‘The Story of ABBA’

Trying to penetrate the creative alchemy of any international pop band and its enduring worldwide success is an almost impossible task. Yet, Swedish 61-year-old music Swedish music journalist Jan Gradvall gives it his best shot in The Story of Abba: Melancholy Undercover. But sometimes Gradvall doesn’t look closely enough at each of the performer’s specific human psychology and how their individual backgrounds affected other members of the group.  Gradvall stays grounded in a somewhat romantic glow for ABBA whom he fell in love with at the tender age of 13.

 There were many who shunned Abba for its outwardly sunny demeanor and wholesome good looks.  Jeff Tweedy, a devoted punk rocker as a teenager in the 1970s, wrote in 2023 how he thought he hated pop music until decades after ABBA’s arrival on the scene, when he heard the line “Having The Time Of Your Life” playing on a tinny supermarket speaker and felt an unexpected endorphin rush.

Gradvall doesn’t feel compelled to follow a conventional narrative but instead meanders about filling us in on Swedish culture and the trauma that was still present in the atmosphere for decades following the Second World War into which ABBA’s members were born. Gradvall wants us to understand they were products of their time and place in history.

He draws our attention first to Benny Anderson, who played the keyboards, and Bjorn Ulvaeus, who wrote the music together with Benny in a small boathouse in Stockholm with only a piano and a guitar. After they set the music, Bjorn would write the lyrics, and Benny always commented on how Bjorn instinctively understood what they should be.  Bjorn claimed his lyrics weren’t autobiographical and points to “The Day Before You Came” which chronicles an ordinary day in a woman’s life just as things are about to go haywire.

ABBA was composed of two married couples, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Faltskog, and Benny Anderson and Frida Lyngstad.  The world knew the group for their glittery costumes, and ecstatic melodies that insisted you get up and dance.  The two couples eventually divorced, and the band disbanded in 1982, but surprisingly resurrected itself four decades later to mostly glowing reviews with their new album “Voyage.”  Abba is most famous for its songs “Dancing Queen” and “The Winner Takes It All.”  The two women, one a soprano and the other a mezzo-soprano, seemed gifted with an instinctive ability to sing in harmony with one another.

When people have asked Benny Anderson in interviews to delve into the meanings of his songs, or what they might reveal about him, or his band members, he defers politely saying only “What we did was melancholy, undercover.”   Gradvall seems too easily satisfied with this response, and although perhaps this is representative of the privacy that is haloed in Swedish culture when it comes to personal reflections, one wishes he could have spent more time probing what sort of  ‘melancholy’ Benny Anderson was referring to.

Agnetha and Bjorn met at a concert when she was 18 and he was 23.  Benny and Frida met at Swedish Eurovision heats in the March of 1969.  They were all impossibly young.  They all had been involved in singing and entertaining throughout their teens. Frida was already a mother of two children had in her teens when she met Benny, and he was the father of two children as well. This volume doesn’t touch whatever complications this surely must have brought to their relationships and the pressures of performing and touring .

Gradvall digresses to share with us Frida’s most unusual parentage.Frida was born in Ballengen Norway in 1945 when Norway was occupied by Hitler.  Her mother was a 19-year-old Norwegian, and her father was a 24-year-old Wehrmacht sergeant stationed in Norway to secure its borders. He had a wife and child back in Germany he never mentioned to Frida’s mother until it was too late. The war started to shift in favor of the Allies, and he moved on, but Frida’s mother was pregnant, and after the war people spat upon her in the town square.

This caused Frida’s mother and grandmother to move the child to Sweden, and then her mother died when she was only 2, leaving her in her grandmother’s care.  She followed the pattern of her mother and got pregnant early and unexpectedly having children before meeting Benny whom she would marry.  There seems to be so much here that begs for clearer understanding, but Gradvall leaves us with just the barest outlines of a most unusual youth that would have shaken any of us to our core.

