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The story of The Soul Preachers Part five: 1995 - 1997     Pasi and Jarmo had now decided to throw all The Soul Preachers songs away and start all over again. In that way they didn't have to compare the new bass player with Uffe. You could always write new, fresh songs.   But who could be the next bass player? - Someone with a great sense of rhytm and who likes to be rough on his instrument, Jarmo and Pasi thought. And they figured it out: Hannu Alakoski is the man! He had played drums earlier with The Soul Preachers (also with the Dirt) and they knew each other well. They was only one problem: he could play the bass. But they contacted him anyway.   Of course he could play the bass, Hannu said. It had been his first instrument before he started the play the drums instead. They decided to start rehearsing already the next day. That was a cold October night in 1995.   The rehearsals with Hannu were really fun. One could hear at least as many laughs from their rehearsal studio as during the time with Uffe and Jarmo wrote a couple of new songs for every rehearsal. In the new-years eve they recorded four songs in It's Alives studio and it was a promising new start for the band. But...   There's always a but. The studio session turned out to be the last time the blokes played together. There was always some reason for Hannu not to appear to the rehearsals. He started to run marathons and stuff instead of playing rock'n'roll.   After a couple of months Pasi and Jarmo realized that Hannu wasn't really interested of continuing to play and they asked Fredde if he would help them out again. They wanted to play to an audience, not just for themselves. They played two small gigs, in April and in June 1996, with band names Noppikoski Home Boys and Elvisp.   Then Uffe contacted Pasi and Jarmo again. He had now moved to Västerhaninge in Stockholm and wanted to join the band again. Alright. Now it was for real again. In October they played their first gig at Heda, Hälleforsnäs. They called themselves Bliss, but the songs were mostly old stuff The Soul Preachers used to play. It sounded as powerful and electric as it used to be - the lights had been lit again. Great!   After the gig they decided to give a fuck to the announcement a year earlier that The Soul Preachers didn't exist anymore. They took back their old band name and were hungry again. They wrote and rehearsed new interesting stuff and planned to release a couple of new songs on a compilation CD that was going to be released through It's Alive. They were a couple of days in the It's Alive studio at the end of the December 1996 and recorded a handful of new songs, two of them were to be released on the compilation CD.   It turned out that the CD was never released. Ten bands should had recorded songs for it but just a couple of bands actually finished their recordings.   In the beginning of 1997 Uffe went to Equador. He was there for a couple of months and other that he toured with a theater group. The Soul Preachers couldn't play then. Weeks and months went by and nothing happened. In June Uffe vanished again. This time to Greece. And then he moved to Gothenburgh. And then to Växjö again. Great... The last time Uffe, Pasi and Jarmo played together was in the beginning of May 1997.   While the bass player was fooling around in the jungle of Equador or on the theater stage, Pasi and Jarmo were jamming with Fredde and also with a guy called Per "Pelle" Holmgren. He wasn't a great guitar player, he had just began to play the instrument, but he was a great guy and it really didn't matter that he couldn't play that well. In May 1997 they decided to start playing cover songs together and they called the band Doctor's Special.They played a couple of gigs in July and one in November. But then Pasi got tired of playing. He din't have the time or energy to play as othen as the rest of the band wanted so he stepped aside and wanted somebody else to take over. For a while, anyway.   Jörgen Danielsson from Flen became the new drummer of The Soul Preachers. Yes, the cover set and the name Doctor's Special was history. The line-up in the end of 1997 was: Jarmo Haapamäki (lead guitar, lead vocals), Jörgen Danielsson (drums), Fredde Larsson (bass, backing vocals), Pelle Holmgren (guitar).     (to be continued)     The photo at the top of the page is taken by Lars Carlsson 1992.

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