Indie Today

I thought this would be a pretty cool idea.  I’m going to start talking about some of my all time favorite bands.  These are the ones that I keep going back to over and over again.  I thought it might be interesting for you guys to see which bands are epic in my world and why.  The first band that came to my mind for this was Kent.

I can’t believe I’ve been listening to Kent for 14 years now.  I found them after seeing one of their videos on MTV, promoting their Isola album.  (I would have added the video on here but I couldn’t find it on youtube.)  After buying the album, I was hooked.  Isola would easily be up there as one of my top five albums.  It’s such a well balanced album.

Kent turned into my gateway drug for the entire Swedish music scene.  Before them, I didn’t really know how diverse and amazing  the Swedish music scene was.  Now, I can’t hardly keep up with all of the Swedish bands that I think are really good.

I think it would be simply wrong for me to do this kind of post on Kent without talking about the time I met them.  I still can’t believe this happened.  It was truly a dream come true for me and my girlfriend at the time.  So here’s the story.

 

We had been fans of the band for a while when we found out that the band would be doing one show in L.A. in the near future.  It honestly wasn’t a thought, we were going.  We didn’t even live in L.A.  We had to fly out there and everything.  Of course we didn’t have tickets even.  I can’t remember why we didn’t.  The tickets must not have been available online.

We got into L.A. fine and got a hotel in Hollywood.  The afternoon of the show we decided that we’d just walk to the gig, which was a horrible idea as it turns out.  On the map it looked like we were pretty close, but we definitely weren’t.  Then to make matters worse we got turned around and turned left on a road instead of right.  We ended up walking several blocks in the wrong direction.  Eventually we realized our mistake and after a lot of walking made it to The House Of Blues, where Kent was the opening act.  For the life of me, I can’t remember the opening band but I distinctly remember it being some horrible one hit wonder band from the late 90′s.

Once there, we walked up to the ticket counter to get our tickets.  The show was sold out!  We couldn’t believe it, but that wasn’t going to slow us down.  We were determined to make it into the show.  The next step was to find a scalper selling tickets.  We looked and looked.  The one time when we actually wanted a scalper bugging us for tickets, they didn’t have any.  At that point, we started asking people walking into the show to buy their tickets.  We weren’t joking around.  We started offering them A LOT of money for tickets.  Every time they would say, “Hmmm, I don’t know.  I really wanted to see that band.”  We were offering them more than double what they bought the tickets for and they were saying no!  What was up with those people?

At that point Kent had already started their set.  At one moment I heard Stop Me June (Little Ego) off their recent album at the time, Hagnesta Hill, and I broke down.  I sat down on the curb and started to cry.  I was just a few feet away from seeing this incredible band but didn’t have tickets to get in.  My girlfriend at the time saw me getting upset and only became more determined.  She walked back to the scalpers to see if they were able to get any tickets yet that we could buy.  A few minutes later, I see her walking back to me with two tickets in her hand.

“How much did you have to pay for the tickets,” I ask her.

“$75 each,” she said.  I couldn’t believe she put down so much money for the tickets.

We ran into the show.  The place was packed.  We couldn’t really find a good place to stand so we had to walk around a bit.  By the time we got settled in, I realized we were listening to their last song of the set.  It was 747.  As the song made it’s way to the piano part at the end of the song, the band left the stage with the piano part left playing.  It was one of the coolest exits I’d ever seen.  The only problem was, we spent $150 to hear half of a song.

As soon as the set was done we looked at each other and said, “We’re meeting the band.”  Now that sounds like I’m exaggerating the story but I’m honestly not at all.  We really did say those things to each other.  The only problem was to figure out how.

“We need to send them a note, and tell them our story.  There’s no way they would turn us down if they heard our story,” one of us said.  We needed a paper and pen.  She looked into her purse and grabbed a pen and paper.

She grabbed the flight itinerary and said, “Here, then they can tell that we’re not lying about flying here to see them.”  Perfect.  That was a great idea.

We wrote a quick note, telling our story.  Now we had to find someone to give the note to that could give it to the band.  We walked outside and found a door that looked like the one bands could possibly go into that had some security people.

We walked over and said, “Can you hand this to Kent?”

The lady said, “Is he in a band?”  Oh God, we’re handing this note to a person that didn’t even know the band Kent was just playing at their venue.

“No, it’s the name of the band,” we said, convinced there was no way the band would ever see that note.  The lady walked into the venue with the note.

At that point, all we could do was hope.  We sat down and waited for someone to come out and talk to us.  No one ever did.  The main act went on stage and was doing their set.  We had no interest in seeing the band so we waited outside, hoping to see somebody with Kent come out.  The show eventually ended and we never got word from anybody.

“They’ll have to load up their gear at some point.  We’ll find one of those guys and maybe they can help us out,” we then said.

So the next step was to wait for the Kent roadies to make their way out.  A few minutes pass, then I see this tall guy with blonde hair walk out.

“There we go.  He’s with Kent,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Come on, look at him.  He looks Swedish.”

We walk up to the guy and start talking to him.  He struggles to understand what we’re saying.

Then he said, “Wait, you’re the two with the note?”

“Yes!”

“Excellent.  We were trying to find you.  The band left already.  They went back to their hotel, The Four Seasons.  Head there and ask for Martin Rossiter’s room.  He’s their manager.”

Awesome!  We’re one step closer to meeting the band.  We grab a taxi and go to the hotel.  When we get there we call for Martin’s room, but get nothing.  We find out his room number so we can keep trying.  Over and over again we try but never get a response.  All we could do was wait outside of the hotel and see if they walk in.  At one point, Matt Dillon walked into the hotel.  We made eye contact.  My girlfriend and I recognized and couldn’t be more indifferent to seeing him.  I know we were both thinking, “You’re not Kent.”  We waited for a few hours and started to give up on the idea of meeting the band.

