We Wanted to Be Like Them (part one)

We wanted to be like them.

Not just a little inspired. Not just interested in music. No, we wanted to be like them for real. Have hair like them. Walk like them. Party like them. Laugh like them. Go on tour like them. We wanted to stand on stage like them at the Concert Hall or Scandinavium and look as if we had never done anything else. We wanted the light to hit us the same way. We wanted people to look at us the way we looked at them.

It all began in the boys’ rooms.

That was where the dream took shape. The future hung on the walls with tape and drawing pins. Bravo, Melody Maker, Okey, and every other pop magazine we could get hold of were bought, read to pieces, leafed through again and again, and then sacrificed to the walls. Pictures were cut out with surgical precision. One week some glam rocker would be up there in glitter boots with the stare of a prince from outer space. The next week he would be pushed aside by a new hero with a guitar, long hair, and a facial expression that seemed to say school, the state, and the whole adult world could go to hell.

The walls became a kind of living collage of who we wanted to be.

My mother could open the door, look in, and see ten long-haired men with bare chests, narrow hips, strange poses, and even stranger expressions staring back from the walls.

“Do they all have to be there?” she might ask.

And you would think: where else would they be? They belong in here. With us. In this shrine of posters, singles, cables, dust, and oversized plans.

Music was not just something you listened to. It was clothes. Hair. Posture. The way you held a cigarette, even though you could barely stand the smoke. The way you leaned against a wall as if you already had three tours of England behind you, when in reality you had just been told to go to bed.

We practiced being rock musicians almost as much as we practiced music.

And in the middle of all this there were the record shops.

Waideles was not just a shop. It was a gate. A temple. A place where you walked in with money in your pocket and came out with a new life under your arm. An LP was not a purchase. It was a statement. A manifesto. A decision about who you were going to be for the rest of the week, or ideally for the rest of your life.

I especially remember one day that burned itself into my memory. 1971. I was ten years old. That alone says something about how early all this took hold of me. While others may have been thinking about bicycles, football, or model cars, I was standing outside Waideles waiting for Black Sabbath’s new album, Master of Reality.

It was not ordinary waiting.

It was ceremonial waiting.

The kind of waiting you feel in your stomach, that makes the air outside the shop almost vibrate. Gothenburg carried on around us — trams rolled past, people did their errands, adults lived their adult lives — but for us standing there, it felt as if time itself was holding its breath. It was like waiting for a messenger from another world.

And that was exactly what it was.

When the door opened and the record was finally in my hands, it did not feel like buying an LP. It felt like carrying home dynamite. The sleeve, the weight, the feeling of it. Even the walk home became an adventure. You held that record with the same respect other people might reserve for communion or cash. This was sacred material.

And then came the return home.

That boys’ room suddenly became the center of the world. Me and my band — or what happened to be my band that particular week — gathered inside. One sat on the bed. Another on the floor. Someone stayed standing because he was too wound up to sit. And then the record was put on.

When the needle dropped and the sound came, we went completely crazy.

It was as if the walls shifted. The posters almost started breathing. Black Sabbath were not just playing through the speakers. They stepped into the room and took over our entire imagination. That heavy, dark, threatening, magical sound went straight into the body. Not only into the ears, but into the stomach, the chest, the imagination. The boys’ room in Gothenburg suddenly became Birmingham, the underground, the future, danger, and freedom all at once.

We stared at each other as if we had just heard the truth.

It was no longer a question of if we were going to become musicians. It was only a question of when. And preferably immediately.

That is hard to explain to someone who grew up with all the music in the world one click away. Back then, music arrived as an event. As an arrival. It had been preceded by rumors, waiting, talk, and longing. When it finally came, you shared it. Together. That made it bigger. Heavier. Almost religious.

And maybe it was right there, in that boys’ room with Master of Reality spinning, that something was decided. We did not just become fans. We became obsessed. We became a group of boys who genuinely believed that life had to be possible to live this way — loud, free, dark, grand, and together.

Then came the dream of instruments.

When air guitar was no longer enough, our eyes turned toward Musik utan gränser in Haga. Just the name! Music Without Borders. It did not sound like a shop. It sounded like a revolution. You went there with the same nerves as you would to a first date or a math exam you had not studied for. Expectation mixed with fear and hope.

And there they were: two Brits.

That was enough.

They were from England. Which meant they knew everything. That was how we saw it. And there was no reason to complicate the matter. If you had an English accent and stood among guitars, cables, and amplifiers in Haga, then you were, in practice, a professor of rock. In our heads, they had probably had tea with Pete Townshend, argued with someone from The Kinks, and seen half of London explode in feedback.

