We Wanted to Be Like Them (part two)

Because in the rehearsal room, you could be a king. There, you could stop halfway through a song, blame the cable, say that you “just weren’t really feeling it today,” or insist that the song would come together next time. The rehearsal room was forgiving. It was like a mother with poor hearing. But a live gig? That was something else entirely. There was nowhere to hide. You had to get up there, step into the light, and try to look as if you had been born to do it — even if you barely knew how to plug in the amplifier without something starting to smoke.

And still, that was exactly what we wanted.

The first gigs rarely came with glamour. They came with youth centers, school dances, and some improvised stage in a hall that smelled of coffee, dust, and wet mops. Sometimes it was a gymnasium turned into a pop temple for one evening. Sometimes a church hall where some brave adult had thought, “The young people need something to do.” They probably had not fully imagined Marshall amps, feedback, and a drum solo sounding like someone throwing a cutlery drawer down a stone staircase.

But we loved it.

Just carrying the gear in was almost a ritual in itself. Amplifiers that weighed as much as small cars. Drums that never fit together properly. Cables with lives of their own. Someone had forgotten a stand. Someone else had forgotten the lyrics to the one song we could actually play all the way through. And somebody was already talking to a girl in the audience even though we had not even managed to get the bass onto the stage yet.

It was always the same thing: huge confidence, terrible planning.

And that was exactly why it was so beautiful.

We wanted to look like a touring professional band, but the truth was that it often looked more like a moving company with hormonal problems. We hauled, carried, swore, laughed, and at the same time tried to hold onto the feeling that this was the beginning of something big. Because that was how we saw every gig. Not as a performance at a youth center in Västra Frölunda or a local event in some community hall. No. In our heads, it was Madison Square Garden. Or at the very least Scandinavium, if the universe happened to be in a good mood.

And once you stood there on stage…

My God.

The first thing that hit you was the light. Even if it was just a few simple lamps and a couple of tired spotlights, it felt enormous. Then came the heat. And then that strange mixture of panic and euphoria. You were terrified and immortal at the same time. Your knees could shake, your hands could sweat, your stomach could twist itself in knots — but the moment you struck the first chord, something happened. Another room opened inside you.

At best.

At worst, everything went wrong immediately.

The guitar could be out of tune. The microphone could die. The singer could forget the lyrics in the second line and start mumbling something that sounded vaguely English if you were being generous. The drummer could drop a stick. The bass player could accidentally start playing a completely different song for a few seconds, fully convinced that it was the others who had made the mistake. And yet you carried on. That was almost the most beautiful thing of all. Nobody thought: let’s stop. No. You kept going as if the disaster was part of the arrangement.

That was where you learned something important about life: sometimes you just have to look confident and continue.

And the audience?

Well, that was a chapter of its own.

Sometimes they stood there with folded arms looking like a labor court. Sometimes they were happy simply because something was happening. Sometimes they danced. Sometimes they stood there giggling at the singer’s trousers. Sometimes they came to listen, sometimes to flirt, sometimes just to see if somebody would make a fool of himself. Quite often, it was all three at once.

And the girls.

Let us not pretend otherwise. Part of the whole band idea was naturally about girls. Not only, but certainly as well. Music was a path to freedom, identity, community — and maybe, finally, to seeming interesting. For many of us, the instrument was not just an instrument. It was a social tool. A ticket out of invisibility.

And sometimes it worked.

Suddenly there you were after a gig, hot, half deaf, happy, and slightly shocked that someone had actually looked at you as if you were more than the boy who forgot his gym kit or struggled with math. On stage, you could become someone else. Or perhaps rather, more of the person you dreamed of being.

That was powerful.

At the same time, band life was also full of comedy, pettiness, and total collapse. Because the more you started playing out, the more the egos grew. Suddenly it was not only about playing. Now it was about who stood where on stage. Who got the most applause. Who the girls talked to afterward. Who really was “the face of the band.” And of course — when four or five young guys with roughly the same oversized dreams have to share a stage, it does not take much for a world war to break out over who moved the microphone stand two inches in the wrong direction.

Bands are strange little democracies.

Everyone says they want the same thing, but deep down everyone wants to be seen the most.

All it could take was one comment. “You play too loud.” “You take up too much space.” “You looked at my girl for too long.” “Why did you thank the audience as if it were your band?” And then the circus began. What to an outsider would have seemed like a minor detail suddenly became a three-act moral drama.

You can laugh about it now.

Back then, it was deadly serious.

And yet there was a loyalty inside bands that was hard to find anywhere else. When it worked, it really worked. Then you carried each other’s amplifiers, lent money you did not have, covered for one another when somebody forgot the lyrics or lost his nerve. You defended your band against other bands, against the audience, against the adult world, and sometimes against reality itself. We may have fought internally like badly managed royal families, but outwardly we were family.