This is another moment that I’m honestly not exaggerating.  We had basically given up on the idea of meeting the band.  We were about to stand up to leave and go back to our hotel.  We had given it a great shot but it just didn’t work out.  Then a taxi rolls up with a couple of guys in it.  I look and see that one of them is this super tall dude, that looks like he can barely fit in the taxi.

“That’s the band!”

We jump up and start walking to the bassist and drummer of Kent.  We said we were the two that wrote the note.  They instantly knew who we were talking about and got so excited to see us.  They went up to us and started hugging us.

Then they grabbed us and said, “Come on, you’re coming with us.  You’re lucky to see us.  We’re at a party at another hotel.  We ran out of beer.  That’s the only reason why we’re going back to our hotel rooms right now.”

We follow them up to their rooms.  The two split up and we followed one into his room.  He went to the restroom and left us alone in his room.  This was just before iPods got really big so he had cd walkman on his desk.  I couldn’t resist.  I had to see what he was listening to.  I open the player.  It was a cd-r.  I really wish I listened to thing.  I can only imagine what was on there.  I’d like to think it was some Kent demos but it probably wasn’t anything that exciting.

We got back together and started to make our way back downstairs.  While we waited for the elevator to get to our floor, the bassist grabbed my girlfriend’s camera off her neck.  Now if you’re not familiar with photographers and their cameras.  One thing you don’t do is grab their $500 camera from around their neck.  I could tell she was instantly worried about her camera.  It turns out, he’s a photographer too so the camera was in good hands.  He then took a picture of my girlfriend and I.

The elevator showed up and we made our way down.  As we were going down the drummer, who was clearly VERY drunk, took a bottle of beer and opened it with his teeth.  I couldn’t believe he did that.

We crammed into a taxi and made our way to some other hotel.  The entire time the drunk drummer kept saying it was fucking awesome that we found each other.  It was so cool to see the guys were just as excited to see us as we were to see them.

We made it to the hotel and went up to the penthouse suite.  We walked in with the guys to what looked like some sort of executive party because none of the band members looked like they were having fun.  Actually the drummer had been sober the entire time they were in L.A. until they party started then he decided he wanted to get wasted.

My girlfriend and I wanted to play it low key and not seem like ogling fans so we left them alone.  Because of that, we were basically off on our own for a while.  Some of the party goers saw that and started to get irritated that we were there.

One lady made a comment that we shouldn’t be there.  The bassist over heard then yelled, “Shut up! They’re with us!”

It was so nice to hear him say that because we were starting to feel uncomfortable in the suite.  Even so, we decided to walk out onto the balcony and not bug anybody, but also to see the view.  I mean, we were on the top of a big hotel over looking L.A.  It was a beautiful view.  We were out there on our own for a while then Joakim, the lead singer, walked out onto the balcony too.  It wasn’t a very big balcony so it was clear that the only reason he was going out there was to talk to us.  We thought it was so cool he was interested in talking with us.

We introduced ourselves and we started chatting.  He was a really nice guy.  We spent some time talking about the music scene at the time.  We talked about how horrible the top 40 pop bands like Britney Spears.  He went on to explain how those type of artists have songs made in almost a factory like setting up in Sweden and it’s basically cookie cutter garbage.  Then we talked about the bands we were excited about at the time.  It was fun because we were big music fans talking to other big music fans.  He wasn’t this big rock star at that moment, even though I was a big fan.  He was just a guy into music like myself.

I did feel very lucky to have been able to ask him about his own music.  I asked about his writing process a little.  He said he tends to go to the band with a good amount of the song then the other guys add their own cool bits to the song.  He said he lets the lead guitarist do whatever he wants because it always sounds really cool.  The other thing I remember asking him was about using the word “Isola”.  My girlfriend at the time was a huge Oscar Wilde fan and knew he had a sister die at a very early age by the name of Isola.  She was dying to know if that was where the line came from.  He said that it was a double reference.  Isola was the name of a book he had read but it was also Italian for “island.”  In the song Unprofessional the line goes, “And now we fade out fast to the blackout/And we heading for our Isola,” he would then be referring to the fact that the two people are heading off into their own isolated world.  It was really cool that he was willing to talk about his lyrics like that and didn’t get tight lipped about them.

It was getting really late and we were tired.  Before we left Joakim gave us his room number and said, “Tomorrow we’ll be hanging out on Sunset Blvd shopping.  You should hang out with us.”  Uh yeah, of course we want to hang out more.  That’s a no brainer.  We left excited that we’d get to hang out with the guys some more.

We made it back to the hotel and crashed.  We got up around 10am and called Joakim’s room first thing.  There was no answer.  We waited a little while then called again, but still nothing.  We kept trying and never got in touch with them.  It turns out this rock band actually woke up at an early hour.  We couldn’t believe it.  We never would have thought that they would have already left their rooms by 10am.  Unfortunately, we never got the chance to hang out with them again.  We tried to meet up at LAX before they left on their flight since we were leaving the same day but that never worked out either.  We weren’t upset at all.  We already had a completely amazing experience with the band.

So that’s my Kent story.  I’m not sure if I ever wrote about that on the blog.  I guess it’s about time it got out there.  It was a really special moment for me.  I think it helps you understand why I love the band as much as I do.

As for the songs I picked for the playlist.  I went through their library of music and picked the songs that instantly jumped out at me.  These are the cream of the crop for me.

I hope you enjoy the songs and the band as much as I have over the years.

 

Ansgar & Evelyne
Music Non Stop
FF
What It Feels Like
747
The One To Blame
We Need To Eat
Just Like Money
If You Were Here
A Timekill To Die For

 

 

 

This Is What Kent Feels Like