Jalla
Jalla
This article originally appeared in NFH #21 in
the winter of 1991.
"We are Jalla
Jalla from the Arctic Circle and we are sitting here in our ranch. The weather is fine and
birds keep singing. We had a gig in a kid concert and there was a couple of hundred kids
and their mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers, and after the gig they
came to thank us. That's the kind of punk rock and roll band we are. Grannies come to
thank us", laughs one member of Finnish rock band Jalla Jalla during a chaotic taped
interview in which each member took turns interrupting the other and identification of
individual voices was totally impossible.
I suspect that
Finnish grandmothers are an unusual bunch, because I can't imagine my grandmother doing
anything other than reaching for new pacemaker batteries after listening to Jalla Jalla's
powerful rock and roll. The band comes from a town called Rovaniemi that lies right on the
Arctic Circle and far outside of the larger cities of Finland like Helsinki and Tampere
many hundreds of miles to the south. Their press release says that living in the middle of
Lapland explains why the band is a "working mixture of positive rock energy and
craziness". I've heard crazy and energetic bands from other places, so I won't say I
totally buy that argument, but there's no denying that Jalla Jalla play music that's great
fun, catchy and memorable while being powerful and energetic.
The band started over
six years ago. The drummer and guitar player (they don't list their names on the records
and never bothered to say them in the interview) first played together in a punk band in
1978, and four years later Jalla Jalla's current bass player joined with them. In 1984
their singer, who also plays guitar left handed, joined up coming from an art band called
Sprite Train. This completed the lineup, and they began to try to build up some momentum.
They recorded a demo in 1985 and tried to get a major label deal, but they got no
reaction, so they took the time honored route of releasing their own single in an edition
of 300, pairing the songs "City Song" and "Apartment Stories". It's
impossible to find now, but both songs appear on the new lp, at least. The single got a
lot of airplay on Finnish radio stations and was well received by Finnish fanzines. More
importantly, it got the band an indie record deal with Hiljaiset Levyt, who signed them
without ever seeing them live.
In 1988 they recorded
a four song ep for Hiljaiset Levyt, which was called "Goes Pop". Like their
first record, this is now sold out and impossible to get. With two releases under their
belt, they started touring regularly to the cities of southern Finland. In 1989, they
released another single, the brilliant "Love Charging Battery"/"Ain't Got
No". The A side of this one has a great chugging beat and a killer fat guitar riff as
its signature, and if you can't find it as a single, you can get it on the Gaga Goodies
compilation Finndies Volume I or on the soon to be released Noise For Heroes
compilation The Violence Inherent In The System.
This past year they
finally released their first lp, called Jalla Jalla. In Finland it's on Hiljaiset
Levyt, but it's also been released on the English label Plastic Surgery Records. They've
begun to tour outside of Finland to support it...going to the rest of Scandinavia, to
Belgium and to Germany, and they were scheduled to go to France and England in May.
They've even played three gigs in Russia, although when they played in Leningrad they only
got through three tracks and then their singer was abruptly escorted off the stage with
the explanation that the music was "too hard" for the Russian people. I guess
Russian grandmothers are more like mine.
The album is pretty
much fantastic as far as I'm concerned...it's one of the five or so records from the last
year that I keep coming back to and play over and over again. The music is fairly
traditional high energy rock and roll stuff, but it's played with a great sense of feeling
and fire. The singer has a great voice that's slightly nasally sounding, goes rough in the
right spots and stays melodic in other places. The guitars are big and fat, and the
drummer has a sense of feel that you don't hear very often. The songs are optimistic and
upbeat for the most part. The cacophony of voices on the interview tape explained it like
this:
First voice:
"It's quite difficult to explain our style because we have mixed different kinds of
styles in our music. We play straight rock, but there are some other rhythms inside.
Somewhere there is a guitar war, we say. Maybe you can hear the ska beat in some
tracks."
