The story of the songwriters

Burt Clinton & Jim Slim

In the beginning of the 60:s, Lars E. Carlsson and I started to write songs together. Lars composed the music and I wrote the lyrics. We both lived in Örebro at that time and some common friends brought us together. As we hoped to make international songwring careers I wrote the lyrics in English.

We started to send our songs to artists and record companies in England. It was common to send sheet music at that time . Demos was very unusual, even among well-known songwriters. To make it easier to work internationally, we decided to use pen names. Our pen names were Burt Clinton (Lars) and Jim Slim (Jörgen).

Our international careers were hard and progressed very slowly forwards. One first success in Sweden was when Lars got his song ”Ozark” recorded by The Gunnar Kinch Band. But if Muhammed won't come to to mountain, the mountain will have to come to Muhammed. That´s why we put an advertisement in The New Musical Express, a very important music paper at that time. We were searching for a group interested to record some of our songs and for getting the record released in Sweden. I don´t remember if several groups were interested but The Micros Of Oxford hired a studio in England. At their own expense they recorded ”Feed That Monster” (Burt Clinton) and ”Guitars Beyond The Moonglow” (Burt Clinton & Jim Slim).

At that time Lars had been in touch with the Swedish record company Cupol. Cupol had also a label called Nashville. The record was released on the Nashville label but it didn´t sell many copies. The lead guitar player in the group died a few months later in a car accident, and as far as I know The Micros Of Oxford split up.

What happened the two songwriters with international ambitions? Yes, we continued to write together until the middle of the 60:s. We (mainly Lars) did some productions with bands from Örebro. These recording were released by Dollar Records. Lars had a fulltime job as producer for Cupol, but he was also 50% part owner of Dollar. The other 50% was owned by the singer Åke Söhr. I started to study history and the English language at the University Of Uppsala. Later I became a teacher working with adult education in Sandviken. Lars continued writing with other lyricists and composers.and he got many of his songs recorded. Among the artists he wrote for was Anna-Lena Löfgren, Vikingarna, Thorleifs, Wenche Myhre, Lasse Stefanz and many others. A songlist is published in the book ”Stora Dansbandsboken”.

We didn´t finish our co-writing completely. On an LP recorded by Forbes we had two of our songs included, ”Shades” and ””Sweet Kiss Of Fire” (text). The last-mentioned song was on the B-side to Forbes´ Eurovision Song Contest-entry ”Beatles” in 1977.

All together we have gotten around 25 of our songs recorded. Our most successful songs are ”Alfred E Goes Surfin´”(text) and ”Rambler” (text) with The Madmen and ”Christmas Present” with The Chicks. The song we are most proud of is ”Sunshine And Rain” recorded by Jean William.

Lars E. Carlsson lives since 1975 in Norrköping. He´s still writing songs as a hobby. Since some years ago we have taken up songwriting again. We also co-write with other composers and lyricists.

Storvik, Jan 14^th 2006

Jörgen Sjöstedt
(Jim Slim)