The Hives, "Dead Quote Olympics"

In December 2017, in an improbable turn of events, Kate and I went as guests to the Nobel Prize award ceremonies. This was the last time I wore a tuxedo. Kate’s boss, Michael Rosbash, was one of three scholars to receive the Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm.” By this time Kate had worked in Michael’s lab for more than sixteen years, so she was a slam-dunk invitee to Stockholm. I was determined to tag along, and it turned out Michael had a ticket to spare for me to attend the events. So off we went to Sweden for the better part of a week, to do some Grade A hobnobbing.

The Nobel ceremonies are a whirlwind. There are lectures, parties, performances, receptions, banquets—one after another. I had dinner with the King of Sweden, along with 1500 other guests. The King and I weren’t exactly elbow to elbow, so I had no opening to ask him for things I was needin’ (Apple Music, Spotify). Your Grace: the barbecue sauce? But we were in the same room.

That room is the Blue Hall of the Stadshuset—Stockholm’s City Hall. Each year three internationally renowned chefs submit draft menus to the Nobel Foundation “for tasting and testing.” The Foundation then selects one of the three finalists to go into production on December 10, the day of the Banquet. This is not your proverbial rubber chicken. The meal I had in 2017 most decidedly did not taste like a fleet of chefs had plated it 1500 times over that same evening.

Each year’s Nobel menu is kept top-secret until the day of the Banquet. After that first, essential plating, however, anyone can have the same five-course meal. It’s available at Stadshuskällaren, a restaurant installed in the basement of the City Hall. You only have to call five days in advance, and you have until early December of the next year to try the menu, before it refreshes with the following Banquet’s bill of fare.

Here’s the 2017 menu:

Pressed and dried Jerusalem artichoke, served with kohlrabi flowers flavoured with ginger and lightly roasted cabbage broth

Crispy saddle of lamb, potato terrine with Svedjan crème, yellow beet, salt-baked celeriac, apple salad and rosemary-spiced lamb gravy

Frosty bilberry bavaroise, bilberry ice cream with lemon thyme, lime jelly, lime curd and lime meringues

For most of Nobel week, Kate and I felt a bit out of place. We were well below the mean and median ages of the attendees (though this part was welcome), and we weren’t at all accustomed to the extent of posh we were experiencing. This won’t surprise anyone who knows me, but I’m not much of a mix-and-mingle cocktail party guy. But all that said, I did feel right at home digging into that crispy saddle of lamb. And I had no trouble burying that dessert, either, even though to that point if you’d come to me with the word bilberry on your tongue, I’d have assumed we were talking about R.E.M.’s drummer. Put food in front of me, and I’ll adapt to any situation.

We rode a shuttle bus from our hotel to the Banquet, and shortly after boarding Kate gave me a kick in the shins and instructed me to give up my seat to an older woman who was standing by, holding onto the pole. In the moment this annoyed me, in part because I’d gone for a five-mile run around the city earlier in the day and my legs were shot, but also because I was already hypersensitive about making mistakes of etiquette, and really: had she given me another ten minutes to read the room, there was at least a 30% probability I would have made this offer myself. That woman was really skating around the floor of the bus in her heels.

In any case, I put a smile on my face and rose to my feet, motioning the woman into the seat next to Kate. In so doing I showed up a raft of European men with medals pinned on their chests, all of whom were sitting stone-faced on the bus, presumably working silently through equations, theorems, conjectures, and other abstractions. I would later log this incident as Instance #514 of Kate serving as the Source of All Good Things in My Life, because as luck would have it, this same woman and her husband were seated next to us at our assigned table in the Blue Hall. By my math, this was a 750-to-1 shot. As it turned out, I spent three lovely hours talking with the woman, and Kate making sure I wasn’t an asshole on the shuttle bus was a significant driver of that.

It bears repeating: men in Europe really do wear medals to formal events. Walking among them, you feel like you’re in a Tintin book. And you also feel underdecorated. Had I only known how this would play out, I might have brought along some of the pins I have stuck in my bulletin board at work. Meat Is Murder by the Smiths, Script Ohio, and the Ramones seal with the eagle on it, arranged in an inverted triangle just to the left of my jacket lapel, over the heart.

