The first glimmer of ABBA was seen in 1970. Benny and Bjorn were doing a Swedish album. For a song titled Hej Gamle Man (Hey Old Man), they wanted female backing. They asked Agnetha and Frida if they would do it. Little did they know they would be backing up the girls up for the next 12 years. It was the girls coming to the front which catapulted them to fame. The great thing about ABBA is the equality of the sexes. The men and women share the spotlight. I recall the first time I heard Waterloo. I was driving back to Louisville from Barbourville, Kentucky where I was finishing up a Bachelor's degree. The song came on the radio. I turned it up. There was static. "Who is that?" I wondered. A couple of weeks later, I learned it was a group from Sweden. In January, 1975, I found the Waterloo album in a dime store. "Could the album be as good as the single?" I took it home and listened. "Yeah! Sort of quaint but not bad! Little did I know this group would still be coming at me 30 years later. For the rest of the '70s and into the '80s, this maverick band from Sweden continued to turn out consistently appealing singles and albums. It always amazed me when after the lapse of what seemed a long period of time, I would find another of their albums. Occasionally I saw them on TV. Regretfully they departed almost as quickly as they arrived. The self-titled album, ABBA, came out in the fall of 1975. I call it the SOS album. The length of time between Waterloo and the SOS album necessitated a reintroduction. People in Europe never expected much as Eurovision winners were seldom heard from again. Stig Andersson said the great crisis was their decision to compose only in English. English may be the language of rock music but it is a second language in Sweden. The deeper I got into the compositions of Benny and Bjorn's, the more astonished I became that they could write such great songs in English. Was it not a foreign language? Then, I learned that English is spoken by nearly everyone in Sweden. Benny and Bjorn used a Swedish-English dictionary when they started. There are moments of awkwardness in the early lyrics, but it did not take long to smooth things out. Benny wrote the music. Bjorn wrote the lyrics. They worked the music up first, then the lyrics. Languages come easier to Europeans than to Americans. With all those countries next door to each another, there is a lot of lingual overlap. One can drive 3,000 in the U.S. and encounter only English. What about rough language? Before the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was unthinkable to use cuss words in a pop song. The disgrace of the Vietnam War and the political corruption at its root brought profane outcries from serious artists. John Lennon legitimized the F word in his song, Working Class Hero. ABBA used 4-letter words. In I Wonder (Departure), Frida sings, "But who the hell am I if I don't even try?" Her thoughts are self-analytic. She is stirring herself to action. In Man In The Middle, Bjorn laments, "She don't give a damn just as long as he pays the bills." It fits, street language for a street scene. Put downs like Creedence Clearwater Revival's Fortunate Son were passe by the time Waterloo came out. Vietnam and Watergate were over. The Swedes were good-natured, their looks invigorating. They were unaffected by the decade of unpleasantness following the assassination of John Kennedy. They nursed us back to health. When Arrival hit The States, ABBA could be found on juke boxes. I was happy to see them attain this acceptance. I thought the cover of ABBA The Album to be too abstract. Its artwork loosely depicts scenes from ABBA The Movie, filmed in Australia. In 1977 and 1978, ABBA was such a force that large, smiling photos may have been in order. More aggressive marketing may have pushed Take A Chance On Me to #1 in the U.S. There was a campaign in 1978 to spread ABBAmania to the U.S. Even though the group was played widely on radio, it was a thing of being heard and not seen. Older people had no inkling of them. Information was scarce. Articles were short and sketchy. Benny Andersson explained ABBA's half-hearted reception in America in terms of their unavailability. They were a Scandinavian-based group. They toured infrequently. They would not make the splash in the U.S that The Beatles did. In fact, ABBA conquered England much the same way The Beatles took America. 8 albums topped the British charts. The 10 year career of ABBA invites comparison with that of The Beatles. Both started with exuberant love songs. A gradual cooling produced more solemn lyrics. The Beatles' concept album, Sergeant Pepper, was a drug-inspired masterpiece. Benny and Bjorn's Chess musical was a broad attempt at character development and showed involvement with the world at large. The Beatles ended with suits and countersuits. ABBA was two divorced couples going their ways. John Lennon was the Beatle who did meaningful solo work. Because he aligned himself with the peace movement, his songs had purpose. Agnetha's and Frida's solo albums were good in the short-term. Over the long haul, they lack the soul of ABBA albums. Benny and Bjorn went the distance. By going into theater, they remained productive. The American leg of ABBA's 1979 tour began in the west and came east. September 17 Seattle 18 Portland 19 Concord 21 Los Angeles/Anaheim 22 San Diego 23 Tempe 24 Las Vegas 26 Omaha 27 Minneapolis/St. Paul 29 Milwaukee 30 Chicago October 2 New York 3 Boston 4 Washington, D.C. It was in Las Vegas that I came close. I spent a month in Vegas that summer. ABBA brought their show to The Aladdin Hotel, September 24, about two months after I left. Had I stayed in Vegas I would have seen them. I had bought their releases to that point. Back in Nashville, I picked up a copy of the Voulez-Vous album as disco peaked. ABBA's stage show offered two hours of hits. Agnetha and Frida fronted the band. Agnetha was the typical Swedish blonde, demure and vulnerable. She drew the attention. Frida was the athlete. She was more active on stage. When Frida twirled, I expected her to explode into Wonder Woman. Agnetha and Frida allowed for one another. They did not compete. They enhanced each other's charisma. They were cute and voluptuous simultaneously, sometimes erotic but not in a way that threatened other women. Agnetha glided as Frida drove her fist into the air. They dazzled with their beauty. Nor did Benny and Bjorn intimidate males. ABBA is the truist example of the unisex principle. They merged while retaining their genders. