Please note: Trees, Grass and Stones emerged out a succession of bands, with the majority of the members staying on, but with some personnel changes over the years. They began as Paerson Sound, then called themselves International Harvester and Harvester, before taking on their Trees, Grass and Stones guise. To make things simpler, and to stress the organic development of these groups into the one that made them so well-known, I have called them Trees, Grass and Stones all along in these texts. This feels a bit strange for the band members, who draw a clear line between these bands, but for the sake of simplicity and consistency, I'll just call them by their lasting name: Trees, Grass and Stones.

Traed, Graes och Stenar (Trees, Grass and Stones) are touring Japan when I write this, playing Kobe on the 28th of February. They have come a long way. The other night I went to a concert with the band in a crowded, small space called Kafé 44 in Stockholm, situated at Tjaerhovsgatan 44 on the South Side (Soeder). It’s one of those surviving anarchist/communist/alternative spots in the circuits of the big city, sporting a café, a book store with pamphlets and progressive or generally obsessive and heavily alternative music, and… books; Karl Marx: Das Kapital; the thoughts of Angela Davis, and so forth.

Kafé 44 seems to be a watering-hole for the small but insistent alternative crowd of Stockholm; the third generation of romantic revolutionaries and social reformers; grandchildren of the hardliners from 1968’s Berlin and Paris!
I felt at ease with these youngsters at Kafé 44. They were all my kind, at heart, because I was fostered in the 1960s, concerning politics, culture and humanism, and this way of thinking and feeling, this way of identifying, has shaped my life and never left me, and, in a certain way, I’m even more convinced these days, when I work as a crime investigator with the Police Department, of the deep worth of the idealism of the late 1960s’ and early 1970s’; of the basic values of those days, when Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme identified genocide as genocide, even when it was our brothers in the United States of America who were the war criminals, bombing Hanoi during Christmas 1972. I was in Katmandu, Nepal when Palme held his speech in Stockholm, and it echoed all over the world; flashed across newspaper placards, knifed the idiots in Washington down to the last murder victim. I made a text-sound composition out of the speech many years later.

There was a moral stature at the center of power in Sweden for a short, illuminated moment through those rare years, and as backdrop for the silver-tongued Warrior of Justice at The Chancellery (Kanslihuset) the people of Sweden – through their most prosperous years of the Swedish Welfare State – also grew an underbrush of makeshift, low-budget – sometimes non-budget – cultural phenomena; oftentimes with leftist political signatures, but sometimes in a free-flowing creativity at will, disembarked from all specific loyalties, drifting into the focus of the Eye of Pure Lust and Shivering Surprise at Being Alive!

Trees, Grass and Stones was such a phenomena; an ejaculation of whimpering Freedom, letting go and going!

This band of musicians, getting together in 1967 as Paerson Sound, eventually calling themselves International Harvester or Harvester before finding their final identity in Trees, Grass and Stones, were a one-of-a-kind band in the underbrush of those years. They stood out as something remarkable from the outset. They arrived in a dream, no; a Dream, with a capital D – and the music that they played was non-existent in popular and folk music until they swung their wands over parks and clubs and whatever circumstances they played, diffusing their dreamscape pulsations in long, winding, hypnotic melodies… or, sometimes, not even melodies, but just… vibrating, circling, spiraling electric gestures. Theirs was an atmosphere that none had before them, like the fragrance of Nag Champa incense through a downtown street, or the hallucinatory nostril lust of butterfly orchid (Platanthéra bifólia) pheromones over the meadows right after a late June sunset, when dusk hardly darkens to night over cows resting in the grass, before the sun again rises, the Scandinavian way.

Some of the bands of the progressive era didn’t care to develop their music any. Music wasn’t really interesting to them. They just used the tunes as political pamphlets and megaphones. Music was there, music was around, was convenient – so they used music. Blå Tåget – former Gunder Hägg – was one of those bands that didn’t care about music – but they had many other advantages, and served the times very well! Some bands leaned heavily towards old Swedish folk (fiddle) music. A couple of those bands were Arbete & Fritid and Kebnekajse. Then there were those one-off bands that might come closer to the atmosphere of Trees, Grass and Stones, like Garden of the Elks – but they were nowhere near the magic of TGS - even though there were some exchange of members between the bands.

