Most of this material is recorded on reel-to-reel tape and has passed through many hands before it ended up in my possession. Consequently, many generations of copying have tragically affected the technical quality. However, the musical message, and perhaps above all, the historical interest, means that I simply have to share these documents.
The Nazz took their name from the Yardbirds song “The Nazz are Blue” from the LP “Roger The Engineer”. It is, incidentally, one of the few songs – and perhaps the only album track – where we hear Jeff Beck’s “singing voice”.
To return to The Nazz, the group actually took that name before the American guitarist Tod Rundgren appeared with a group of the same name. The Swedish The Nazz never released any records. The only works that have survived are some odd and noisy tape recordings from the time they started.
The Nazz emerged from the ruins of the R’n’B band High Life Sect. The first line-up of the band had Mats Dahlberg on bass and vocals, Roger Norlund and Gunnar E Olsson on guitar and vocals, Anders “Shorty” Larsson on drums and Philip Tagg on keyboards.
Three more bassists (Erik Otternäs, Pär Dawid Johnson and Herbert Bodinger) and another drummer (Tommy Löwbäck) passed through the band before it disbanded in 1970.
The Nazz toured all over Sweden and half of Norway and participated with great success in several of the pop band competitions that were organized in Sweden in the 60s. They almost always won …
Like for example the competition that Nya WemlandsTidningen organized at Sundsta’s youth farm. There the first prize was a trip to England. We participated and won, but we never went to England… A miss of course. We played, among other things, this creation:
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