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For all its problems, the women's movement had plenty of pluses. In the 1970s, women got better jobs. They spoke their minds and exercised a physical freedom never believed possible. Can you imagine Connie Francis using the stage as aggressively as Frida? The guitars of Lars Wellander and Mats Ronander added to the chemistry of the concerts. They give us cool artistry. They never try to blow us out with volume. On video tape, Wellander is the one with the beard and receding hairline. Ronander is the smooth-shaven guy on the right. ABBA employed many musicians. They took 14 musicians with them to Australia in 1977. Some of the people who played with them are Lena Andersson, Ola Brunkert, Lars O. Carlsson, Anders Eljas, Lena Ericsson, Rutger Gunnarsson, Per Lindvall, Liza Olman, Roger Palm and Mike Watson. Each contributed to that inimitable sound. After the American tour, ABBA began to lose ground in the U.S. The political climate following the Iran hostage crisis did not favor them. The Reagan Revolution cooled the Ayatollah but wreaked havoc on good rock and roll. There was one more top 10 record. The Winner Takes It All went to #8. By 1981, I had parenthood in mind and neither bought Super Trouper nor The Visitors when they were released. It would be awhile before I heard them. The Visitors is apocalyptic. The angel on the jacket is not a Cupid symbol as we have seen before. The is Gabriel come to blow his horn. On the cover of The Singles, ABBA has ascended into heaven. I discussed the change in tone of Benny and Bjorn's songs from the Arrival years to The Visitors era. It is a long way from Honey Honey to The Day Before You Came. Compare the four people walking away at the end of the Bang-A-Boomerang video with the four walking away at the end of the Under Attack clip. It is the difference between being young and free and in love and feeling the responsibilities of marriage, children and middle age. They would deny that it was because there was no more ABBA, but that is part of it. Bjorn grew sensitive to complaints that his lyrics were fluff. He started cramming as much meaning in as possible. It holds up. The later material is of high quality even if it is more serious. What about religion? Is ABBA music Christian? References to God are little more than parenthetical. Nevertheless, they are there. "Thank God, it's true" in As Good As New, "God knows that we've been trying" in Dance (While The Music Still Goes On), "Go away, God Bless You" in My Love, My Life. It seems they call on God when they are desperate about their love lives. Prayer is resorted to in Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! The Piper is like a priest, and a minister turns up in On And On And On. The soul is alluded to in Andante, Andante. There are more theological scraps: "Deals with the devil" (Man In The Middle), "What a miracle to happen" (Gonna Sing You My LoveSong), "In the seventh heaven" (When I Kissed The Teacher), "Faith" in People Need Love. These are signs that the music was conceived within the geographical bounds of Christendom. Swedes are overwhelmingly Lutheran, a legacy of the wave of Protestantism which spread across northern Europe in the 16th century. ABBA's music is humanistic. From the music alone, conclusions regarding deeper convictions are hard to draw. Agnetha did wear a cross in The Heat Is On Period, linking herself with the only means of eternal salvation, Jesus Christ. Ultimately, there is one story, the one told in The Bible, paradise lost and paradise regained. All others are variations. Does ABBA drink? Socially. "When the rest of us drink a beer" (Man In The Middle), "Won't you have a drink with me?" (That's Me), "We had a drink in each cafe" (Our Last Summer), "No more champagne" (Happy New Year), "One More Toast" (When All Is Said And Done). The live album was an afterthought. There had been talk for years, and a German guy got 50,000 signatures calling for a live album. Benny regretted its lack of authenticity. ABBA did about 110 songs in 10 years. When a group records as long as they did, there is stuff left over. There are fragments, fragments stuck together to make songs and different versions of the same song. They have all of these. There were unreleased gems in I Am The City, DreamWorld and Just Like That. It is hard to say how many records ABBA sold worldwide. Figures of record sales are always unreliable. An estimate of a quarter of a billion is safe. Stig Andersson got them on many labels around the world. Atlantic released their records in the U.S. In their day, ABBA was the only big rock group not from the U.S. Britian, Canada or Australia. They opened things up. Roxette and Ace Of Base emerged from Sweden. Roxette showed a Beatles influence. Ace Of Base was second generation ABBA, two guys and two girls. Ace of Base was a family: two sisters, a brother and a friend. I got into Shania Twain in the 1990s and early part of the 21st century. I saw Shania and her husband, Mutt Lange, as picking up where ABBA left off. They took the magic to Nashville and country music. Elvis Presley started it. The Beatles amplified it and spread it through the British Commonwealth. ABBA took it across Europe and into the third world. Shania brought it home. Elvis, Beatles, ABBA, Shania. These are the 4 musical acts that matter in the 50 years, 1955-2005. I never meant to write about ABBA. After searching libraries and book stores in vain, I starting compiling my own thoughts. I began with an overview of their music, presenting it as a unified whole rather than as a collection of singles and albums. That meant interpreting the songs individually and collectively. The misconception is that ABBA lyrics are superficial or that the group is a "guilty pleasure." Melt down the albums, merge the songs and you will see recurring themes, statements of philosophy and life style. In the 1990's, ABBA books hit the market. The 1970's became nostalgia. As one might expect, books about ABBA came from Scandinavian and European authors.
Contact: jim@jimcolyer.com