Freak When Spoken To

by Anastasia Jonsen

  IA kept mixing and remixing, and each version turned out worse than the last. His sailing holiday with Camilla had been cancelled, because he saw no alternative: the album had to be finished. Finally, he remembered a local – but popular – sound engineer called Roberto Laghi, and rang Torben.

  “I was so tired, no, tired isn’t even the word: I was completely worndown and on the verge of insanity. I was desperate and needed help, and asked Torben for quite a substantial figure in order to engage Roberto. Torben understood that it was the only solution if we wanted a third album out at all. Thankfully, Roberto managed to save our asses and the album actually sounds decent, if a little thin, soundwise.”

  Being a musician himself, Torben was aware of the pressure of producing an album, and trusted IA to make the right decision.

  “IA knows exactly what he is going for, and how he wants it to sound, and he doesn’t stop until he gets it; he is very persistent. The third album was more experimental, so it was probably harder to get there. It was also the first Freak Kitchen album IA produced himself, and obviously he took that very seriously.”

  But IA’s musical dictatorship hadn’t ended with the addition of quirky instruments and hysterical over-mixing. He had also expanded the track list without even discussing the matter with Christian and Joakim.

  “I added all sorts of extra stuff and I wanted another song, and didn’t listen to Joakim, who was very much against my adding another track without asking him and Christian first. So I simply presented them with ‘A Regular Guy’ where I play all the instruments, and in my naivety I pretty much thought they were going to thank me for this cool song I had blessed the album with. And they reacted, quite rightly so, by questioning why we hadn’t discussed the matter, and said ‘You can’t just record a song without us’, to which my reply was ‘Why not, and here’s another track you’re not playing on, for the Japanese release’. I don’t mean to justify my behaviour, but I think that if I hadn’t been brutal and done it on the spur of the moment and recorded it without them, then we wouldn’t have ‘A Regular Guy’. All the talking and discussing and arguing always takes time and I’m not a fan of wasting time by engaging in group work. And maybe the harsh reality is that I don’t always feel like being considerate and maybe I reacted with a ‘get over it’ rather than giving them a group hug.”

  By now, even Christian was starting to feel angry and completely disregarded.

  “IA and I had a pretty big argument about it. That was the first and only severe conflict we’ve had. His attitude was that we were going to do it his way or not at all. I wrote him a long letter where I explained how I felt about everything concerning how the band was run. He sent me a fairly understanding letter in return and we never spoke about it again. Perhaps things got better for a short while, I don’t remember, but I don’t think he compromised one bit regarding the band.”

  This is something IA is very aware of.

  “I have my own ways of getting what I want. I’m a subtle manipulator. It’s either one of two strategies: ‘Look, wouldn’t it be much better if we did it like this?’ or ‘Well, I’ve done it already, so it would just be silly to change it now, wouldn’t it?’ It’s not always been fair or the best way, but when I believe in something, I feel so passionately about it, I think my way is probably the best for the big picture.”

  On the surface, Freak Kitchen was still a band, and Christian and Joakim tried to keep their spirits up. Christian still had every intention of taking the band to a level where he could make a decent living out of it, but had hoped that the “rawer” direction they were first aiming towards on the third album would someday appear.

  “We went all in with Freak Kitchen, but it was always IA’s baby. I think Joakim and I always hoped that Freak Kitchen would become more of a normal hard rock band eventually, the kind of music we liked. We were never as far out musically as IA. We weren’t very pleased with all the musical twists and turns; in fact, it sometimes annoyed us. IA knows that we feel like this, but looking back, he did the right thing to stick to it, because that’s what makes the band unique.”

  It wasn’t just the quirky and sprawling musical direction Christian wanted a more straightforward version of.

