THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,840) Steppeulvene/The Steppe Wolves — “Dunhammeraften”/”Dunhammer Evening”
Something’s funky in the State of Denmark! And, no, I’m not talking about Operation Dunhammer! I’m talking about the Steppe Wolves’ very funky evocation of strange goings on during a Danish evening in the ’60s, as can be surmised from a bit of the lyrics (https://genius.com/Steppeulvene-dunhammeraften-lyrics, courtesy of Google Translate):
“I Frue Kirke kan ingen begribe Hvem der sidder og ryger på orgelpibe Det’ da ellers ikke særlig svært at forstå Når man har sine violette snabeltyrkersko på”/”In room 7 Rifbjerg plays chess with Grundtvig sitting and humming Bach In Frue Kirke no one can understand Who is sitting and smoking on the organ pipe It’s not that hard to understand When you have your violet turkish shoes on”
“Dunhammeraften” is the opening song of the band’s only LP — Hip. “It is a very acid-bubbling poetry, where the imagination is given free rein, says Michael Charles Gaunt, music critic at Berlingske.” (Sarah Schlüter, https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/kultur/steppeulvenes-hip-er-tusinder-af-kroner-vaerd (courtesy of Google Translate)) Indeed!
Wikipedia (courtesy of Google Translate) tells us of the Steppe Wolves:
Steppeulvene . . . was a Danish rock band which despite its short life has become the icon for the Danish hippie music scene. The name of the group was taken from the 1927 novel Steppenwolf by German Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse. Also in 1967, in California, the band Steppenwolf named itself after the novel. Their only album Hip (1967) was the first rock album with original Danish lyrics, and has attained near-mythological status in the history of Danish rock. The group was the result of a collaboration between lead singer Eik Skaløe, who had traveled in the Orient in the early 1960s and wrote the Bob Dylan-inspired, highly symbolic and almost surreal lyrics, and Stig Møller (guitar, vocal), who wrote the drawling, psychedelic, folk-influenced music. . . . A tour in October 1967 came to a chaotic end when a concert was cut short by the police and the group members were arrested for cannabis use. Shortly after being released, Eik Skaløe went on a journey to Afghanistan/Nepal (on the so-called “hippie trail”*) and was found dead . . . near the Indian/ Pakistani border in October 1968, apparently after a drug-induced suicide. Back in Denmark the rest of the group attempted to carry on, but, lacking the characteristic Skaløe as a front figure, quickly dissolved.
Ralf Christensen tells us more (courtesy of Google Translate):
Danish rock’s so-called Jellinge Stone** did not go down well when it was erected on June 1, 1967. . . . [T]he 24-year-old hippie Eik Skaløe . . . front[ed] the Copenhagen quartet. A Danish-speaking, self-thinking entity thrust its proboscis monkeys into the arena of barbed wire music, and broke the framework for what Danish music could be. But Steppeulvene’s debut album Hip was released in only 700 copies, and it took about two years to sell the modest edition. Skaløe was at the microphone and was the lyricist, Stig Møller was the guitarist and – with one exception – the songwriter. Søren Seirup operated the bass and harmonica – and wrote one song – and Preben Devantier played drums. . . . Time called for acid in the two-stroke engine, and in Steppeulvene it was drilled by a unicorn in free flight through the barn of colors. Eik Skaløe was a formidable meaning-transformer and language developer. Bob Dylan had put 10,000 volts into the English language, and Skaløe had listened, yes. But in his Danish lyrics one could also trace – occasionally explicit – references to and influences from Danish language artists such as Klaus Rifbjerg, Halfdan Rasmussen, Benny Andersen. . . . As Carsten Grolin originally wrote on the album cover, the band’s music is performed “in a Danish that is for the first time young and contemporary”. And it is also truly amazing to hear how funny and inventive, in love and desperate Eik Skaløe appears in the lyrics. . . . The giggle herb exerts its influence. The echo of the voices and the laughter in the spoken intermezzos is a hint with a cart pole about the state of affairs at the reel-to-reel tape recorder. “Be serious now, Stig,” chuckles Skaløe. But that doesn’t hurt the songs, indeed, during the later – only two-day-long – recordings of Hip there were also hash, LSD and hard drugs in play. . . . The Steppe Wolves only lived for nine months in 1967 in their original form, then they disbanded. Skaløe went to Nepal and ended up committing suicide on October 15, 1968 in the borderland between Pakistan and India. Hip was the band’s only album, and it was the first Danish-language rock band of high artistic caliber. “The pop song is today what the novel was 20 years ago. The electric guitar is the typewriter of our time,” Carsten Grolin quotes Skaløe as having said in the cover text from ’67. Rock could then be seen as a new form of contemporary novel. It was the vessel for a movement’s storming of the conservative supremacy of adults. . . . It’s an album of its collective time because it’s so full of late-’60s flighty dreams, rock musical catechisms, and psychedelic imagination. And it’s an individual, timeless experience because everyone – but not everyone – can become completely electric from listening to the best songs.
https://www.information.dk/kultur/anmeldelse/2015/01/elektriske-modstande-svunden-tid
* Wikipedia tells us that the hippie trail was “an overland journey taken by members of the hippie subculture and others from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, travelling from Europe and West Asia through South Asia such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh to Thailand.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie_trail) Maitreya Kali (see #1,016, 1,722) is another artist I have featured who fell victim to the hippie trail.
** Wikipedia informs us that:
The Jelling stones . . . are massive carved runestones from the 10th century, found at the town of Jelling in Denmark. . . . The larger of the two stones was raised by King Gorm’s son, Harold Bluetooth, in memory of his parents, celebrating his conquest of Denmark and Norway, and his conversion of the Danes to Christianity. The runic inscriptions on these stones are considered the best known in Denmark. . . . The stones are strongly identified with the creation of Denmark as a nation state. Both inscriptions mention the name “Danmark” . . . .The larger stone explicitly mentions the conversion of Denmark from Norse paganism and the process of Christianisation . . . . it is therefore popularly dubbed “Denmark’s baptismal certificate” . . . . In 1997 a photo of this stone inspired the name Bluetooth for the wireless technology.
Here is the demo (sans funk):
There is a 2014 Danish biopic about the band (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itsi_Bitsi) Here are two trailers in English:
Seems pretty cool!
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