The Sound of Happiness

Abba Lives!

Abba in their seventies heyday. The women in the musical act “Direct from Sweden” wore the same outfits in the performance I saw.

As some of you know, I am slated to become a grandfather in 2025. To mark the occasion, I have begun writing letters to my prospective granddaughter, which I hope will ultimately become part of a larger project that tries to capture what it’s like to be alive in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. I hope it will be of some value to you now and her later. —Jim

January 7, 2025

Dear Baby,

I had a good time last weekend, and I want to tell you about it. Because sometimes it helps to have a yardstick.

It was a Sunday night, which is usually a work night for me. But your father gave your grandmother and me tickets to see a show for Christmas. It was to see a touring troupe performing the songs of Abba, a Swedish band of the 1970s that enjoyed huge global success. This is a band that made so much money that Communist nations from Eastern Europe barred them from taking hard currency out of their nations; they were paid in commodities. Abba was not quite as successful in the United States, but they did score fourteen Top 40 hits between 1974 and 1982. (Their sole U.S. tour was thirteen dates in 1979.) Abba’s biggest hit was “Dancing Queen,” which hit number one in 1977, a disco-inflected confection whose sheer luminousness transcends its laughable hokiness—“You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life,” croon the photogenic singers Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, who fronted the band behind backing musicians and songwriters Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. Abba got a new lease on life in the twenty-first century thanks to the Broadway musical Mamma Mia, which featured their songs (your grandmother and I saw it and loved it), and a pair of movies that followed. I doubt they’ll still be in circulation by the time you grow up, but I suspect their worth checking out because their melodies are amazingly catchy. When the great punk rocker Elvis Costello, of whom I was a big fan, wrote his scathing 1979 attack on British imperialism, “Oliver’s Army” (that would be Oliver Cromwell, scourge of the Irish) he based his melody on the work of Abba, crafting a sprightly melody to go along with lyrics like “All it takes is one inch of trigger / One more widow one less white nigger.”

Anyway, this musical tribute act, called Direct from Sweden, was performed at the Tarrytown Music Hall, which to my mind was the first reason I thought this could be a good night: it was close by. We found free parking relatively easily. The restaurant we hoped to attend had a long waiting list, but we were able to get decent pub fare around the corner. We arrived at the venue with about 20 minutes to spare. It’s about 140 years old with a pleasing scruffiness and afforded a surprising amount of legroom, helped further still by the fact that your father landed us an aisle seat. In between looking at my phone and the book I was reading, I guessed about the gross revenue of the night ($50,000?), what would be left after the house took its cut and the overhead, and guessed that each member of the nine-piece ensemble would be paid somewhere between $500 and $1000 for the night’s work. Multiply that by a few dozen dates—they were headed to Florida and would be performing in the native Sweden—and I figure it’s a decent piece of income though not a life of luxury (I reckoned touring could be grueling, but perhaps some of them had a disposition for it).

Then the show started, and the enchantment began to kick in. The impossibly catchy “Knowing Me, Knowing You.” The romantic splendor of “Fernando.” The joyful surrender of “Waterloo.” The tragic grandeur of “The Winner Takes It All.” Really, sweetheart: I hope you will have an occasion to listen to these songs. Andersson and Ulvaeus were deeply saturated in the Western classical tradition, and crafted hooks redolent of Schubert, or Chopin, or Beethoven. There’s something so elegantly simple and sturdy about them.

But here I’ll make something of a confession of perhaps misplaced pride: Abba could not have become what it did without American culture. The band’s Scandinavian flair was built on a rock & roll foundation in terms of its beats and rhythms, which of course were African American: global cultural domination facilitated by art of our nation’s most oppressed people. They made something beautiful that all could share, and which could be refracted generation after generation. There’s sin and stain in that but joy and redemption, too.

It was a long night for your grandmother—she gets up at 4 a.m., and the plan is that she will soon be doing so on your behalf, just as your maternal grandmother will be in the hard work of bringing up baby. Tonight, though, she stayed awake for me through an encore that included “Dancing Queen,” wonderfully enhanced by a pair of young adults with Down Syndrome who came onstage and danced rapturously to this paean to musical democracy. We hustled out as soon as the last note sounded, got home by 10 p.m., and ended up getting a far better night's sleep than I would have ever predicted.

This, dear baby, is one of the shapes, however slight or amusing, that happiness takes. I will be very interested to know what shapes your happiness will take.

P.S. For your amusement, I’m including this brief clip from a forthcoming episode of Cunk On Earth, in which our hilariously misinformed protagonist stumbles into some unfortunate understanding of nuclear proliferation. Fortunately, Abba comes to the rescue.