Category Archives: Sweden

Jack and the Rippers

Mikael Nilsson sent in the cover and tracks by Jack and the Rippers. Of the band he says “they started as a instrumental band. In 1965 they came second in a radio competition the prize for that was to make a record.”

“Cathy’s Clown” is not one of my favorite Everly Brothers songs, but the group does a good job of it. I”‘m the Richest” is a solid beat song, with lyrics sung in English, though they’re hard to make out clearly. It was written by Kjell Wadstedt, Jörgen Sjöstedt and Lars E. Carlsson.

Songwriter and producer Lars Carlsson’s website gives the history of the Dollar label, an excerpt is below:

Together with Åke Söhr I started Dollar Records in 1965. At that time I worked as a producer at Cupol Grammofon AB in Stockholm. Åke (dead since 1995) was then a well known singer and musician mostly working in Stockholm. He recorded for Cupol and was a friend of Helge Roundqvist, the owner of the company. This friendship made it possible for us to distribute the Dollar label through Cupol and as I was working there, I could keep an eye on the distribution.

The first Dollar records were cut at Borgarskolan (a secondary school) in Stockholm, where a small studio was located. The owner was an engineer, Erik Lundberg. The control room was situated on the third floor and there was no lift. The artists and the groups stood on a small stage on the first floor. The producer kept in touch with them by a local phone and was actually looking down on the musicians through a small window. In the control room there was a two-track tape recorder, a reverb effect and a mixer. The background music was recorded on one track and the vocals on the other. To listen to the recorded tracks the singer had to go to the control room. When the singer had climbed the stairs three or four times, he/she was so exhausted he/she couldn’t sing any more. That’s one of the reasons cutting a record was so fast at Borgarskolan. Two or three vocal takes on one song were very common.

Among the first Dollar recordings made at this studio were The Madmen, The Teddy Bears and Jack And The Rippers. The first pressing of each record was around two hundred copies. The group bought some records to sell and Cupol distributed the rest. In 1969 the last Dollar record was released. We had made sixty-eight singles, seventeen EP’s and one LP.