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Garage and
psychedelic rock bands are easy to find these days. From south
of the border all the way to the far east and the orient the
style is now all the rage. But there was a time between cock
rock and grunge when a small Swedish band was doing the rounds,
behaving erratically and making the type of noisy music that for
a while only seemed destined to be frowned upon. Years later,
the rest are following. In any case, you probably had to be
there (or in one of the few Stateside gigs) to even notice
their existence. For those who don’t know them, well it’s time
to learn; meet Union Carbide Productions. A band you should
know.
Union Carbide
Productions
Ritz,
Stockholm, January 1988: I remember it quite well. A bunch of
guys in ill-fitting clothes, like something picked up from a
third grade thrift store, get on stage. The crowd, trying to
look blaze, pretended not to notice. Some sounds start to emit
as the band plug in their instruments, and suddenly the bass
pumps out the first bars of Ring my bell. Guitars creep up
behind it – wah-wah-tones spilling out of the PA. Then, on given
signal, the drums crash in and an explosion of sonic distortion
lunges out and hits the crowd like a shockwave.
The band
members stand in contorted postures, holding their instruments
in cramped grip, faces hidden behind greasy hair. They look as
they’re ready to blow up. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a figure
rushes on-stage holding a mike. Head shaven, eyes bulging and
only wearing tight silvery pants and some weird bicycle shoes,
he’s the instant focus of attention. Like a rowboat on a stormy
sea – he’s letting the music throw him around. Frantically
trying to communicate something, emotions filled with an anger
that he can’t articulate – which make even more frustrated. The
volume is extreme, beyond loud, and when he puts the mike to his
mouth, the voice is barely audible. For me, the next 40 minutes
is just a total blur.
But I do recall
the ending: the singer on his knees, trying to connect the mike
to the cord, the two having been separated during his wild
leaps. Finally he gives up and lays on his back, head sticking
into the base drum, screaming the last words into the drum mike.
Me and my friends are trying to rip of one of his shoes, but
security grab me by the shoulder and the pain makes me stop.
Strange, it wasn’t like me to try a stunt like that. Then again…
Union Carbide
Productions wasn’t your ordinary band either. During the
eighties style was everything. In fashion, films, design and –
of course – alternative music. The Swedish scene was relatively
new, but everyone was quick to check out what was ‘in’ and what
was ‘out’. During the end of the decade the goth inspired look
was ‘in’. You listened to German industrial music, coloured your
hair black and applied the posture of ‘the tortured artist’. It
was also okay to champion The Cure, The Smiths or any other
English band that gave misery & self pity a face. And whatever
you did, you had to make sure not to blow your cool. Bands
appeared on stage like ghostly figures, the singers usually
behind utterly silly, applying one theatrical cliché after
another. And the audiences were happy to comply, standing glumly
in front of the stage, many doing their best to out pose the
musicians. Oh what fun times we had, in the eighties! Luckily
there were exceptions.
Union Carbide
Productions was a major. Here were five guys from Gothenburg who
dressed either as slobs or in suits, wore their hair long and
uncombed or shaven to the skin. The music was loud, vibrant and
– unlike most bands – full of groove and energy. Union Carbide
Productions fused the Detroit sound of The Stooges and MC5 with
the weirdness of The Fugs and Captain Beefheart. They let the
Stones, Doors and other great sixties acts shine their songs
long before Primal Scream. Union Carbide Productions was the
band that did everything right in the wrong time. Time – and
luck – was not to be on their side, but like all great bands,
vindication and justice somehow finds a way.
Now then, let’s
take it from the beginning. Gothenburg is the second largest
city in Sweden; a seaport town known for its football team and
lousy winter weather. It’s here that the saga of Union Carbide
Productions begins. In the early eighties teenager Ebbot
Lundberg was one of a bunch of skate punk kids. He nurtured a
taste for American hardcore, listening to bands like Black Flag,
Minor Threat and the Circle Jerks. In 19821 Ebbot met future UCP
guitarist Patrik Caganis at a U.K. Subs gig. Caganis had a
liking for the same hardcore stuff, and the guys began to hang
out, finally forming a band of their own. “We started this
punk band, Sure Trakings Trio, where we did our own numbers with
Swedish lyrics and mixed them up with covers. Among others we
did Rise Above by Black Flag and Tush by ZZ Top. Ebbot sang and
played bass while I was the guitarist”, Caganis remembers.
Between ’83 and
’84 Caganis spent a years as a high school exchange student in
Minnesota, and had the chance to really see some of the
happening US bands in Minneapolis, “I went to gigs with
Husker Du, replacements, Loudfast Rules. Experiencing these
bands as a musician was a great inspiration and it really made
me want to make some mind-blowing stuff myself”, he recalls.
Back in Sweden and fueled by the music of the vibrant
Minneapolis scene he and Ebbot continued trying to get things
moving, although they had dropped the moniker Sure Trakings
trio. But it wasn’t until the fateful meeting of two other
Gothenburg music freaks in the spring of ’86 that things gelled.
Bjorn Olsson
and Henrik Rylander played in Heartbeat City, a band named after
a song by The Cars. Bjorn was guitarist and the source behind
much of the music, and had no interest whatsoever in the punk or
hardcore scene. He’d consumed s steady diet of captain
Beefheart, Zappa, The Stooges, MC5 and no-no’s of the time like
Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival and America. Henrik
handled drums and delved into industrial stuff in the group
Pleasure & Pain, and cited Captain Beefheart drummer “Drumbo”
(John French) as a major influence. The music was raw and loud,
but tinged with an experimental edge. At gigs most people
reacted with dumbfound surprise or just tried to ignore them.