 There were various musical influences in vogue when ABBA emerged, including ‘reggare’ culture, where the musicians dressed in jeans and denim jackets with cut-off sleeves and T-shirts. People wore their trousers  very low.  Benny and Bjorn identified with this group.  There were also the ‘mods’ who were growing their hair long and messy and listening to hippie music.  Gradvall observes that there was great antagonism between those who loved punk and those addicted to ‘reggare’ insisting “Neither reggare nor punks stopped to consider that they actually had a considerable amount in common.  Both cast themselves in opposition to the hippie era.  Both played rock songs at a furious tempo.”

Being from Sweden was a liability when it came to making it big in pop music.  The Swedish newspapers at the time barely covered pop music.  ut ABBA broke through when it won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with “Waterloo.”  The song reached number one on the sales charts in the UK.  But the leftist movement growing in Sweden at the time made ABBA’s place in the music culture tenuous since people saw them as not progressive enough and not sufficiently cool.

Gradvall finds Bjorn Ulvaeus the most complicated figure of the bunch. He is a long-distance runner who claims to remember little about his earlier life. In interviews, he seems cheery and obsessed with questions about life’s meaning and what happens to you after death, but these grandiose questions seem like little more than a smokescreen to conceal his inner self. He does concede his father felt like a failure and drank too much, as Bjorn and Benny will go on to do as well, but he says little else about his parents.

All the ABBA’s members show a similar reservation to speak candidly about themselves or how their experiences influenced their music.  Whatever dramas played out with their partners, children, or parents remained with them. To do otherwise seemed unnatural to them.  Our American sensibility demands a much more ferocious unmasking of oneself as an artist and person, and perhaps that’s why we find their reticence disappointing.  Bjorn did admit “my parents lived in an unequal and unhappy marriage” and perhaps that tells us all we need to know.  Gradvall leaves us to think about how they dealt with such pain and suffering and think perhaps the ‘happiness’ of their songs, which often felt so exaggerated and over the top, was an antidote to their sadnesses. We aren’t sure.

Gradvall gives a few shout outs to other key players.  He loves Michael B. Tretow, the sound engineer, who he credits with the brilliant opening sound of acoustic guitars he created for “When I Kissed The Teacher.”  He salutes the unrelenting tenaciousness of the group’s manager, Stikkan Anderson, who also struggled with alcoholism, and died of a heart attack at 66 in 1997.  He praises Rutgar Gunnarsson who played the bass with an incredible and original passion.

ABBA’s reach extended into the most bizarre places.  They are huge in Vietnam, mostly because Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme criticized the United States for Vietnamese atrocities.  The Swedish government also assisted in the rebuilding of Vietnam after the war and brought ABBA’s music with them.  Poland fell in love with ABBA and the government printed “Arrival’ which their population devoured.Even the Russian loved ABBA but had to do so in secret because their government didn’t like ABBA’s public comments in support of trade unions and the emerging democratic movement in Poland.

 The gay community never abandoned ABBA.  Peter Aspden claims it was the gays who understood ABBA’s music better than anyone else.  They “understood that artifice can transmit suffering as fully as blunter artistic tropes.”  Gradvall believes ABBA set the template for the Backdtreet Boys, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and Ariana Grande.

Gradvall leaves someone important out. Himself. He never speaks about just what it was about ABBA that moved him as a young teen. What did he hear in their pulsating music?  Music is ultimately a personal experience and understanding what happens in a fan’s head when they hear the work of a group they love, is an important part of the entire experience.

His carefully-crafted sentences didn’t satisfy my American hunger.  I wanted to see him lose himself in the music and let me know what that feels like for him; I would ask the same of a Dylan fan, or a Beatles one. I looked on the Internet to see if there was more for me to ponder, but I found out only this about Gradvall: he loves Dusty Springfield, Swedish meatballs, Joan Didion and Nik Cohn, the photos on his cellphone, and David Bowie, as well as his extensive record collection. Somehow, this just wasn’t enough.