ABBA-Dabba-Doo!

I recently took a cruise from New York to London. There were big musical revues with singers and dancers performing ABBA songs. In the lounges, trios played still more ABBA songs. You could dance to ABBA in the disco and butcher their songs at karaoke. By the end of this cruise. I had heard more ABBA than ABBA heard ABBA.

I got sick of their music, but then, so did they — they broke up in 1982. In 2000 a promoter offered them $1 BILL|ION to reunite — they said no. (Actually, they said ‘nej’ which is Swedish for ‘no’.) This really inspired me: what wouldn’t I do for $1 billion? Work for Ellen Degeneres. Or go through junior high again.

I was really impressed with ABBA’s integrity right up until 2013 when they lost it. That’s the year the band reunited for ABBA Voyage — well, at least their holograms did, in a huge stadium purpose-built for this concert.

The show begins with film of ABBA as they look today, all pushing eighty. Without naming names, let me just say that the beautiful one was now pretty, the pretty one looked okay. The homely guy is still homely, but at eighty, that’s to be expected. As for the handsome guy, in an attempt to look younger, dyed his hair and beard shoe polish black and now looked like an old Swedish Wolfman.

This is the fun of a reunion concert: the musicians they have aged, but the music sounds the same. But then ABBA made a horrible move: they de-aged themselves using holograms. They tried to look the way they did back in their heyday and the effect was frankly terrifying. They seemed to be using software from the late 1990s, the stuff used in movies like “The Last Starfighter” and “Ice Pirates”. The band didn’t look like 1970s ABBA, they looked like robots in cheap plastic masks.

It was an illusion you never got used to. I would have left after 10 minutes, but the ABBA Voyage stadium is so far out of town, I knew I would never find my way back to the hotel.

As the concert began, I chuckled to my wife, “I hear they’re gonna play mostly new stuff.” It was a joke: why would they play new stuff when they have such a great catalog of oldies? But that’s just what they did — they played a lot of new music from their 2021 album“Voyage”. It sounds like what you’d expect from a bunch of 80-year-old rockers who couldn’t stand to be in the same room together for forty years.

A much better way to experience the band is the ABBA museum in Stockholm, Sweden. This makes a good day trip if you pair it with the next-door attraction: the Vasa Museum. In 1628, King Vasa of Sweden built the most ornately decorated warship in history. The day of its launch it sank immediately, and sat on the bottom of Stockholm Harbor for three centuries. In 1950, they finally figured out how to raise the ship and built a museum around it. It’s an astounding sight: a 400 year-old warship perfectly preserved by frigid Nordic waters. it reminded me of the ABBA holograms: really old, yet strangely preserved.

As for the ABBA Museum, they do a great job telling the story in the band. (Fun fact: one of their fathers was a Nazi!) It’s an immersive experience with one room covered floor-to-ceiling with ABBA album covers. But on closer inspection you realize they only recorded 98 songs — which they then repackaged in hundreds of ways.

There’s a jukebox in the museum that plays every single ABBA song. I sampled them all, looking for deep cuts and lost classics. There are none. They made nine original albums and had two good songs on each one. Eighteen is a lot — a dozen-and-a-half more hits than I have — but that’s it. You’ve been hearing the same eighteen songs for fifty years.(The guys from ABBA would go on to write the Broadway musical “Chess” — 29 songs, one hit.)

The Voyage holograms played most of ABBA’s hits, but there were some notable omissions. I assume they are holding them back for a second concert, Voyage 2. But that’s a show I will never see. Not for $1 billion.

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