Nonetheless, times were vibrant, exciting, promising. Of course, times proved less exciting and promising as the decades folded back and withered away, at least in the sense that late 1960s and 1970s had been exciting. Somehow the first decade of the 21st century seems to become very exciting again, in much the same way as the times were vibrant 40 years ago, in a reawakened or even NEW awareness. Let’s hope for it. We gotta take this one life at a time!

Swedish musician, composer, radio producer etcetera Folke Rabe (1935) traveled the USA in 1965, meeting up with a host of decisive personalities; decisive for our perception of the times and our general attitude towards existence (at least for the ones of us who indulged in culture) -: people like Edgard Varèse, John Cage and… Terry Riley! On returning to Stockholm, the head of the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation – Karl-Birger Blomdahl – asked Folke to assess his experiences from the States, and he concluded that the most interesting music he’d heard on his odyssey was Terry Riley’s new repetition music – so Blomdahl prepared an artist-in-residency for Riley, which was realized in early spring 1967. While in Stockholm, Riley conducted a few pioneering workshops, involving The Royal College of Music in Stockholm, The Community Music School of Nacka, Stockholm, and The Swedish Broadcasting Corporation. Of special interest for us in connection with Trees, Grass and Stones is the commission Terry Riley got for a work intended for the Orchestra and Chorus of The Nacka Music School, to be included in The Swedish Broadcasting Corporation’s Contemporary Music Series. Composition students at The Royal College were to participate in this endeavor.

One aspect of Riley’s study with the students was that no conductor was allowed. This freaked some of the teachers, but Riley had it his way, and the musicians simply had to listen to each other. This was a good lesson in itself.
The premier of the new piece, entitled Olson III, took place on 27th April 1967. Folke Rabe describes it as a beautiful spring evening.

In March 2007 I asked Folke Rabe to provide some recollections from the Nacka Olson III concert and the subsequent In C performance at the Radio House. Here are his words:

When I met Riley in Stockholm in March, 1994, I was aware of the Olson III reel-to-reel lying dormant on a shelf in the archives of the Broadcasting Corporation in Stockholm, so I suggested to Riley to listen to it and release it. He said something about perhaps being able to put it out on a Swedish label, and then – before being swallowed by the elevator with George Brooks - he asked Folke Rabe, who was also present, and at that time still working at the Radio, to send him a digital copy of the tape. I’m not sure whether my suggestion had an impact (but I certainly would like to think it did!), or if the idea was already brewing, but a few years later the Cortical Foundation Terry Riley Series appeared, and Olson III was one of the releases, hitting the street in 1998. Folke Rabe wrote the liner notes.

Some of the members of Trees, Grass and Stones (which was forming in it’s first guise in 1967) participated in the study of Olson III and the resulting concert.

It was normal to record in mono in 1967, but the recording engineer Bengt Nyquist, on his own accord, made a parallel stereo recording as an experiment, and it is this recording that is found on the Cortical issue. Hail initiative!

There is also a recording of Terry Riley’s In C with Terry Riley and an Ensemble from the Composition Seminar at The Royal College of Music in Stockholm, recorded in renowned Studio 2 at the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation. It was recorded on 28th April 1967, the night after the Olson III concert. I don’t know if Bo Anders Persson of Trees, Grass and Stones and one or other of his TGS accomplices participated, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m sure Bo Anders will give me a call with the correct information once he reads this, right?
Folke Rabe was one of the orchestra members at the occasion, any way.
This recording isn’t officially released, but has been broadcast on Swedish Radio a few years ago, and I would have been a fool, hadn’t I recorded it!

It is generally assumed thet the Olson III concert of 1967 was the only performance of the piece - but I have a recoring of The Great Learning Orchestra doing a somewhat shorter version of the piece, in 2005.

