RENÉ GUMMER: Grass

René Gummer

Grass

© 2003 René Gummer

CD IN STOCK. ORDER NOW. Will ship immediately.

Excellent songwriting, The White Album anno 2003

notes

I was 21 when my first album was released in 1986. The Compact Disc hadn't come around yet, and to this day I can almost feel the euphoria of putting the stylus into the groove for the first time, and there it was, my own music suddenly flowing from the speakers. I had signed a contract with EMI and the sheer look of the capital letters in the middle of the disc made me proud. It was the same label as that of my idols, The Beatles, and in my view that made us sort of colleagues - in any case, it would surely force an enormous respect from my audience. So I thought, anyway. Like most too young artists I was more consumed with myself than with the product, convinced that the shock wave of my appearance would soon sweep across the continents, leaving the common people astounded by the very enormity of my genius.

Of course the record was met with stony silence. Excepting, that is, a few critics who took the opportunity to demonstrate how far you can take a poisonous writing style in public without facing libel action. At the time it was rather like having your face rubbed in gravel, but looking back I expect it was all for the best, for me and for the music business. After a period of snivelling self-pity I took to performing live. Small venues, small pay, but on the other hand, there were plenty of gigs around. Extraordinarily many. Where I had done some 12 odd gigs in connection with the release of my record in 1986, I would put 300 behind me a year by 1988. I had moved to Germany with my girlfriend and was playing the local 'Irish Pub' a couple of times a week. They featured live music every night, but with the choice of performers being limited to bearded homunculi with weary eyes and mock Irish accents or smug artist types with spectacles and John Denver ambitions, I must have seemed like a breath of fresh air. I was 23 and covered everything from The Bee Gees to Tom Petty, firing up the nostalgia of stationed American G.I.'s who were understandably sick of The Wild Rover.

That was also my first encounter with bar owners, a race unto themselves, incomparable to other species of man, though I suspect their closest relatives are second-hand car salesmen, mechanics, and people who talk loud in restaurants. It was one of these, Shay Dwyer, who arranged for me to play at all the Irish Pubs in Western Germany. I think they had 33 of them, all in the major cities. I would play a couple of nights in a pub and then go on to the next in an old Ford Transit that I had purchased for the purpose. Its major advantage was that you could sleep in the back and save the 35 Marks the pubs used to charge for overnight accommodations. I toured that way for six months, building a repertory and learning the trade.

Soon, however, I had enough of the endless kilometres, on a path that didn't seem to go any further. I went home, and - ironically - started playing the Irish Pub in Copenhagen, better known as Lades Kælder.

For the next six or seven years, Lades Kælder, then owned and run by Steen Lade, became home, training ground, party spot, and a few other things that I shouldn't mention in public, for practically all the musicians I know and play with. When I first started in the fall of 1988, 'solo artists' like Finn 'Folk' Møller and Malcolm Lay still dominated the scene, but the bartender boasted that at one time, Steen had actually engaged a duo; 'Imagine two people on that stage!'.

So I imagined that and then invited my friend, bass player Niels Møller, to come down and join me, which caused a few lifted eyebrows. After a few gigs we asked Jesper Rytkov to bring over his snare drum and hi-hat. We were on a small hollow, wooden stage, and with us wearing western-style, pointed boots, it did fine for a bass drum.

That's how Needles And Pins was born, a name we chose for lack of a better one. We played regularly on Sundays and Mondays and every other vacant slot in Steen's calendar, which turned out to be quite a few; Steen was not exactly an orderly person. In fact, things went quite well until Jesper went off on a tour of Germany and Greenland with Irish danceband Molloys, and I had the - some would say absurd - idea of becoming a guide for the travel agency Tjæreborg.

As a guide I managed to bother a lot of people whose only mistake was buying a trip to Rhodes. To make a long story short, I was soon transformed back into musician, this time at the 'Colorado Pub' in Rhodes City. I played there every night for the entire season, giving me a somewhat callous relationship with such concepts as cigarettes, whiskey, and naked women, and in particular a strained relationship with Greeks and charter tourists.