Second voice:
"I'm the singer, and I like to go to gigs where the guitar is strong. I like that
guitar sound when I'm singing...with that it's just fun to sing everything, because guitar
is so loud and good."
First voice: "I
don't like loud guitars...you can't hear the drums. We are not much into that heavy metal,
or speed or that kind of stuff, just traditional rock melodies."
Second voice:
"Mixed by punk!"
Third voice:
"Singing in harmonies."
Second voice:
"Just like Beach Boys who have listened to too much Exploited!"
The various band
members each seem to like many different kinds of music, but the common thread is new wave
records from the 70s; names like the Damned, the Ramones and the Specials came up. You can
hear a ska beat in a couple of tracks on the lp (like "Apartment Stories"), but
the songs are played with such a rock and roll punch that the net effect is not to sound
like a Two Tone band, but rather just another twist on their high velocity rock and roll.
The Replacements also got a special mention for their approach to live gigs. As a twist,
the band also likes to play an occasional acoustic gig; they typically play about 50 gigs
a year, and in the handful that are acoustic they play banjos, mandolins, acoustic guitars
and even ukuleles. The songs in these gigs are generally traditional American folk and
country songs, which perhaps explains the presence of the bizarre "Redneck's
Lullaby" on the flip of their cool new single, "Minnesota Plates". The most
important criterion for music that they like, says one member is "if the music is
honest, it's good music."
I wrote in a review
of their last single that Jalla Jalla means "Faster Faster", but the band were
quick to add to that in the interview. First of all, the "J" is pronounced as a
"Y" as in all Scandinavian languages, so it comes out "yalla yalla".
As for what it means:
First voice:
"There are three different meanings..."
Second voice:
"Four meanings. The first meaning is from a Laplander tribe in Finland and it means
"crazy crazy". In Egypt it means "horrible stomach ache" and in
Arabian lands it means "Faster faster"."
Third voice:
"When you drive your camel the crazy Arabs hit the camel in the ass and go
"Jalla Jalla"."
They never did say
what the fourth meaning is. Oh, well. At this point, I surveyed the rest of the disastrous
transcription of the interview that remains and I think the best thing to do is just to
print it the way it came out. It's a bit chaotic, but it captures something of what the
band translates into music and it's kind of funny to read.
First voice:
"When we released our first single there was a photograph where the drummer jumped,
ski jumping, and it's fun to try ski jumping, so every one of us tried by themselves how
long they can jump. We built our own ski jumping place nearby our training place. It was
our guitarist and drummer who built it. Then we had a competition by ourselves and my
record at first was 7 meters. It was a 50 meter long ski jumping hill. When I first jumped
I was so afraid "Oh, I can't do that, I can't do that". And then I did it and it
was so much fun, such a good feeling, so I said to the other band members...some of them
have jumped before, but our lead guitarist, I asked him to jump, and he said "Oh,
that's good, that's very good". Little by little we got our own records, my record is
twenty meters. Our lead guitarist has an 11 meters, and our bass player has 12 meters. The
drummer has our best result...he has a 78 meters...he's quite a good jumper. We are very
jealous of him."
Second voice:
"He's quite good so far, before he breaks his neck."
First voice:
"The guitarist has a very good record also. He has 47 meters. When rock bands
nowadays come in the winter to our city and we go to their gig and we say "hey let's
jump tomorrow", we challenge them that we will beat you at ski jumping and they say,
"No we are better than you" and then we have a competition."
Third voice: "It
heals their hangovers."
First voice:
"What bands have beaten us?"
All (decisively):
"None!"
First voice: "No
bands have beaten us. But every time a band comes, we challenge them."
Third voice:
"And we take videos of them in competition."
Second voice:
"In Finland, it's not a flat country as you think. We have hills, but not
mountains...good places to jump. The best jumpers in the world are from Finland
(laughter). When we go on tour in the winter, every city where we go we try to find a ski
jumping place because there are also bands that want to ski jump, and then we challenge
them to go somewhere to jump."
