Mecki Mark Men
A breakthrough performance at Stockholm's Experimental Jazz Festival in July 1967 helped establish the group, placing them at the forefront of Swedish psychedelic rock and its fledgling progg subgenre.
MMM, along with the improvisational rock trio Baby Grandmothers,[10] served as a house band at Stockholm's famous Filips club run by Janne Carlsson of the instrumental music duo Hansson & Karlsson.
[12] By late 1967 the band had shrunk to the quartet of Bodemark, Nordstrom, Svanberg and Gartz for a tour of Finland with the Baby Grandmothers and Finnish singer Anki Lindqvist.
[13] Jimi Hendrix had become acquainted with MMM on previous visits to Klubb Filips and he was regularly performing his own version of the Hansson and Karlsson tune "Tax Free.
"[14] Hendrix played short sets on the tour due an injury from smashing a plate glass hotel window,[15] but his forearm bandaged, he regularly jammed with the Mecki Mark Men when their bands were warming up for gigs.
[8] Because of Mecki Bodemark's Jimi-soundalike vocal style[17] and his band's heavy, unpredictable and esoteric music, MMM often drew comparisons to both Hendrix and Zappa, even from those unaware of the artists' various associations.
[28] The musical ran at Stockholm's Scalateatern from September 1968 through April 1969, playing a total of 155 shows, and the cast recorded a Swedish language version of the soundtrack with Bodemark and the others as the backing band.
[29] During Hår's Christmas break, Bodemark and the Baby Grandmothers toured again with Finnish singer Anki Lindqvist, this time to Prague, accompanied by avant garde musician M. A.
[6][33] Earlier in the decade Limelight had been managed by Quincy Jones, who booked luminary jazz artists like Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Hines, Milt Jackson, Gerry Mulligan, and Oscar Peterson.
[36] Upon finishing their seven-month run with Hår, Bodemark asked the Baby Grandmothers to become his new Mecki Mark Men, and the re-dubbed quartet returned for another tour of Finland.
[28] Mecki Mark Men made a promotional film for the songs "Running In The Summer Night" and "Being Is More Than Life," which aired on the Swedish TV program Kram: Tema Att Lyssna in May 1969.
[39] By the fall of 1969, the band's popularity in their home country garnered them numerous TV appearances, another U.K. tour, and a collaboration with the Royal Swedish Opera on Lars Johan Werle's work Resan (translated as "Journey" or "The Trip").
[40] Rasan's libretto by Lars Runsten depicted a suburban woman's everyday life in contrast with the fantastic world of her childhood friend, reflecting the rifts between post-war European society and the burgeoning counterculture seeping in from America and Britain.
[41] In the program notes, Werle wrote that Resan was "An opera about people of today; about the children of the welfare state; our lack of contact with one another; our loneliness and blindness and pretensions.
[49] In 1974 MMM's original trumpeter Anders Sjöstedt returned to work with Bodemark in a new version of Mecki Mark Men, gradually forming the group with Bosse Svenssonon playing tenor sax, Staffan Linros on guitar, Peter Sahlin on bass, and Janne Kullhammar at the drum kit for the recording of the 1979 soft rock, smooth jazz, and soul-inspired album Flying High.
The group of Henry Uilli on guitar, Peter Sahlin on bass, Tommy Koverhult on sax, Anders Nilsson on trumpet, Daniel Wigstranol on pedal steel and Johan Sjokvist on drums joined Bodemark and Omhav in the studio to record the band's fifth album, Livingroom.
