well for an unknown European group, selling 20,000 copies stateside. After seeing a performance of Hår, a Mercury Records A&R representative expressed interest in releasing a second Mecki Mark Men album for Limelight. Upon finishing their seven-month run with Hår, Bodemark asked the Baby Grandmothers to become his new Mecki Mark Men, and the re-dubbed quartet returned for another tour of Finland. This less jazzy-sounding band of Kenny Håkansson on guitar, Bengt Linnarsson (a.k.a. Bella Fehrlin) on bass, and Pelle Ekman on drums backed Bodemark for MMM's sophomore release, Running in the Summer Night. Recorded over the course of a few days in early 1969, the album mixes Bodemark's songs with material previously composed by the Baby Grandmothers. Critics have hailed the album, some citing it as an early work of proto-heavy metal, predating Black Sabbath's debut by one year. Mecki Mark Men made a promotional film for the songs "Running In The Summer Night" and "Being Is More Than Life," which aired on the Swedish TV program Kram: Tema Att Lyssna in May 1969. By the fall of 1969, the band's popularity in their home country garnered them numerous TV appearances, another U.K. tour, and a collaboration with the Royal Swedish Opera on Lars Johan Werle's work Resan (translated as "Journey" or "The Trip"). Rasan's libretto by Lars Runsten depicted a suburban woman's everyday life in contrast with the fantastic world of her childhood friend, reflecting the rifts between post-war European society and the burgeoning counterculture seeping in from America and Britain. In the program notes, Werle wrote that Resan was "An opera about people of today; about the children of the welfare state; our lack of contact with one another; our loneliness and blindness and pretensions. It also depicts the difficulties we experience in visualizing existence—our own and others." For the performance, the Mecki Mark Men and various orchestral soloists were situated in illuminated cubes and fit into a larger program of classical music. In 1970 Mecki Mark Men also performed the opera with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra. In 1970 Mecki Mark Men were heralded as the first Swedish rock band to embark on a tour of the U.S. For three months they made the city of Chicago their home base, from which they travelled to various other cities to play festivals with Sly and the Family Stone, Jethro Tull, Pentangle, Mountain, Grand Funk Railroad, Paul Butterfield, The