After the banquet, we took cabs through the city, lit already for Christmas, to the Karolinska Institutet for the world-famous after-party. A light snow was falling, just to make sure the dial was turned to Maximum Picturesque. The Students’ Night Cap after-party is something else. It rotates year to year through four of the in-town colleges and universities. When it’s their turn, students at the school plan, equip, stage, and host the event. The Medicinska Föreningen student union at Karolinska threw the party in 2017. I cannot describe to you how insanely cool this party was. Nor can I show pictures, because taking photos of the event was strictly forbidden. All I can say is that the party was laid out across at least a dozen spaces—indoor and outdoor—each one differently themed, with elaborately devised amusements, refreshments and costumed students decorating the space.

The attendees were either (1) Nobel laureates and their invited guests to the ceremony or (2) the students, many of whom were dressed to mock the attendees of the Banquet: i.e., decked out in formal attire with tails, but with piles of fake Tintin medals stuck through their jackets. These students led us drunkenly from room to room, steering us to trays of wildly conceived hors d'oeuvres—Tack¹, no—I’m already stuffed to the gills with bilberries—and fluorescing drinks spiked with dry ice to look like potions.

Nobel Prize winners are given (1) a diploma hand-delivered by the Swedish King; (2) a 175-gram gold medal stamped with a portrait of Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite; (3) eleven million Swedish kroner, to be subdivided among the co-recipients in their discipline; and (4) by general consensus the highest level of honor granted to scholars worldwide. Laureates also receive (5) a standing invitation to attend the ceremonies in subsequent years, and this—at least to me—has to be the best part of winning. I would kill to go back.

For the duration of our five-day stint running with royals and generally living the high life in Stockholm, Kate and I stayed in the Grand Hotel, a real edifice in the neoclassical style that through some Scando-Rowling wizardry is most certainly 60% bigger on the inside than on the outside. In the guts of the building are vast open staircases and vaulted corridors so plentiful and, um, grand that at times, walking from the elevator to our room, we fell prey to the supposition that we were entirely alone in the place. And this was during a week when the hotel was booked to capacity. On rare occasions you might encounter other guests in the hallway, as when I was flagged down by the wife of an earlier Economics laureate to help fix her husband’s bow tie. Three weeks earlier I had seen this man giving commentary on CNN.

The breakfast buffet at the Grand Hotel was extraordinary. I still dream about it. A bit heavy on the herring and lingonberries, but one must account for certain national idiosyncrasies. And on that subject, possibly my fondest memory of the Grand Hotel was riding the elevator up from the lobby one afternoon, listening to the Muzak, thinking about this and that (Apple Music, Spotify), when it dawned on me that the elevator music I was hearing was a soft-jazz rendition of “Hate To Say I Told You So” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the Hives.

On its face, this is an odd match. The Hives write, record, and perform songs that are the opposite of elevator music. Uniformed garage punk rabble-rousers in the grandest tradition of rock ‘n’ roll, the Hives are everything that the Grand Hotel cannot and should not abide. Their songs— take “Walk Idiot Walk” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Die, All Right!” (Apple Music, Spotify), and “Tick Tick Boom” (Apple Music, Spotify), for example—are loud, preposterous, and ill-mannered. Their mesmerizing front man, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist, is a cross between Mick Jagger, carnival barker, and exploding car battery. At the show I saw in Rome this summer, Howlin’ Pelle declared as follows, between songs:

The only material in the world that can be hot and cool at the same time, without being lukewarm, is THE HIVES.

So what gives? Well, the Hives are from Sweden, and in the Year of Our Lord 2017, i.e., decades after Ace of Base, and five years before the ABBA reunion, they may well have been the country’s favorite sons. (Stand down, Skarsgårds: I meant musically speaking.) And if it is the mission of the Grand Hotel staff to turn its out-of-town visitors on to the local delights—this way to Gamla Stan, sir, and here’s a map to the Vasa Museum—it seems reasonable also to dial up a playlist of watered-down arrangements of “Waterloo” (Apple Music, Spotify), “The Sign” (Apple Music, Spotify), and the Hives for guests to enjoy as they pass between floors.

