Nov-Dec-2015_Pg 11_no bleed

the Holiday Entertaining issue

home town closed down for the month. Everything closed down for the month. Everything except the bars, restaurants, hotels and resorts. Because everybody else was on vacation and went to them. At the time, Göran was the lead guitar player in a band called Queen Bee and the Zydeco Amigos. They were, as the name might imply, a Tex-Mex zydeco band. From Sweden. And they were killers.

My World Cup

Runneth Over

by Chris Rose

I ’ve been to a great many parties, fêtes, feasts, functions, soirées, affairs, events, happenings, bashes, blowouts, throw-downs and doings in my life. Some folks might even consider me an expert on such matters, such as reputations go. I mean I’ve been to a lot of parties.A lot , right?Who on the Gulf Coast hasn’t? Hell, life here is a party without borders, curfew or reason. But the best shindig I’ve ever been to was in a place called Bohus Malmön in the Bohuslän archipelago in Västra Götaland County on the west coast of Sweden, just north of Gothenburg. Of course, you know it! OK, maybe not. One special night in the summer of 1994, Bohus Malmön was all that, and more. Very few of us mere mortals ever get to say we danced at the center of the universe. Where reverie, purpose, pride, sports, nationalism, zydeco music and topless Swedish beaches all come together in a harmonic convergence, a perfect storm, the Utopian ideal, Valhalla, and just … paradise . • • •  

They had a show the night that I arrived, on the island resort of Bohus Malmön, at a place called Lilla Draget, a local seafood house specializing in traditional Swedish fare — of which one of the specialties was called “crayfish.” Now, since you are reading this story in Rouses magazine, I am presuming that you are presuming what I was presuming:That they were serving “crawfish,” but had simply spelled it wrong, like lots of restaurants in places that aren’t in Louisiana do. Well, no. These “crayfish” were served like New Orleans “crawfish,” but were about five times bigger. Kind of like mutant mudbugs gone wild. In fact, they were more like little lobsters than what we in Louisiana know as crawfish. And they were some kind of good. So I was eating these “crayfish” lobster things, and we were all taking shots of a Scandinavian liqueur, a local delicacy called North Sea Oil. It was as powerful as it was awful. But the crowd was in high gear and the band was burning it down and the walls were throbbing and floor was shaking and it was just sublime. And of course my Swedish friends made me feel like a king, introducing me around the bar, buying drinks, toasting New Orleans

For most of the previous decade, I had hosted at my home in New Orleans a great many blues musicians from Sweden. I had become a very close friend of one wickedly talented guitar slinger from Gothenburg named Göran Sevenson Svenningsson, and then, over the years, he directed any and all of his musician friends who were visiting the United States, for whatever reason, to contact me. Thus, for many great years I basically ran a flophouse for Swedish blues musicians. And my payday came through when all those many Swedish friends of mine pooled their money together to fly me over to visit them as a thank you gesture for my years of hospitality. The best way to describe the place would be to compare it to Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard or the Hamptons. It’s an island resort that fills up in summertime. Sweden has a tradition wherein pretty much the entire country goes on vacation at the same time, in July. The Volvo plant and the Absolut Vodka distillery in Göran’s

Queen Bee and the Zydeco Amigos

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2015