  “I’m not particularly obsessed with image, but I had always hoped we would find some kind of direction. If you look at the old pictures, we have three completely different styles. I think that silly attitude came from IA. Look at the pictures from Appetizer: sure, we look dreadful, but fairly serious. Later on, there has been more of an emphasis on the wacky style with silly faces and so on. It bugged me a bit that Freak Kitchen never dared to be truly serious. Even if we had serious lyrics, we were never allowed to be deep and serious. Sometimes it tips over into farce and that’s a shame. It goes from super zany to super serious and back in a flash. That’s IA’s personality in a nutshell. IA’s personality has become Freak Kitchen.”

  When it was time to do promotion, especially the Japanese were at their wits end. How do you promote an album like that? IA had to discuss the matter with them.

  “I had to ask them to look for slightly different channels to work with. It was a challenge for them too. Initially I think we sold a little less than we used to, but it’s caught up over time. But there was a rumour going that Freak Kitchen had lost their marbles. We were met with a lot of ‘What have you done?!’ But I like it. It’s such a slap in the face to all those who thought they had managed to pinpoint us. Unfortunately, as always with us, we ground to a complete halt. No breakthrough.”

  Joakim had had a rough time during the recording, and it’s not difficult to understand that he might have felt slightly cheated: first being convinced not to quit the band, only to then be completely overruled by IA’s Machiavellian decision making.

  “I liked our third album quite a bit, because we had worked our way through some serious conflicts before and during the recording. There was a lot of pent-up anger in our camp at the time. When we put that behind us, I could enjoy it better.”

  In terms of iconic images, the cover was a direct hit. The yellow cow on a black background really mooed right at the potential record shopper. The painting was of course Joakim’s doing, and although his reward wasn’t exactly luxury cars and big tits, at least his creation has given him a place in the history of hard rock imagery and trademarks. Getting recognition as something of an artist thanks to the cover as well as being interviewed on national television about his cow paintings, gave Joakim new energy.

  The album had tracks which seemed to appeal to everyone. IA is particularly fond of Joakim’s oddball moments.

  “The drum fill in the end of ‘Mr. Kashchei & the 13 Prostitutes’ is one of the wackiest and coolest things Joakim’s done: all the tom-toms at once! He’d sometimes break out into uncontrolled little frenzies. ‘My New Haircut’ seems to be popular still, and ‘Pathetic Aestetic’ is many people’s favourite off that album. I still like ‘We’ve Heard It All Before’, but I don’t think anyone in the band likes ‘Entertain Me’.”

  Swedish reviewers were divided in opinion, and there seemed to be an overall uncertainty about what to call this new direction. The marks tended to be a bit lower than with the previous effort, perhaps owing to the fact that the album was indeed very mixed in its material. One reviewer thought it had “the curse of too much variety, when the Zappa burlesque show takes over without any sense of direction”, but another found “raw beauty in the melodies”. A recurring opinion is that it’s a more personal or perhaps even sensitive album: “It is vibrant, hot and almost sensual with brilliant vocals.”

  IA started to get the hang of making the lyrics take the shape of little stories, and “Broken Food” is one of the more touching pieces of lyrics he’s written.

  “I wrote it for Niklas Andersson. I call him my ‘baby brother’, even though there’s no blood relation. He’s a musician too and recorded the song under the moniker Petrus before I did and his vocals do the song a thousand times more just
ice. The song isn’t actually about Niklas, but about someone who’s been physically and mentally damaged. That someone doesn’t dare approach the world – until the last verse. It’s about fighting against the odds.”

  The song title has generated some curiosity. Perhaps it’s as easy as being a play on the words broken home. But knowing IA’s knack for puns and the Gothenburg style of humour, it may also be more intricate. In Swedish, the word, “lagad” means both ‘cooked’ and ‘mended’, which means that the opposite would be something which hadn’t been mended/cooked – broken food!

