Abba

The impossibly long escalators stretching up from the bowels of the Underground were lined with posters. And every day, as my mom, my grandmother – Oma – and I traveled around London, I’d study the parade of paper, trying to decipher the exotic, urban, British culture, so far removed from my experience growing up in the rural hinterlands of Michigan. Movies I’d never see, magazines I’d never be able to read, clubs I wasn’t allowed in to, music that was impossible to find in what passed for the record stores of my hometown, the Tube tunnels were lined with cultural clues and, as a curious and hungry 13-year-old, itching to carve my own niche, I ate them up.

It was 1978, and punk was ripping through the cultural landscape. In England, anyway. I had first heard about punk on In the News, a Saturday morning interstitial programs that used to slip a little information in between the slabs of cartoons (like the infinitely cooler and more entertaining School House Rock). Punk was presented as a crazy and slightly dangerous fad from those madmen across the ocean (oh, those crazy Brits!), all angry music and bad hair. It was years before I understood that the punk seeds had been created in New York City by the Ramones and Television and Talking Heads and Blondie et al, but they grew faster in the hothouse jungle of London, fertilized by the manure of a crippling recession, where the Sex Pistols spit the gob that launched a thousand bands and the disaffected youth suddenly had a powerful voice with which to yell to each other and at the Man. And best of all, in those days, punk rock was scary. The clothes and hair and music really was shocking, and it gave its practitioners power. Now, it’s just another codified sub-genre, toothless and irrelevant, but then it really was making the establishment nervous. Or some of them, anyway.

I remember the thrill I felt passing posters of The Clash and The Damned and 999, and how it all looked like the end of the world to me. I was very much an outsider to that scene – not only geographically but culturally and musically – but I could feel the crackling energy of a thousand tiny labels starting, I could see the fire in the record stores we passed and in the flyers trampled underfoot, and I reveled in the way it made my mom shake her head and Oma cluck her tongue. Youth culture has always been a secret club, and I was beginning to understand that in a new way, my passport to puberty having just been stamped.

Like in NYC, punk was only one vein of the local popular culture. It briefly got the majority of the press and felt like it was the biggest thing going (and, in some important ways, it was), but it was still a pretty peripheral movement, despite all the sound and fury it created. For every Graham Parker or The Jam poster plastered up on the tile walls, there were three posters announcing Abba’s latest release, The Album (which was released in conjunction with their film, called, imaginatively enough, The Movie), along with the tag line “Bigger than the Beatles!” (who were, you may recall, bigger than Jesus).

I was stunned. I just figured the Beatles were the biggest possible band – who could be bigger? – but, at that time, Abba was outselling the Beatles handily, in Europe at least. Turns out that, although they are now certified as the biggest selling band of all time, the Beatles have built their numbers up relatively slowly, and for all their chart dominance and influence, they were frequently outsold (Herb Alpert was selling twice as many records in America as the Beatles were during the 1960s – even Slim Whitman claims, through some statistical anomaly, to be bigger than the Beatles).

Abba is an anagram, chosen partially because their first collective name was so unwieldy – Bjorn, Benny, Agnetha & Frida (not to be confused with Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, or Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young) – and partially because then it was sure to show up at the top of alphabetical lists. The two B’s – Bjorn and Benny – were singer/songwriters that had been kicking around Sweden, working in various groups. They got their girlfriends Agnetha and Anni-Frid involved, won the (sort of) prestigious Eurovision talent competition, and quickly became Sweden’s biggest export. Benny and Bjorn reportedly never wrote down the music they were working on – figuring that if it wasn’t hooky enough to remember by itself, it wasn’t worth working on. Consequently, Abba has released an enormous catalog of songs that just will not leave your cranium no matter what drugs or surgical procedures you attempt. Sure, there are plenty of more “serious minded” musicians who despise such a populist attitude, desperately trying to make their music as difficult and unpredictable as possible, but they never get to be bigger than the Beatles, do they? For perfect formula pop delivered in the smoothest sonic suppository possible, it’s hard to beat Abba. Although it was cool to hate them for a while (unless you were in Australia, where they are a national institution (go figure)), Abba’s star has been on the rise lately, with groups like U2 and Erasure covering their timeless pop for a new generation and with the success of the Abba review musical Mamma Mia delighting the Broadway blue-hairs.

I’ve always loved this track more than any other, even though it was never a hit and was buried on the The Album album (see the defunct baseball team the Los Angeles Angels, or the La Brea Tar pits for similar linguistic redundancy and repetition), a record which is mostly remembered for giving birth to Take a Chance on Me (take a chance take a chance take a take a chance chance) – and also includes a wildly misguided mini rock opera at the end. I particularly like the middle section of this song with its layered vocal harmonies and melodramatic lyrics about painting your world with all the colors and singing songs that are too romantic and being spit upon (?). Then a glass-breaking shriek leading to the “funky” percussion break. Ridiculous and sublime all wrapped up in one bright, shiny package. I also like the seemingly studied way they chose the names of the people in the song to appeal to the wider British and American audiences (after all, how many Sams and Jerrys do you find in Sweden?). And, despite the lyrics, this is about as far from “rock and roll” as you can get.

Back when my friends and I were trying to find our way through the thicket of popular music, we’d share our discoveries with each other, hoping to find a fellow traveler along the path we had chosen. Mel was big on Kris Kristofferson and Jim Croche and others in the countryesque singer-songwriter mold. I couldn’t go there with her. Lenore turned me on to ELO and Abba and the Eagles (which she probably got from Mel), and I could wander a short ways into the woods with her (plus, she was cuter), but the bland sterility soon wore me out, and I had to strike out on my own. I dutifully returned the favor and tried to show them the benefits of Synergy and Peter Gabriel and Kraftwerk, but neither of them were interested in abandoning their smooth, clearly marked highway for my ratty little ill-defined path hacked through the woods. So, although we had been happy walking together for years, when we hit that split in the road, we all bid each other farewell and struck off in different directions, our paths never to cross again.