There are quite a number of interesting texts in CD booklets and on the web about the early years of Trees, Grass and Stones, for example in the Paerson Sound double-CD booklet and other TGS booklets; on Trees, Grass and Stones’ site, and on band member Thomas Mera Gartz’s site - so I direct the inquisitive listener to these sources… but, by all means, don’t stop reading here!

Bo Anders Persson, who emerges, to begin with, as a major influence on the music of the group that was forming into Paerson Sound; the first version of Trees, Grass and Stones, shows up – his first phonogram commitment - on an LP from the great German label Wergo, with his textsound/electronic/hypnotic work Proteinimperalism (1967). On the other side of the LP Folke Rabe laid down his celebrated and of late very much revived and reissued electronic piece Was?? (1967) The LP was announced as containing “zwei Produktionen aus dem elektronischen Studio des Schwedischen Rundfunks, Stockholm”.

When I think about this LP – when I pull it out from its place on the shelf and hold it in my hands – I get both melancholy and revived looking at the picture of the young guys on the back of the cover: Folke Rabe and Bo Anders Persson in the woods in 1967 or thereabouts… and especially when I think about last Friday, when I left Bo Anders and the others after the Kafé 44 TGS concert and took a bus cross Stockholm to Folke Rabe’s studio, which he had lent me as a place to spread my sleeping bag, since trains and buses to my hometown in a rural district 100 kilometers away stop operating before the night gets very late.
Here they were again – or still! – these two boys, in Stockholm in 2007, forty years after that Wergo LP, after Proteinimperalism and Was??, and it only took a short bus ride to travel between them… and, most importantly: their musics still capture us, spellbind us; Folke’s and Trees, Grass and Stones’! Amazing, and a beautiful turn of events, a beautiful development of benevolent forces, to allow this time-span, this Kronos Bridge on which the good medicine of 1967 and 2007 mix into a magic, shaman potion that heightens our spirits and makes the Stockholm skyline glow and vibrate at the frequency of 37° Centigrade (98,6° Fahrenheit) happiness.

I read from the leaflet that comes with the Wergo LP. It’s Bo Anders Persson talking:

“Als ich die Musik von Terry Riley 1966 hörte, entdeckte ich, wie kompliziert doch jeder Klang ist, selbst der einfachste.”

Proteinimperalism is a term from the scientist and writer Georg Borgstrom, describing how the rich Western world forces the poor and hunger-ridden peoples of the world to produce for the imperialists what they so badly need for themselves. In this way, Bo Anders Persson’s work – in his choice of subject; the word which he keeps permuting through-out, in a way similar to what Steve Reich does in Come Out (1966) or Alvin Lucier in I Am Sitting In A Room (1970) – is a precursor of the progressive, socialist, communist and sometimes anarchist music movement of the Scandinavian 1970s, where most folks these days also place Trees, Grass and Stones, though they actually never really belonged there, amongst boisterous pamphlets and the simplified manifestos of orthodox fundamentalists of forced insanity. They weren’t propagators or political thugs. They were part of the general leftist humanism of the times, but they weren’t conforming to absolute and set standards of socialist purity, which kept splitting the leftist movement into smaller and smaller factions. They were dreamers, and they proceeded to build their dream, which still soars today like a giant Zeppelin across jagged pine-forests, inviting cow-meadows and the empty winter streets of turned-away small-town Sweden. Praise be! I felt it at Kafé 44 on the 23rd of February 2007. It enlightened me! I’m a dream-keeper! I feel it today!

Later in the LP leaflet Bo Anders Persson says, about Proteinimperalism:

“Es ist mein letztes Stück als “Komponist” – wenigstens bisher. Seitdem spiele ich Gitarre in einer schwedischen Gruppe von Folkrock”.

In English:

“It is my last piece as a “composer” – at least for now. Since then I play guitar in a Swedish folk-rock band”!

Yes, and that “folk-rock band” was to become the legendary dream drone experience Trees, Grass and Stones.