And that whole thing with other bands mattered too.

There was rivalry, of course. Who was the best? Who had the best singer? Who had the coolest guitar? Who had “original material,” which was a major thing even when the original material really sounded like a half-stolen mix of Sabbath, Slade, and something heard on the radio but never fully understood. But the rivalry was also inspiring. You went to see other local bands and thought two things at the same time: they’re good… and we are going to beat them.

That was healthy.

It kept the dream warm.

Then came the parties.

Because sometimes the gig slipped into something else. Somebody had access to a hall. Somebody knew somebody who could get beer. Somebody had brought a bottle from home with questionable contents and an even more questionable label. And suddenly there you were in the middle of the night with amplifiers still warm, ears ringing, and the feeling that life right then was bigger than all adult rules.

It was chaotic. Often fairly innocent, sometimes a little less innocent, but above all unforgettable.

Because it was there, in the afterglow of the gigs, that so much of life happened. The jokes. The arguments. The flirting. The big plans. The promises about the future. Somebody was going to move to London. Somebody was going to start a new, heavier band. Somebody was going to buy a real Les Paul. Somebody was never going to drink again, which by the following weekend had already proven to be a very airy promise.

A lot of it never happened.

But that did not matter.

Because the important thing was not always the result. The important thing was how intensely we lived in all of this. Everything mattered. One gig could keep you high for a week. A failed gig could feel like the end of the world for two days. One glance from the right person in the audience could be enough to make you think life had just turned a page. Band life made emotions larger. Everything was turned up — literally and emotionally.

And then, as always, life began pulling people in different directions.

Not everyone stayed. Somebody got a job. Somebody had children early. Somebody became serious in a way that did not fit with late-night rehearsals and half-organized gigs. Somebody got tired. Somebody burned out from dreaming bigger than the available resources. Somebody carried on into music for real. Others drifted into different roles, other contexts, other stages.

But something remained.

It still does.

Because even if later in life you became something else — a project manager, a worker, an entrepreneur, a father, whatever — the band guy stayed inside. The one who knows what it feels like to drag an amplifier through the rain. The one who knows what an audience feels like in the stomach before the first song. The one who learned that timing is everything, that group dynamics are hard, and that sometimes it does not help to be right if you say it at the wrong moment.

That is why so many people who once had band life in their bodies carry it with them for the rest of their lives. Not because everyone became a star, but because you learned things there that cannot really be learned anywhere else. You learned interplay. Ego. Chaos control. Courage. Improvisation. How to get back up when something goes wrong in front of people. How to carry on even when you forgot the lyrics, dropped the stick, or had an argument during the break.

It is strange how much of adult life actually resembles a band.

Somebody plays too loud. Somebody arrives late. Somebody wants more credit. Somebody thinks the others understand nothing. And still, somehow, you try to make the song hold together.

Maybe that is why one smiles when looking back.

Because not all of it was beautiful. Not all of it was successful. Some of it was downright embarrassing. The clothes, the hairstyles, certain lyrics, certain attempts at “English” pronunciation that probably should have been outlawed by government decree. But in all of that, there was heart. There was laughter. There was thirst. There was a desire to be more than just an audience to your own life.

We did not only want to stand below the stage and look up.

We wanted to get up there ourselves.

And sometimes we actually did.

Not always with brilliance. Not always with control. But with will. With hunger. With warmth. With exactly the kind of youthful madness that moves the world forward.

So if Part 1 was about the boys’ rooms, the posters, Waideles, and the dream, then Part 2 is about when the dream got legs. When it stumbled out onto small stages, carried amplifiers that were too heavy, argued in dressing rooms, flirted after gigs, and learned that music is never only music.

It is life.

And maybe that is the finest thing one can say about those years in Gothenburg, about the bands, the gigs, the parties, and all those boys who wanted to become like their heroes: we may never have become exactly like them.

But we got to experience something of our own.

Something that smelled of dust, beer, sweat, cables, wet asphalt, and the future.

Something that sounded like an out-of-tune guitar suddenly finding the right note.

Something that began in a boys’ room and continued long after the posters had come down.

Band life never really leaves the body.

It stays in your posture, in your memory, in your ears, in the way you read a room, in the way you understand groups, conflict, and magic. It remains in that little pull in the stomach when stage lights come on. And it remains in the smile that appears when someone mentions an old rehearsal room, a gig that went completely wrong, or a night when everything — against all odds — actually clicked.

We wanted to be like them.

Maybe we never fully became that.

But my God, we had fun trying.