  Another song off the third album is “Vaseline Bizniz” – a track whose meaning is not difficult to interpret. The listener meets the devoted fan and hears about the desperately headline-seeking musician, and this is one of many examples where IA criticizes the music industry. The lyrics are apparently not about a musician who simply comes out as gay, but about someone who uses the shock value of the rumours. In order for such criticism to work, you would have to be very careful to avoid stones and glass houses. Some artists brag about their sexual exploits and drug habits to increase their record sales, other artists sell out for sponsorship deals. What is the difference?

  “You may see my face in lots of adverts in musicians’ magazines, but I think you have to remember two things. Firstly, I never approached any of my sponsors. Young musicians shop around like crazy in order to get free stuff, but believe me, the saying is true: There’s no such thing as a free lunch. There’s no end to what people do to get their mug attached to some product. Secondly, I turn down most offers I get. And that’s not something I say now because I can afford to say it: it’s always been the case. I’ve played Dunlop picks, Laney amplifiers and Caparison guitars for nearly twenty years now. I’m a loyal chap, and I happen to be proud of it. When Caparison first wanted to endorse me, they showed me a bunch of models, and I actually chose one of the cheapest ones, the Horus. Not because I was humble, but because I loved the sound. They wondered if I didn’t prefer a flashier model, but why would I want that? I chose the one which fit my sound best. And that’s my advice: play the stuff you like and can afford at the time. If people in the business think you’re special in some way, or if they think you’ve got the potential to be seen in the spotlight, they will approach you. They have people whose job it is to find you, for goodness’ sake. Don’t send them begging letters, because nobody looks good in brown lipstick. Concentrate on doing your thing, try to grow that moustache I’m always going on about, and they’ll come to you. And the more you say no to stuff, the more they want you. I’ve made mistakes too, but I really try to learn from them.”

  As usual, Freak Kitchen tried to find gig opportunities, but ended up with the normal round of Scandinavia and a spatter of other oneoff gigs. Perhaps it was because they didn’t have a booking agency – IA wanted to be independent – and perhaps it was because IA was as busy as ever doing other things. Little inconspicuous things, like making his debut as a solo artist.

  Nothing screams “hey guys, I want us to stay together” like releasing a solo album after having gone through two serious bouts of arguments with the other members. Or perhaps that was exactly IA’s reasoning: keep the zany stuff to one side and focus on something more straightforward with Freak Kitchen next time. No matter the intention, the result was that IA got to travel the world even more, doing clinics, instruction videos, interviews and showcases thanks to the release of Freak Guitar in 1999.

  The album has been described as a mixture of Django Reinhardt, Frank Zappa and Tintin, but most reviewers also recognised that IA had a unique approach to making music. Not only did IA have a fresh way of writing songs, but it was also obvious that he was imaginative in his choice of gear. He was no stranger to hose clips, dildos and remote controls in order to make strange, new sounds with the guitar. One writer asked, “who is meant to listen to this?”, but little did he know that IA’s guitar and dildo exercises were distributed in 200,000 copies in Japan’s number one guitar player magazine Young Guitar and that IA would eventually get signed to Steve Vai’s label Favored Nations.

  The Zappa influences were indeed present, and perhaps it was only a matter of time before IA got involved in a Zappa band. In Zappa Cliniquez, IA and three musician friends would combine clinics with gigs: analyse Zappa’s music and play the most complex and interesting pieces from his massive catalogue of non-hits.

  “I nearly had a nosebleed when Anders Häggebrant put a voluminous bundle of Zappa sheet music in my hands. He wondered if I’d be interested in joining in on the project, and by Jove I took it seriously. I practised the songs day and night and tried to figure out how on earth I would be able to live up to the expectations. But it was great fun and a huge challenge. Unfortunately, Anders was involved in a serious car accident from which he never recovered; he passed away recently. He was the best musician I have ever played with.”

  Following the schedule of a Freak Kitchen album every other year, it was soon time to record the fourth studio album: Dead Soul Men.

  The Bitter Season

  WHILE FREAK KITCHEN were in the middle of the song writing process, they played a couple of gigs, one of which was the 2000 Decibel Festival in Bengtsfors, Sweden. The gravity of what happened cannot have escaped IA.

