!
Enters Trees, Grass & Stones:

...on and on! And the inserted “Ja, mina vanner, klockan ar mycket nu!” (“Yes, my friends, it’s getting late now!”)
This repetition is chanted and layered, and jazzy music is emerging in the tightening web of sounds, and later on some kind of discussion is going on between a couple of people, but I can’t make any sense of the shreds I can make out. It has to do with environmental concerns and population growth, and the repeated sentence comes from writer and ecology debater Georg Borgstrom (1912 - 1990), who argued that it was getting late on Earth, the way things were headed. This wasn’t so evident in those days, when development optimism was very strong, as well as national Swedish economics. Jobs could be found in abundance. Then came Rachel Carson (1907 - 1964 with Silent Spring (1962), and in Sweden Georg Borgstrom and his pamphlet books The Hungry Planet: The Modern World at the Edge of Famine (1965) and Too Many: A Biological Overview of the Earth's Limitations (1969).

Yet another short, dreamy shred, like a faded old photograph found in a drawer, suddenly calling up fragmented memories of summers of your youth; the smell of fusty reeds down by the lake, while you lie on the jetty, studying the white puffs of clouds drifting inland. Just like that. A shred of a melody, folksy; clarinet and a humming voice – and some bells. Wow! The significance of the insignificant! Wonderful!

Here the band starts to sound more the way we’ve become accustomed to them, with a melody line that keeps coming back in shrill, high-flying electric distortion guitar riff permutations from Bo Anders Persson, the pounding drums of Thomas Mera Gartz and the throbbing bass weaving from Torbjörn Abelli. This folk tune receives the treatment by Trees, Grass and Stones, and the only off aspect of the recording is the limited duration. It’s a freewheelin’ swirl of a dancer across the planks of a dance pavilion; years of love and childbirths ahead, through the light nights of intense Scandinavian melancholy. Boy, can I identify!

Trees, Grass & Stones deliver a somber and heartfelt song about the death of a loved one; perhaps a Grandma or a sister or even a child. I can see the relatives in the apartment, the sounds of their shoes across the newly scrubbed floor-planks – and even the caretaker is shedding tears: Sleep tight, Rose-Mary!

The whole sequence of the song spells mourning, considering the tone of voice, the elastic expression of the words, as if uttered through time that is thick and sticky as glue: a situation you have to accept though every fiber of your body hurts, though your mind is on fire: Sleep tight, Rose-Mary (in my head-on interpretation):

Frankly, I haven’t really – REALLY – listened to this song before I took it upon me to write about it more in depth (showing, maybe, in my earlier words on the song in the Paerson Sound review) … and it’s a song so strong it moves me to tears, with all its associations, for example as it makes me think of my own brother who succumbed to polio during one of the last epidemics, in 1950. He was 15, and I was very small. Death took only him in our family, and on the neighboring farm it took his girlfriend.

This could be a direct continuation of the preceding lament, but here it comes on in a howling expression of fierce despair, like a severely worsened version of Mick Jagger’s I Miss You from the much later album Some Girls (1978).
A very simple melody emerges gradually out of nowhere, steadily growing in volume and intensity, Gartz playing his drums into a hasty, jittery kind of marching tune, to which the vocals, appearing after a few minutes, adhere, with a gradually more desperate chanting of the words “I mourn you”, finally reaching a state of elevated dismay that could move even bureaucrats to tears and empathic action.

Here comes the last piece on the original vinyl, and also the only more extended work on this CD, the way we’re used to hearing Trees, Grass & Stones, in long garlands of hypnotic throbbing rhythms and hounding guitar trajectories, in a constant showering of glistening overtones and shimmering distortions – but here in a more obvious Indian atmosphere than usual, with Nag Champa incense rising out of the sounds in wiggly towers of weightless fragrances…

It’s hard to really make out the orchestration of the band, but you instantly recognize some kind of hand drum, bongo type. Then there is an electric drone in place, vibrating at a constantly changing oscillation. I don’t now what that is. Could be an electric hurdy-gurdy or a likewise electric tanpura, or some early electric box that Bo Anders Persson got hold of (or is it indeed innovative playing by Arne Eriksson on his cello?) – and then there’s the transverse flute, providing a lucid dream layer, courtesy Thomas Tidholm.

When the music starts, and when it keeps on keeping on, you also hear the sounds of the environment, making it clear that this wasn’t as much a concert as just one activity amongst other goings-on in the park, the Vita Bergen Park of Stockholm, where this recording was made by the band itself.
The sounds of the band sort of blend in with the fleeting moment in the park when all this happened; when those kids played around the musicians on the lawn, under the trees, calling out to each other, and while those dogs barked occasionally, there noses peeking out of their dog consciousnesses.
The very atmosphere is Indian or Nepalese, somehow, in the droning and tingling that goes on and on, with wordless vocals joining. It could be a recording from Jaipur, the red dust rising in the heat of the afternoon, or it could be a gathering of musicians in a small square in Katmandu, the great summits looming above the cloud layers in the distance like lofty deities. In fact, this Vita Bergen recording with Trees, Grass & Stones remind me a lot of a Jaltarang recording I have from Katmandu, Nepal, with Krishna Narayan on porcelain bowls and Kansaras Karnikar on tabla: a raga played with wooden sticks on porcelain bowls with various amounts of water. That Jaltarang episode also sports these nice extraneous sounds of people and animals stirring, making for a total experience of the moment.

How To Survive is an amazing piece of music. It makes me long, I’m not sure what for – but it makes me long… and I always long like that through sunny days of early spring in Sweden, when the asphalt starts to dry up and the coltsfoots are waiting under a layer of yesteryear’s dried up leaves and grass in the ditches. This piece was recorded in August of 1968 – but I’m writing in March of 2007…

This is a bonus track on the CD that didn’t appear on any LP. This lengthy work was originally intended as one whole side of the LP, but was scrapped for unknown reasons (unknown to me, that is!). It’s a real take, i.e., no outdoors snapshot, but a planned recording directly onto two channels in Nacka School Auditorium in August 1968.
Nonetheless, it’s dreamy, throbbing, bouncing and welling-forth of musical time is very characteristic of Trees, Grass & Stones, and they make themselves some real down-home justice here, for this takes you by the hand and brings you into a summertime fairytale where nothing can harm you, and where your dreams come true, one after the other, with a promised liberation through enlightenment on the far side of everything. Majestic! Hypnotic! Deeply engaging. As detrimental today as it was in 1968. This music hasn’t aged one minute; it sounds outside of time, inside of mind.

Thomas Mera Gartz steers his mighty goblin contraption of bouncing and beating rhythms down the illusory path of existence, while Thomas Tidholm evokes sirens of the woods out of hiding on his enchanting flute that no transparent beings of parallel worlds can withstand.
Bo Anders Persson has ground, sharpened and whetted his electric axe until it shines and blinds, and he plays it like a samurai his sword, in shining, slashing incisions through the atmosphere, in blazing exclamations of home-ground sonorities that pierce and fondle, cut and heal! Out of this world, Mr. and Mrs. – out of this world!
Torbjörn Abelli builds a rubbery lattice-work for everything to climb through, for these seekers on a mission to rise up; one hand there, your left foot there, grab and push and rise!: a sturdy and complex bass calculation for everyone to trust; a way up these hills – because, in the end, this is… mountaineering music!

Aah, that summit, those breathtaking views, the cold air, the prayer fliers – everything in one, endless gaze!

Trees, Grass and Stones! Kiitos!