Secondly, the band takes its name from a series of ‘70s pulp fiction books about two dudes who own cool trucks and drive about the desert picking up chicks. Trucks were cool in the ’70s – check out The Cannonball Run, Convey and Dual if you have any doubts.
Thirdly, they play heavy duty, loud and fuzzy stoner/desert rock in the vein of QOTSA and Fu Manchu, although they’re about as clean living as you can get in rock’n’roll and where they live is the antithesis of arid. The lads are mostly surrounded by snow for much of the year – Källgren, the band’s guitarist, even works at what would be a Surf, Dive ‘n Ski in Australia but is just a Ski over there.
Fourthly, Cedermalm once injured Valient Thor’s guitarist’s eye so badly the poor dude had to wear a pirate patch for a week, which would’ve been cool had it not been otherwise painful. To cut a long story short, it’s all fun and games until someone’s nearly blinded in a bread fight.
Finally, Spinal Tap style, they can’t hang onto a drummer. They’ve now had at least seven drummers, although Pezo, their original drummer seems to return to the fold every so often. Källgren describes the lineup changes as relentless.
“Really, it’s hard to get a drummer to get the same feeling for a band, especially when you lose the original,” he rues. “Then the rest of the band, me and Oskar have been playing together for so many years. I guess it’s harder for them to get as excited as what the rest of us do or to be as caring. It’s even harder if you’re touring quite a lot, because you have to sacrifice a lot of normal life. Usually they don’t last more than a year.”
There’s also the fact that they were the subject of their own piss-funny documentary (Truckfighters Fuzzomentary – it’s so worth a look) and QOTSA allegedly once said they’d never share the stage with Truckfighters again because they made them look like amateurs. That may’ve been tongue-in-cheek, but who knows? For a three piece, they generate a massive wall of sound and their shows are sweaty, athletic affairs: Cedermalm (vocalist and bassist) and Källgren rock out like lunatics.
Källgren and Cedermalm are the band’s core. While they met when they were both studying sound engineering, they grew up in Örebro, as did their original drummer Pezo, although he spent little time in town because his folks were in the circus – no shit. While they grew up on ‘70s rock (Led Zep, Black Sabbath et. al) it wasn’t what they were listening to when they were teenagers. “When I was first consciously listening to music, I was into the grunge scene,” Källgren explains. “I listened a lot to Nirvana, Pearl Jam and later Soundgarden – all the ‘90s rock bands. Then I got into Tool and Kyuss, stuff like that. Tool is kind of proggy of course, but I must have been at least 15 or 16 the first time I heard them. Maybe they are influencing us more than we think, because they were the only progressive band we were listening to.”
Interestingly, the band never plans what it’s going to do before it does it. How do you avoid chaos with that approach? “I dunno,” Källgren laughs. “Chaos can be good, you just have to control it a bit. You just need to see what’s coming to you and form it or shape it where you can or the way you can.”
Despite this, they intentionally avoid doing anything hip. What does that mean you need to avoid? “We need to avoid doing a song with the form of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, break and chorus again, or may be double chorus at the end, because that’s very boring,” Källgren observes. “Apart from that, there are no rules to our making music actually.”
It beggars belief because Truckfighters are as popular as all get out here (they sold out their shows at Cherry last year and fill stadiums in the US), but they’re not as beloved on home soil. “It’s always been quite hard to get shows in Sweden for us,” Källgren muses. “2014 was the first year since 2006 that we played more than two or three shows in Sweden – we played eight shows in Sweden last year. The scene is not really big here unless you go a bit more mainstream-accepted hard rock. Sweden is a bit different. Stockholm is the only place where there’s rock radio. Rock is not so trendy anymore. We still play in Stockholm and have 400 or 500 people showing up, that’s good, but we can only do it a maximum of once each year, otherwise people get bored.”
BY MEG CRAWFORD
