Jim Pembroke: London to Helsinki to Kansas City

Part 1

Jim Arrives in Finland

EJ: You were a Finnish citizen at some point?
JP: No, they gave me an extended work permit. I still have a work permit (in my passport). I need to get a new pass in 2002. Until then I've got a … I can do gigs in Finland. In 1965 they would give me one month at a time for the permit. Then they gave you three months at a time. Then I got a year at a time. This went on and on for years. I thought of asking for dual citizenship. [They did not respond to this]. Then there was the European Song Contest...
[Jim wrote two of the songs that represented Finland in the contest. There seems to be some connection to the passport situation].
EJ: With Kojo?
JP: Yeah, and Riki also ["Reggae OK"]. After that, I was still asking about dual citizenship. "We can't do that". I was thinking, should I change, then? [citizenship]. I thought one more time, I said I want an "ikuinen työlupa" or "ilman takarajaa". Usually it took two weeks to get results. I asked for "ikuinen", perpetual. After about 6 or 8 weeks, the paper arrives to come down to Vuorikatu. They've given me a long, long extended work permit.
EJ: You were pretty settled in Finland at the time. You were married?
[Jim has a 20 year old daughter, Emma].
JP: No, I never got married. But Helsinki became my hometown. There seemed to be a need and a want for what I did (songs and lyrics). Especially with Love Records being born. Without Love records it could have taken a longer time for people like Blues Section Juice and Hector, Pelle [Miljoona], Dave [Lindholm] etc. to find an outlet. The legacy of Love Records goes on and on. Regards to Otto Donner and Atte Blom ('the mastermind of Finnish poppy-bullshit' as he liked to be known) [laughs]. That all came through Love Records. I think the talents of Juice and Co. would have come through anyway, but maybe it would have taken longer. I don't know. All I know is that Love was the only progressive record company around in Finland in the 60's and 70's.
EJ: In interviews from that 70's period, the trend was that the people thought they were doing something different. The magazines and record companies were "edistyksellisiä", progressive (almost like a political ideology).
JP: Most of the music was 'Iskelmä.' Cover versions of Italian ballads and Tom Jones covers. Well, there were Finnish lyric writers, of course. But mainly Europop muzak cover versions. That all changed with Love and Blues Section. No Finnish bands were writing their own music. Really there weren't any bands in Finland doing originals before Blues Section, but that all changed when Love Records came along. Well, Jimi Hendrix and Cream etc were exploding everywhere.

Before we discuss the bands in detail, I had asked Jim about his earlier days in London.

EJ: Were you much into music before you got to Finland?
JP: Yes, I was in a couple of bands in London, I actually left those bands in London, saying that I would be back. I never did go back to live in England.
EJ: Do you draw on any older type of rock or R&B?
JP: Well I was into blues before I went to Finland. Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed. They were my introduction to the blues. I was very much a blues fan.
JP: Eric Clapton, he used to play in a little club in '62-'63. Before the Yardbirds. He used to play with John Mayall. Eric Clapton was a big name in London (mainly) at the time. I must have been about 15 or 16. That's when I started the first band I was in. Then he joined the Yardbirds. I became a Yardbirds fan, seeing them playing. The 100 Club in Oxford Street, in London. There wouldn't be a lot of people. It was kind of Thursday night, The Yardbirds with Eric Clapton. They had a small following before For Your Love. Which was their big hit, which made Eric leave. He was very much into the blues. The Yardbirds were, too, but they turned over into a kind of pop music.
EJ: Did you get to meet him?
JP: No.
EJ: Too young?
JP: Yeah. I'd be at the club and he'd be at the bar. But I wouldn't say anything. I met Brian Jones once, just when the Stones were being…I had long hair (shows length). He stopped, looked at me, and he said "you've got longer hair than me!" He had the longest hair in the Stones.
EJ: So you never had much collaboration with English musicians?
JP: No, outside the guys in North London where I came from. We had a blues band. We played the club where The Stones and The Animals started.

Blues Section

EJ: You were one of the early bands that Love Records signed.
JP: It was the first band for Love. It was the band that was formed because Otto Donner and Atte Blom said that we'll form Love Records. They wanted to start a record company. They wanted it to be different, "edistyksellinen", if you like. And so they talked to Måsse and me and Hasse and Ronnie and so we formed the band to make an album. Without Love Records, there would have been no Blues Section. Or maybe there would.
JP: During the Blues Section time my favorite bands were like The Who, The Yardbirds, Small Faces, Jimi Hendrix. I saw myself in that kind of musical setup. Kind of pop music. So I was writing songs in that vein. Call Me On Your Telephone, I saw that as a kind of Who song. And then there was Hey Hey Hey, after I discovered Hendrix. Another Blues Section single. We made two or three singles and one album.
EJ: It sounds as if you played a lot different stuff live than you ended up recording.
JP: Yeah, it was originally supposed to be a blues band because Måsse had seen John Mayall's Bluesbreakers in Stockholm. So the gigs were mainly blues jams and the songs we made we didn't play them live so much. Maybe they were a little different, so that the guys wouldn't bother to rehearse them (but they recorded them!). But it was very popular in the year that it was together.

Living in Finland