We did not just buy strings and picks there.

We bought confirmation.

A feeling that maybe this world could actually be approached. That rock did not only exist on posters. It existed here too. In Gothenburg. In Haga. Inside a shop where two Brits sold the future across the counter.

Then there were the youth centers.

That was where the bands were formed. Not slowly, carefully, and strategically. No. Explosively. Someone had a guitar. Someone had borrowed a drum kit from a cousin. Someone else claimed he could play bass, which often meant he owned a bass but not much more than that. The singer was usually the one with the most confidence, the best hair, or the least sensitivity to embarrassment.

Bands could be formed on a Tuesday and fall apart by Thursday.

It could begin in total unity: now we are doing this, now we mean it, now we are going to become huge. Then all it took was for someone to say the wrong thing about a girl the bandleader liked, or for someone to stand a little too close to the wrong girl, or look a little too long in the wrong direction on the wrong evening, and it was over. Then you were out.

Not just out of the band.

It felt like being thrown out of the future.

But the beautiful thing was that the future had a short memory. If you got kicked out on Friday, you were often in a new band by Monday. New name, new line-up, same dream. Often the same conflicts too, but you did not think too much about that. Someone was always “too dominant,” someone else “didn’t get the feeling,” a third “thought he was the star.”

Which was funny, because deep down everyone in the band thought they themselves were the star.

The rehearsal rooms were nothing you would ever feature in an interior design magazine. They were often cold, damp, half-dark, and smelled of dust, old wood, sweat, and youthful desperation. But to us they were Abbey Road. Anything could happen in there. A riff could be born. A band name could appear. A friendship could be cemented. Or everything could collapse within twenty minutes because the drummer was late and the guitarist had already managed to become both offended, in love, and misunderstood.

Sometimes there was not even any rehearsal.

Sometimes it was just partying.

And that was almost as important.

You gathered to play, but someone had brought something to drink, someone else had heard a new album at an older brother’s place, someone had met a girl, someone had been dumped, someone was moody, someone was in love, and suddenly the whole evening had passed without a single song being played all the way through.

In hindsight, that may sound inefficient.

In reality, that was the whole education.

That was where you learned what a band really was. Not just music, but friendship, competition, hierarchies, dreams, misunderstandings, humor, and emotions nobody really had the tools to handle. A band was as much social dynamics as amplifiers.

And then came the concerts.

The Concert Hall. Scandinavium. Those evenings when you stood there looking up at the stage and thought: that is where we are going. Not to an ordinary life. Not to order, routines, and adulthood. No. Up there. Into the light. Into that strange power that happens when an entire room looks in the same direction and listens to the same beat, the same riff, the same scream.

We did not see the practical side behind it. We did not think about trucks, lack of sleep, technical problems, or bad money. We only saw the freedom. Only the sheer ease with which they carried themselves. They looked as if they lived in a universe where everyday life had no access.

That was where we wanted to go.

So we started dressing for it. Or trying to. The result was sometimes more “Haga basement meets second-hand curtain” than international rock icon, but the ambition was monumental. Someone bought boots that rubbed so badly that the whole rock dream had to be carried out with bloodshed. Someone let his hair grow into something that looked like a failed rebellion against both combs and parents. Someone found a jacket that, in the right light, almost looked professional.

Everything mattered.

Because you were in the process of creating yourself.

And that was the big thing. You did not have to be ready in order to begin. You began anyway. You borrowed. Guessed. Imitated. Exaggerated. Made a fool of yourself. Started over. There was something very beautiful in that. Today everything has to be packaged, professional, and fully thought through from the start. Back then it was enough to want it badly enough and have access to an amplifier that at least worked some of the time.

When I think back on those years, I do not just see a bunch of kids with oversized dreams and terrible equipment.

I see a generation trying to find its place in the world through music. We built our identities with the help of posters, records, boys’ rooms, youth centers, record shops, borrowed instruments, and raw longing. And in Gothenburg there was room for that. Between the trams, Haga, Waideles, Musik utan gränser, the Concert Hall, Scandinavium, and all those tiny rehearsal rooms, something grew.

It was not just about playing.

It was about becoming someone.

We wanted to be like them.

So we did the only thing we could. We bought their records. Put their pictures on our walls. Copied the way they walked. Formed our bands. Argued. Laughed. Dreamed. Wore out our boys’ rooms with music. Waited outside Waideles as if life itself depended on it. And when Master of Reality finally spun in that room and we went wild, we understood that this was not just an interest.

It was a direction.

And even if we never became exactly like them, we became something else along the way.

Something of our own.

Something messy, warm, and full of Gothenburg.