Yesterday I talked with my friend and Sinisthra guitarist mr. Mäkinen about remembering, both of us having recently read ”The Heroin Diaries” by Nikki Sixx, and he took a most sceptical view on the authenticity of some of the tales told in autobiographies of rock musicians with matching lifestyles, i.e. of those who practised what they preached. His argument was this: if a person really was as out of it as he claims then how can he remember so many graphic details? This was a good argument in my opinion, although he continued with a counter-argument: heroin supposedly sharpens your memory and the ability to absorb facts and remember them later on, no matter how trivial they might be. This argument is based on the stories told by ex-heroin addicts, how they supposedly have committed to memory all kinds of manuals for devices that they have no use for and still remember those manuals word-to-word.

I scoured the net briefly and found no facts to support this claim but if it is true, then it proves with absolute certainty that me and mr. Mäkinen have never dabbled with heroin. Because we both agree that we can’t remember shit about the years gone by. Which is kind of liberating but also a bit frustrating. Maybe we just never got up to enough mischief to leave a lasting memory? We started our first band back in 1982 so it’s been 27 years of not-remembering-much. The first half of 1990’s in particular is a hazy period of time, when we had moved from Lohja to Helsinki and joined Protected Illusion, a proper band with gigs and actual recording sessions in actual studios. A lot of can-you-recall-what-we-were-up-to-back-then-because-I-can’t surrounding that era. Of course we were young lions in our early twenties back then so it’s understandable if things got a little hectic now and then (and then again), but it doesn’t get much better in the remembering front even though we grew older and settled down a bit, he more permanently than me (I took another plunge into the deep end after I turned 30 and didn’t properly get myself back together until I was 35 or so).

Maybe this inability to remember is a blessing. At one point a lot of the forthcoming Sinisthra album lyrics were based on the idea of an ”everlasting Now”, where anything that’s significant happens in this here moment and everything else is meaningless. Then I sort of forgot to keep that concept up and only remembered it again much later.

After the phone call to mr. Mäkinen I went home and bought a bottle of champagne on my way, to celebrate the fact that I met my fiancee three years ago. As I got home it turned out I had remembered the date incorrectly.

HAZILY REMEMBERED ROCK’N ROLL MOMENTS part 1
Of course there have been several things that stuck to my mind during the years of ploughing the stony and uneventful field reserved for unsuccessful musicians. The champagne mentioned above brought forth this one:

Back in 2005 the debut Sinisthra album was released and we played some gigs around that time too. I had tried my best to promote the dates, sending out e-mails and putting up posters, but this was before the time of MySpace and Facebook and the effective devices of promotion they provide. Plus there wasn’t too much interest on yet another never-heard melancholy metal band coming up with an album and playing in small clubs in Helsinki in the middle of the week, no matter how encouraging reviews the album had got and the fact of having a singer who had also recently joined Amorphis. So I fumed and sulked in backstages before and after getting out and playing to a handful of people, and swore never to play gigs anymore unless there was a real and actual demand for it. And I haven’t played any gigs since then.

Anyway, the final gig was in our hometown Lohja where we eventually drew a decent crowd so the spirits were a bit higher. Mr. Korkkinen our bass player had talked for years of the champagne bottle he had got as a gift from work and how we’d open it if the band ever got a record deal. So now we had a record out and sat backstage after having played a rewarding gig to a receptive and responsive audience. It also happened to be mr. Korkkinen’s birthday, which we others had coldly pretended to ignore for the whole of the day (hopefully not breaking his heart entirely) but announced on stage during our set and went on to ceremoniously and solemnly present him with a golden-looking prize cup with words to the effect of ”Lord Of The Lower Frequencies” inscribed on it.

So we had smuggled the bottle of champagne inside the club but had no means to chill it down, the staff at the club strictly refusing to give us any coolers or even ice cubes. Cowering in the darkness and secrecy of a cramped and unpleasant backstage pit we corked the room temperatured bottle and poured it on small disposable plastic cups. It tasted awful. When I think of it now, my heart weeps bitter tears, for although I have no idea of the vintage it doesn’t make that much difference since the champagne is question was Dom Pérignon.

Here we are, going at it.

RECENT BOOKS OF CHOICE:
”Complicity” by Iain Banks. Picking up a Iain Banks book is a bit of a safe bet for me since I always enjoy his books and I enjoyed this one too, although it didn’t quite reach the heights of “The Bridge”. Banks has a way of describing horrible things in a deadpan tone (reminding me of Neil Gaiman at times, or the other way round, and also Jonathan Carroll), especially evident in “Canal Dreams”, but well represented in “Complicity” too, resulting in a personal resolution to never again read an Iain Banks novel and have lunch at the same time. Some of the more graphic turns of this novel drastically lessened my appetite. Nevertheless, I gobbled the book up in several days and foolishly went on to the next one without a decent pause, resulting in a difficult situation where I’d like to enjoy “Gun, with Occasional Music” by Jonathan Lethem much more than I do and, some 100 pages into the book, am seriously considering of not finishing it. The SF and detective novel overtones in this, after the rough and unpretentious Banksian Scottishness, seem very silly and unispired. A shame, really, because a book with a title as brilliant as this couldn’t have been all bad.