One that didn’t was Patrik Caganis: “I saw them live and
while everybody else seemed to hate them I thought they were
really cool, especially Bjorn since his body and face were
completely covered in silver paint.!”
But it was
through Ebbot Lundberg that Caganis finally in the spring of
1986 ended up playing with his eccentric combo. Ebbot: ”They
had tried out a friend of mine. He didn’t want to stay but
tipped them of that they might try auditioning me. So we met up
and it was decided that me and Patrik would show up at their
rehearsal place and see if it would work out. And work out it
did.”
“ Everything
just came together from day one. Patrik’s guitar fit in great
with the riffs I had made and as soon as we had jammed something
together Ebbot started grooving along, making up lyrics and
arrangements as the melodies came out of his head. We took our
name from a battery I had, made by the Union Carbide
Corporation. Although we changed Corporation to Productions to
mimic Walt Disney Productions”,
says Bjorn Olsson. After a while Ebbot also brought in long
time friend Per Helm on bass. Actually a drummer easily caught
up on to Rylander’s back-beat oriented playing and the two
provided the group with a fluid and dynamic rhythmic section
that set Union Carbide apart from many contemporary garage acts
at the time.
Besides music,
the band members also shared the idea of having good times – and
lots of it too. After beginning thrown out of the rehearsal
place, which was Bjorn’s job, the band set camp at his parent’s
house. “At that time everybody except one guy lived with
their parents. Many of us had similar background, coming from
well to do suburban areas of Gothenburg. After we starting
rehearsing at my home my parents quickly disapproved of our
activities”, remembers Bjorn. Besides playing the new found
friends partied a lot, and it was after several alcohol-related
mishaps that the band member’s families called a parent meeting
with all the band members! Ebbot: “That’s a classic episode.
I mean, it was pathetic. We were in our early twenties, and our
parents sat there and said we had a bad influence on each other,
and that we must promise to calm down and stop drinking! We just
sat there and giggled. After the meeting we went out and pissed
out of our minds”.
Worried parents
or not, Union Carbide Productions continued to evolve and
started to write songs in a furious pace. The so far unreleased
Senile Man became the first of many numbers UCP quickly penned
in its first year of existence. Live the band debuted on June
the 14th 1986 at a local “Save the Forest” festival
in Gothenburg. UCP drove the sound technicians nuts by turning
the volume way up and kicking over an amp that hit a guy in the
head. A rowdy crowd of skate punk friends also added to the
chaos, and the live standards for Union Carbide Productions were
thus set from the start.
At the end of
’86 the band recorded three songs at Music-a-Matic Studio in
Gothenburg: “Financial Declarations”, “Summer Holiday Camp” and
“So Long”. They had no record deal and paid for the session
themselves. One tape with these songs was sent to Carl
Abrahamsson in Stockholm, then editor of underground fanzine
Lollipop. “One day I received an unusually polite letter saying
a cassette was on its way with Union Carbide. I paid no
attention to his weird name until I finally received the tape in
question; A splendid mix of Detroit frustration, pure energy and
unrefined teenage angst. Lyrics dealing not with anger at
society and the old clichéd rock slogans but something decidedly
more genuine… Here were kids who were singing about having too
much money and too many options in life”, Abrahamsson remembers.
He quickly got in touch with the band, and was actually in
January ’87 the first to release Union Carbide Productions on
record with a flexi-disc of “Financial Declaration” included on
an issue of Lollipop, to day a real collector’s item. Like a
lot of people he was struck by their performance on stage:
“live, they were unparalleled, Ebbot tossing and turning and
really hurting himself. Not a pathetic clone of past gods but
rather the desperate madman looking for attention and a fight.
Drum and bass pumping mechanically in strict order and guitars
whining through wanting wah-wahs. In the first few gigs I saw
people were too baffled to even consider dancing. I don’t think
they could understand what they were up to live themselves.
They just nervously entered the area, grabbed their g ear and
got started… No thinking, no fearing, no hesitating. When they
played they meant it. I remember one concert in Berlin, packed
house, lively crowd. As always, there were people shouting
insults – loudly – but instead of shouting back Ebbot and the
band just started playing the next song “Maximum Dogbreath” (If
I’m not mistaken). The sheer aggressive power of the brilliant
performance pushed the hooligans violently back. Needless to say
they loved it.
At the end of
April ’87 he band finally landed a deal with Radium Records, a
small but vibrant local label that was run by a group of
musicians and artists cultivating a Warholesque Factory scene
doing music, films and art exhibits. The label, now defunct,
released and nurtured many interesting Swedish acts as Sator,
Stonefunkers, and Blue for Two. CM von Hausswolff, then one of
the people running Radium remembers how I found the people
behind the music full of attitude. “I thought they were very
intelligent and egocentric persons – perfect qualities for a
genuine artist. These guys had lots of confidence. An integrity
– which in their case wasn’t a bad thing. At that time nobody
was doing what they were into, and having a reputation as
spoiled rich kids with outrageous behaviour didn’t exactly help
them make friends with the media or the music biz. A lot was
exaggerated, but not all. And we really didn’t mind if there was
a scandal here and there. It was good to have when we wrote
bios”, he muses.
Radium released
their debut In the Air Tonight in September ’87. Before that the
band had made a tumultuous and much talked about gig at the
Hultsfred festival in southern Sweden. Henrik Rylander: “We
got there with 30 of our friends, all wearing backstage passes
saying Union Carbide Productions. Since everyone of them had the
same idea as us about partying the band got blamed as soon as
someone with a backstage pass was found out of his head,
sleeping in the grass or doing some other crazy stunt.” And
the gig? It lasted for about 30 minutes, collapsing when manager
Johan Kugelberg rushed stage with a saxophone, intent on joining
in, only to be wrestles off by Ebbot.
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