Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

The year before, when I moved, I had been listening to groups like The Clash, The Police, The Specials, Teardrop Explodes, The Cure, Joy Division, New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Chameleons, Simple Minds, Utravox, The Aller Værste, Talking Heads, The B52s, PiL, David Bowie, The Psychedelic Furs, Iggy Pop, and Velvet Underground, all of them via Yngve, who not only spent all his money on music but also played guitar, with his very own sound and distinctive style, and wrote his own songs. In Tveit there was no one who had even heard of all these groups. Jan Vidar, for example, listened to people like Deep Purple, Rainbow, Gillan, Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, Def Leppard, and Judas Priest. It was impossible for these worlds to meet, and since an interest in music was what we shared, one of us had to give way. Me. I never bought any records by these bands but I listened to them at Jan Vidar’s and familiarized myself with them whereas I reserved my own bands, who at that time were extremely important to me, for when I was alone. And then there were a few “compromise bands,” which both he and I liked, first and foremost Led Zeppelin, but also Dire Straits, for his part because of the guitar riffs. Our most frequent discussion concerned feeling versus technique. Jan Vidar would buy records by a group called Lava because they were such good musicians, and he wasn’t averse to TOTO, who had their two hits at that time, while I despised technique with all my heart, it went against everything I had learned from reading my brother’s music magazines, where musical competence was the foe, and the ideal was creativity, energy, and power. But no matter how much we talked about this or how many hours we spent in music shops or poring over mail order catalogues, we couldn’t get our band to swing, we were useless at our instruments, and remained so, and we did not have the wit to compensate, by writing our own music for example, oh no, we played the most hackneyed, uninventive cover versions of them all: “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple, “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath, “Black Magic Woman” by Santana, as well as “So Lonely” by The Police, which had to be in our repertoire because Yngve had taught me the chords for it.

We were utterly hopeless, completely out of our depth, there was not a snowball’s chance in hell of anything coming of this, we wouldn’t even be good enough to perform at a school party, but although this was the reality we never experienced it as such. On the contrary, this was what gave our lives meaning. It wasn’t my music we played, but Jan Vidar’s, and it went against everything I believed in, yet this is what I trusted. The intro to “Smoke on the Water,” the very incarnation of stupidity, the very antithesis of cool, was what I sat practicing at Ve School in 1983: first the guitar riff, then the cymbal, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka , then the bass drum, boom, boom, boom , then the snare, tick, tick, tick , and then the stupid bass line kicked in, where we often looked at each other with a smile while nodding our heads and shaking our legs as the chorus, played completely out of sync, took off. We didn’t have a vocalist. When Jan Vidar started at technical college he heard about a drummer from Hånes, admittedly he was only in the eighth class, but he would have to do, everything had to do, and he also had access to a practice room out there, with drums and PA, the whole thing, so there we were: me, first-year gymnas student dreaming about a life in indie music, but unmusical, on rhythm guitar; Jan Vidar, trainee pâtissier who practiced enough to be a Yngwie Malmsteen, an Eddie van Halen, or a Ritchie Blackmore, but who couldn’t free himself from his finger exercises, on lead guitar; Jan Henrik whom we would have preferred to avoid outside the group, on bass, and Øyvind, a happy, thickset kid from Hånes without any ambitions at all, on drums. “Smoke on the Water,” “Paranoid,” “Black Magic Woman,” “So Lonely” and, eventually, early Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” and “Hang onto Yourself,” for which Yngve had also taught me the chords. No singer, only the accompaniment. Every weekend. Guitar cases on the bus, long conversations on the beach about music and instruments, on the benches outside the shop, in Jan Vidar’s room, in the airport café, in Kristiansand. Later on, we recorded our practice sessions, which we carefully analyzed in our futile, doomed attempt to raise the band to the level we were at in our heads.

Once I had taken a cassette recording of our sessions to school. I stood in the break with the headset on listening to our music while wondering whom I could play it to. Bassen had the same musical taste as I did, so that was no use, because this was quite different, and he would not understand it. Hanne maybe? She was a singer after all, and I liked her a lot. But that would be too big a risk to take. She knew I played in a band and that was good, it gave me a kind of elevated status, but my status might crumble if she heard us playing. Pål? Yes, he could listen to it. He played in a band himself, Vampire it was called, played fast, Metallica-inspired. Pål who was usually shy, sensitive, and delicate to the point of being almost effeminate, but who wore black leather, played bass, and howled onstage like the devil incarnate, he would understand what we were doing. So in the next break I went over to him, told him we had recorded a few songs the previous weekend, would he have a listen and say what he thought? Of course. He put on the headset and pressed play while I anxiously scrutinized his face. He smiled and stared at me quizzically. After a few minutes he started laughing and removed the headset.

“This is crap, Karl Ove,” he said. “This is a joke. Why are you bothering me with this? Why should I listen to this stuff? Are you kidding me?”

“Crap? What do you mean crap?”

“You can’t play. And you don’t sing. There’s nothing in it!”

He threw out his arms.

“I’m sure we can improve,” I said.

“Give up,” he said.

Do you think your band is so great then? I thought of saying, but I didn’t.

“Okay, okay,” I said instead. “Thanks, anyway.”

He laughed again and sent me a look of astonishment. No one could fathom Pål because of his whole speed-metal thing, and the clueless side of him which made the class laugh, and which did not square with his shyness at all, which in turn did not square at all with the almost complete openness he could display making him unafraid of anything. Once, for example, he showed us a poem he had had published in a girls’ magazine, Det Nye , which had also interviewed him. Outspoken, brazen, sensitive, shy, aggressive, rough. That was Pål. In a way it was good that it was Pål who heard our band because Pål’s response didn’t mean anything, whatever made him laugh didn’t matter. So I calmly put the Walkman back in my pocket and went into class. He was probably right that we weren’t very good. But since when was it important to be good? Hadn’t he heard of punk? New Wave? None of those bands could play. But they had guts. Power. Soul. Presence.

Not long after this, in early autumn 1984, we got our first gig. Øyvind had set it up for us. Håne Shopping Center was celebrating its fifth anniversary; the occasion was to be marked with balloons, cakes, and music. The Bøksle Brothers, who had been famous all over the region for two decades with their interpretations of Sørland folk songs, were going to play. Then the center owner also wanted something local, preferably with some youth interest, and, since we practiced only a few hundred meters from the mall, we fitted the bill perfectly. We were to play for twenty minutes and would be paid five hundred kroner for the job. We hugged Øyvind when he told us. At long last it was our turn.