Third voice:
"And whenever you manage a tour in America for Jalla Jalla find a good place for us
for fishing. We'll read Trout Fishing In America by Richard Brautigan. And also
find us good ski jumping places in the winter...nearby the Canadian border. Do you have
any?"
Oh, right, I'm going
to arrange ski jumping for Jalla Jalla in San Diego. Is water skiing OK? What is it about
rock and roll that makes lunatics out of people, anyway?
Now the conversation
shifts to more traditional pursuits...
First voice: "In
our songs that we write, almost all of our words are done by our bass player Pekka and
almost all of our tunes are written by our guitarist. Our songs...I don't say they are
love songs, but something between love and hate. I have made one or two songs with the
bass player."
Third voice:
"Sad songs played with a happy face."
First voice:
"Yeah, that's good. And with energy in the gigs and with a lot of attention to music
playing. When we go up to play in our gigs, almost all of the gigs when we go to the
stage, it's almost every time the same. The bass player is in front of the drums and the
drummer hits off the drums and both guitarists are fighting against each other and I jump
every place. I think it's fun to play rock music that way. It's fun and it's good and it
gives a good feeling, and after a gig it's good to play tomorrow, too. Sometimes we have
our fights, but it's usually good."
The lyrics are one of
the many unique things about Jalla Jalla. As you can tell from reading this, their English
is passable but they aren't always the most lucid elocutionists. The lyrics to their songs
are written in a similarly fractured English with the result that you keep hearing
snatches of unique and bizarre phrases here and there and their pronunciation allows them
to stretch words into rhymes and meters that you'd never hear in a song written by an
English speaking band. Here's an example verse from the "Minnesota Plates"
single:
Then we recorded
In your living room
The chandelier
dropped and went
Crash bang boom
We were pissed with
it but it
Gained a hit we were
On the road again
But it sometimes gets
so boring
Think I'll buy an
ultraplane
First voice: "In
Helsinki, our capital city, we have been there many times, and there's little clubs around
the city, and we go there and play hard and very tough. Many people like it."
Third voice:
"Many people don't."
Second voice:
"Well, we don't like them also (laughs)."
(At this point the
band bursts into an acoustic folk song that abruptly ends in a small shoving match.)
Second voice:
"Two years ago in a local restaurant we had a gig and the place was full of local
yups. And after our first track eighty percent of the people went away from that
restaurant because they couldn't stand our music. And there were two 70 year olds; man and
wife, and the man had a stick in his hand and he knocked it on the floor and said "if
the people don't like your music it's not your fault", and they danced away to our
rock music!"
Third voice:
"About our attitudes...we don't have long hair and we don't have leather jeans and
boots. Three of us have earrings (laughs). Two of us. OK. In many cities in Finland rock
bands are very tough and they look like rock and roll stars and they have suits like rock
and roll stars, and when we go there we have just ordinary things on us, and then we play
hard and they wonder "what kind of music do you play? You haven't got the right kind
of rock and roll suits on you.""
"We played a
rock festival down by the library and there was three bands. We had a competition to see
who could play the most gigs in three days. We played 27 gigs."
First voice: "My
voice was awful after that."
Third voice:
"The best had 42 gigs and the other had 31. The rules were that we had to play at
least 15 minutes and there had to be at least 15 people. We lost because at every gig we
had we had free beers, as much as we could drink, and of course we did. Other bands didn't
drink so much."
Second voice:
"Our gigs, usually are various kinds. Sometimes we play very good and very fast with
lots of energy. Other times we have guitars that..."
First voice: "We
suck on stage..."
Third voice:
"Sometimes we play good and sometimes we play bad. Almost all kinds of gigs. We're an
unprofessional band. Definitely."
They may be
unprofessional, but they are about as good at it as you can be. A wonderful band, for
sure.