  “I’ll never forget that car ride home from the festival. We stopped at traffic lights and Joakim suddenly started explaining, in painful and crude detail, how little Freak Kitchen meant to him. I tried to calm him down and begged him to stay and record another album. I told him I understood that it would mean nothing to him, but the world to me. He assured me that he was serious, but I also knew that we’d danced this dance before. Had he really wanted to call it quits, he would have done so right there and then.”

  Joakim was again persuaded to stay, but couldn’t find his old enthusiasm. Just like with any other dysfunctional relationship, the quarrels and the feelings of unfair treatment may be patched up temporarily, but soon there are more memories of hard times than there are new and positive feelings.

  “I know IA thinks it’s that easy: if you want to leave the band you leave the band, but these things grow until you can’t take it anymore. I may have decided to stay in the band that time, but I wasn’t at all emotionally involved in Dead Soul Men.”

  Perhaps you would have thought that the band would play it safe and book time in a proper studio with a producer this time, to avoid unnecessary mental wear and tear, but instead they ended up trying to record it all over the place. The result is a solid album when it comes to material, performance and sound, but the price was high. IA tries to summarize the many turnabouts.

  “It was such a difficult album to record. We recorded the drums in Crocodile Inn in Kolding, Denmark, but then the problems began. We tried to record the guitar and bass in an old rehearsal room in Gothenburg, but had to cover the amps with thick mattresses which we had to find and drag there. And it still sounded like crap. Then we tried someone’s flat. Then we packed up the gear again and tried our luck recording guitars in my pal Niklas’ summer cottage. It’s difficult to believe that we were recording our fourth album! The sound worked great for rhythm guitars, but not for the bass guitar and vocals. We then moved everything to Joakim’s rickety old outhouse. It was literally an outhouse; he had some kind of earth closet lavatory in there – and the sound was fucking amazing. The mixing process was fairly painless; I worked with Roberto Laghi and Hasse Asteberg in Oral Majority Studios again.”

  Christian felt a little more enthusiasm, as he had written three tracks to which IA had written the lyrics, and he also did lead vocals on “I Refuse”.

  “I think it’s our best album. It was tricky to record, but once it was done, I really liked it and was very proud of it. IA and I wrote a couple of songs together, which was a first for us. It’s hard to imagine that it took until our fourth album before that happened, but once it did, the result was top notch. I really enjoyed the few occasions I got to sing lead. Nowadays, my voice isn�
�t what it was, because I’ve had some problems, such as asthma. During my years in the band, I had a strong and good voice, and I had a good sense of pitch. I regret that I didn’t sing more, recorded more, when I had the wider register. I guess I still have that dream: to sing and play the guitar.”

  Christian wasn’t the only Grönlund to feature on the album, as his new-born daughter Amanda also did guest screaming on “Slap Me in the Face”. But although Christian was happy with the outcome, he had given up hope of making it big.

  “If we had got a proper tour and had been able to find our back catalogue in record shops around the world, that would have been something at least. My darling daughter Amanda was born on the first day of the new millennium, which meant that I now had a real reason for shaping up my life in order to put food on my family’s table.”

  Even though the album is much easier to label, again the reviewers tried to find new genres to suit what they heard: hippie metal and punk jazz were among the new suggestions. One advantage Dead Soul Men had over the self-titled album was that at least the distributors knew what to call it. Despite the weird little escapades into salsa and whatnot, this was definitely hard rock and metal: simpler, more aggressive and a whole lot darker. If you read the lyrics on Dead Soul Men, it is quite easy to find a great frustration with everything. Not just the more personal texts, but the lyrics about society and mankind. A deep analysis of those lyrics may have given the reader a reason to suspect that Freak Kitchen weren’t all happy campers at the time. IA says he has no idea why Dead Soul Men turned out so dark.