A. A-ha

Let's Say We Did

In 1998, I attended a concert in Oslo in honor of that years recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, John Hume and David Trimble, the two people who brokered peace in Northern Ireland. The concert is an annual event, occuring over the weekend of the ceremony, and ideally featuring artists from the winning country. Since that year’s winners were Irish, one might have expected U2 to appear, but I guess they were busy, so on this occasion, the headliner was the Cranberries. There were other artists as well – for example, Oumou Sangare, James Galway, and Alanis Morrisette -- but I was most excited to see the Norwegian band A-ha, who at the time were already past their glory days of producing the most beloved video of all time ever for the song “Take On Me.” Given the video, I thought they’d be lightweight and dumb but they were actually really good; performing two songs, “The Sun Always Shines on TV” and “Summer Moved On.” (I know this because it says it in Wikipedia, not because I remember it.) A journalist sitting next to me, knowing I was ostensibly there covering it for Rolling Stone,* turned to me and said, “Please don’t laugh at us,” presumably because A-ha were kind of a teen-dream band at the time, but I had no intention of doing so. Still proud to say I saw this band in their home country, in their hey-day, even if the story ended up a wash.

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*The thing is, Rolling Stone never actually ran my story. They decided they’d written too much about those bands. And by the time I got to Oslo, I knew that they weren’t running the story, because they’d told me, in a phone call cancelling the assignment, which I received in the airport departure lounge at SFO.

And yet. Nevertheless, there I was, on a cold afternoon in early winter in 1998, walking around the center of town somewhere near the Oslo Spektrum. It wasn’t four o clock yet but it was already dark, and it smelled like snow: icy, brisk, clean, uninflected. It was a few hours until the show started, and I killed the time by looking into shop windows and being disappointed that everything inside them looked pretty much like everything you could get in America. I tried to tell myself that it was really cool that I was there at all, in Europe, on assignment. I tried to impress myself with the fact that I was about to go to the Nobel Peace Prize festivity, wearing a little press pass and everything. I looked at myself in the window reflections, bundled up in my black winter coat, and I tried to will myself into feeling like the reporter from Rolling Stone, a rock critic, a working journalist, a professional writer, a foreign correspondent, a female character in “Almost Famous,” only somehow not a groupie… everything I’d ever wanted to be.

But I knew that I was a fraud. Not only was I not on some wild road trip with a band of crazed musicians, but I was covering – if I was covering anything – a government-sanctioned concert at which the highlight was A-ha, four clean-cut Nordic boys playing MTV-ready rock. And I wasn’t even covering that.

In retrospect, it may be that this particular event, A-ha at the Spektrum Arena Oslo, marks the moment when I realized that I had taken a wrong turn in my life somewhere, and that it was time to rectify things. Because the truth was, I realized, Rolling Stone was right to cancel the story, because after all, they had only allotted me something like 300 words in which to write about 9 acts performing on the biggest stage (metaphorically) in the world. In 300 words, what could I say, other than it happened?  

That wasn’t what I’d envisioned when I pitched it: I’d seen it more as a think piece in which I opined, not on the music, but on the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony felt it incumbent upon itself to give a concert like this at ALL. It struck me as very odd that the Nobel Peace Prize, which was such a big and famous event, commemorating something as important as, in this case, the brokering of peace after 80 years of warfare, would include something as, let’s face it, trivial as a rock concert to honor its recipients.

Looking back, the A-ha debacle – and I assure you, it was a debacle, because there was really no reason in the wide world for me to be in Oslo in December of 1998 -- I am mostly just struck by my hubris. In my arrogance, what I thought was that magazines like Rolling Stone should publish this kind of article, rather than what they did publish at the time which was reviews of new CDs by larger acts, gossip, and lengthy features on rock stars, all written by David Fricke. Just for fun, I just looked up what was actually in the issue that my story on A-ha did not run in. In December of 1998, the issue following my attendance at this concert, was a double issue entitled ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Yearbook. It featured interviews with Foxy Brown, Brian Setzer, Billy Corgan and Michael Stipe. There was an ‘expose’ of “wrestling’s top dog,” a man called Steve Austin. The singer Jewel was on the cover, and the cover tag line was, “A weird year of dirty divas, fake fakes, teen sex queens, Marilyn, Madonna, Morissette.”

I mean! Obviously I was utterly deluded in thinking there was room for even 300 words about the Nobel Peace Prize Rock concert. I went anyway, in part, so I could spend Christmas with my relatives in London (I should probably mention here that Rolling Stone did not pay my expenses). And I went to see A-ha, because at that time in my life I was hellbent on witnessing every possible band, in every possible circumstance, and the weirder the circumstance, the better. I went so that I could say I did – which I am now doing, finally. But the only thing I can really remember well about that night is that for dinner I was served kung pao reindeer.

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