Returning home in the fall of 1990, we went on with our routine at Lades, now with guitarist Søren Sebber Larsen - on the drums. We expanded our territory with such venues as Din's (on Fridays and Saturdays), Drop Inn (on Thursdays), Ben Webster (on Fridays and Saturdays after Din's), in that fashion doing some six or seven gigs per week. What, then, would be more natural than having a booking agency arrange for some more gigs, and as renowned Buks Booking tempted us with a series of poorly paid gigs in Jutland, we cheerfully accepted, apparently trying to find out how little you can make from a maximum amount of work.

One night at Din's, two fellows came up and asked if we'd like to make a record. They had just formed a small record company, Electra, and they wanted to sign us because they thought we were 'really wild'. Obviously, we agreed. Before we knew it, a lot of basically unnecessary people were 'working' with The Stone Factory, as we now modestly referred to ourselves. We had a booking agency taking 15%, a manager who expected 20%, a record company wanting 70%, and a publisher charging 33%. It all adds up, and obviously you have to do quite a lot of gigs to keep so many people alive and well. Fortunately, they all had perfectly good explanations as to why nothing at all happened with the album. Even if we, being the callous cynicists we are, were a bit doubtful, of course they must have worked around the clock to make us live like kings.

In this period we changed drummers as often as I change underwear, which says a lot about my personal hygiene, but which also tells of a band in the process of dissolution. By spring 1993, The Stone Factory had surrendered to God and the tax authorities. We simply decided that the ambition was 'not to make it', and, as a logical consequence, changed the name of the band with every single gig. We sat down on small stools and made a point of not entertaining people who had innocently come down for a pleasant night out, and we flatly refused to play anything ordinary people might know. And, strange as it may seem, a lot of people starting showing up to experience this odd group. At the same time it was becoming a kind of 'anarcho-democratic musician's band', which basically means that you get to play exactly what you want to, as long as it is in symbiosis with the rest of the line-up. Jesper, Niels, and myself was the core of the group with lead guitarists changing over the years. One of the guitar players that stuck with us for a couple of years was Janus Nyeborg. Janus is one the most talented persons I've ever met, and without question the funniest. He was the one to suggest that we were going to be Taberband (Losers' Band) on one particular night, and, since we had ran out of silly names, we kept that one for good. Taberband had its heyday in 93-95. Ironically, we seem to be remembered mostly for a notorious 'stage performance' which was really not a 'performance' at all, which was probably what made it so absurd. Whenever we felt like it, we would display the most pathetic magic show imaginable, and we had a striptease show that would ordinarily end with me sporting a sock at the end of my penis. All of it without ever bothering to even pretend to notice the audience. What was really absurd, I guess, is that most of the time we were really just sitting there, playing some fairly good music, songs that we cared for and knew how to play together.

In 1996 we took part in setting up a theatrical appearance at the Husets Teater in collaboration with Peter Kær. Half of it would be Peter telling grotesque stories, and the other half was us making music either contrasting or underlining the stories. I think Peter may still have a few hundred copies of the CD lying around if anyone is interested. In passing, Peter had introduced us in the programme as Det Legendariske Taberband ('The Legendary Losers' Band') and from then on, that was what we were - in short, DLT.

Around that time we had also started playing with TV host and entertainer Michael Carøe. At such occasions we were known as Gimmicks, excelling in Rock'n Roll-style covers of the standard Rat Pack repertoire. For some of the boys, the project went on to becoming quite a career. They even get paid.

Still, everything has its day, and in 1999, DLT was closed down at a final session in Studio NO in Jutland. We recorded 11 songs in order to prove that after all, we had been there. Some of them can be downloaded from the DLT site.

After DLT I had kind of had it with music, been out on too many gigs, and was somehow lacking the urge to play. So I quit. For a long time I thought I ought to have a bad conscience. Then one day I realised that I don't have a conscience, and suddenly the songs started coming all by themselves, though in a different way than before. This time I really feel like playing, and I'd really like to record some more, mostly for the sake of the songs, but also just to watch them grow in cooperation with the people I so much care for. The material on The Shadow of Myself came about in a wonderful atmosphere where everyone had an equal say musically. And starting from there, I guess I'm well equipped to go on doing what I do for the next 20 or 30 years.

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