I believe I may have witnessed a Trees, Grass and Stones event in the town of Norrkoping, Sweden in the very early 1970s. I was sitting at Kumlin’s Café in Nykoping – a very small town south of Stockholm where I lived and still reside – with my friend Sune and a few other mates. We got the news of an open-air concert of the progressive kind that was to be held in the neighboring town of Norrkoping, 60 kilometers further south on the other side of the wild Kolmorden Forest, the same day – I believe it was a Saturday. I borrowed the phone at the café, over by the counter, and called the local aviation club, to inquire if any of the member pilots needed airtime, in which case we could pay the fuel, if they just flew us to Norrkoping so we could attend the concert! Sure enough, one of the pilots took us up on the offer, so we bicycled down to the airfield right on the outskirts of the little town, by an inlet of the Baltic Sea. On the way we hit the liquor store and bought some Red Port wine to sip in the cabin!

The plane – a Piper Cherokee – could accommodate three passengers, so Sune, I and someone that I can’t quite remember (perhaps Sune’s girlfriend, the writer Camilla Gripe) crammed into the plane, which took off with no time to lose. Between the three of us – the pilot stayed sober! – we emptied one bottle of Red Port before we eased down onto the tarmac of the Norrkoping airfield of Kungsangen. The pilot was jittery, because he wasn’t allowed to fly paying passengers, but we sneaked off the field at a remote area and jogged into town, to the park where the concert took place… and that’s where my memory fails me, because the next thing I recall is how we stood on the north side of town, drinking a second bottle of wine, hitchhiking home, eventually getting lucky on an 18-wheeler (in the mood of Dylan’s Memphis Blues Again…). I have completely forgotten all about the concert – and that was probably my first Trees, Grass and Stones concert!

But Sune played me Terry Riley’s Rainbow In Curved Air in our derelict building (comfortably low rent) at Lilla Stromgatan 3 in Nykoping in 1971, over and over and over and over… and I was caught in the current!

Another concert that I missed – i.e., not just forgot, but actually missed – was the first Gardet Festival in Stockholm 12th June 1970 – but at that time I was so wrapped up in, to mention a few things, classical classical music, my summer job at the steelworks of Oxelosund, and Bob Dylan. I was completely wasted by Dylan’s devastatingly positive album New Morning (1970), and I needed “a dump-truck to unload my head” (From A Buick 6 [1965]) – which were abundant at the steelworks… - even without wild, revolutionary festivals, but in retrospect I should’ve been there of course. Luckily, we have a CD of the Trees, Grass and Stones part of that unlawful concert, thanks to Subliminal Sounds of late (The CD release) and Joakim Skogsberg, who took it on himself to record the event on location in 1967 on a reel-to-reel and safe-guard it through the years!

Bo Anders Persson elaborates on the beginnings of what was to become the sensual, dreamy and penetrating shamanistic sound-world of Trees, Grass and Stones, in the booklet of another release from Subliminal Sounds; the important double-CD Paerson Sound:

In the same Paerson Sound double CD booklet, the band’s drummer Thomas Mera Gartz speaks (in an edited quote from his text A Report From A Bucket Of Music):

Torbjörn Abelli, who teamed up with Bo Anders Persson at an early stage of the formation of the forerunners of Trees, Grass and Stones – in 1966 –, and began playing bass when he borrowed Bo Anders Persson’s Hofner and got turned on to it, speaks in the same booklet, in an edited quote from his text A Glorious Mess:

The guitarist Jakob Sjöholm joined Trees, Grass and Stones in 1971, and he has always seemed to be the shy or perhaps indifferent one, or the one that never craved for the limelight. I can’t find much information on his background or his views anywhere, and at the Kafé 44 concert in February 2007, he veered off to the side if the stage, even turning his back at times, clearly wanting to stay out of the immediate view of the audience. There was nothing provocative or ostentatious about his attitude, but he was there to play his guitar, and that was it – but he had a few feature performances, too, when he sang.

I will browse through the CDs that are – or have been – available, in a chronological order according to the original recording dates, and I hope – and trust – that the CDs that are out of print will reappear shortly; it would be such a waste otherwise. The band’s cult status in the USA and Japan would probably guarantee some sort of profit for any label that would take this on.
I’m not going to dwell too long in each CD, but will indicate track titles and say a few words about each track. You can reach the texts through the links in the scroll-bar at left, CD by CD.