The Hives occupy a specific niche and serve a specific purpose within rock ‘n’ roll. They’re not aiming to tear the whole system down (like, say, the Clash), or to expose the ugly underside of modern life (like, say, Nirvana). The Hives’ objective is more immediate and modest: they want to honor their forebears—by example, not citation—and give us all a hell of a good time. Make us laugh and dance and throw a middle finger or two up into the sky. Pelle et al. realize that all of rock music is, in the final analysis, pretend rebellion (see “Four Score and Seven”), so let’s take a couple hours in the dance hall and lean heavily into the pretend.²

On that score, the Hives aren’t too sinister or countercultural to penetrate a posh hotel lobby in Stockholm, and they’re a damned good rock band that should make the King of Sweden proud. In a 2002 review of their album Veni Vidi Vicious, Pitchfork called the Hives “the safest garage band in the world today”—and still awarded a 7.4 rating to the record:

[T]he Hives dish out power-punk that’s totally predictable, but will knock your ass around your hips and blow the gel out of your hair. … [T]hey bang through twelve tunes in thirty minutes—some of them indistinguishable from one another, but at that pace who cares?

If a Pitchfork reviewer can’t bring himself to turn up his nose to the Hives, what chance does the Grand Hotel manager have?

The song I picked for today is “Dead Quote Olympics” (Apple Music, Spotify). Clocking in at just under two minutes, it’s classic and essential Hives: brash, loud, frenetic, and catchy as hell. As for the lyrical subject matter, Pelle has a word or two for the scholars in his life:

You can’t make an omelet without breaking an egg. And I can’t make a headache if I don’t aim at the head. You had enough of their thoughts—have your own. Then you won’t have to be such a clone. That just won’t get you nowhere you thought it would.

***

This time you’ve really got something—it’s such a clever idea. But it doesn’t mean it’s good ’cause you found it at the library. Yes, they were smart, but they’re dead. And you’re repeating all that they said. You know, it don’t make you clever like you thought it would.

At least at the surface level, this is a sentiment that ought to shake up the 1500+ scholars and scholar-adjacents packing away potato terrine in the Stadshus on December 10—and especially so, when delivered at 180 bpm over thrashing guitars and drums. But should it really? Alfred Nobel made his bones mixing volatile chemicals and blowing shit up. Then he wrote his third and final will to establish a foundation to award annual prizes to the most innovative thinkers in the world. Now decades later come the Hives, themselves a combustible mix, calling on us all (in at least this one song) to quit bending the knee to dead thinkers and push forward instead with our own ideas.

Seems to me Alfred and the Hives would have been fast friends.

1. Swedish for “thank you.”

2. Speaking of pretend, the Hives have for years maintained that they are under the management of an American Col. Tom Parker-type named Randy Fitzsimmons, who—so the story goes—wrote letters to each of the band members in 1993 and instructed them to find one another and form a band. Fitzsimmons has all of the band’s songwriting credits and has never been seen in public. Enterprising rock journalists have unearthed government documents showing that “Randy Fitzsimmons” is a trademark registered to Hives guitarist “Arson” (born Niklas Almqvist).

Earlier this year the Hives released their sixth record and first in eleven years. In a press release announcing the record, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, the band explained that they’d been estranged from their manager since 2012. However, “[f]ollowing the recent discovery of a hidden away obituary and cryptic poem in the local paper of the Northern Vastmanland town where The Hives are from, the band members were led to Fitzsimmons’ tombstone.”

Naturally, the Hives started digging—who wouldn’t?—and found no body. Instead, they unearthed some demo tapes and five black-and-white suits. They rehearsed and recorded the songs on the demos, and there’s your new record.

For my part, I like to think Randy is still alive.