Nine Years And Still Going Strong…
This past month, I reached a milestone in my ABBA fandom, it has now been nine years since the day I bought ABBA GOLD and began my journey into the world of ABBA Fandom. Up until that fateful day I had a very casual awareness of ABBA, in fact, I had in what seemed like once every two to three years during the 1980s and early 90’s I had borrowed my parent’s cassette copy of “ABBA: The Singles”. In fact, for many of those first few times I borrowed those tapes, I was under the impression the group name was “The Singles” because on the cassettes, the ABBA logo was so small compared to “The Singles” that it was pretty easy to make that mistake. I just figured that “ABBA” described the “The Singles” and since I didn’t know what it meant I just never gave it a second thought beyond that.
Somewhere down the line I learned that the group name was ABBA and “The Singles” was the title of the collection and as we fast forward to that February day in 1995 when I had a little extra money to spend. I had just gotten a couple of raises and felt like treating myself to a couple CDs. As I browsed the CDs and saw the ABBA GOLD CD, I had seen it a few time before and never had any interest in it. But since I had a little extra money I decided to buy it with the intentions of playing it a couple of times and then just giving it to my parents as a way of replacing “The Singles” cassettes with a CD since nether my parents nor myself played cassettes anymore.
Well when I finally did open the CD and play it for the first time, it was as if I was hearing the songs for the first time. The clarity of the sound, and I guess I had never noticed how worn out those tapes really were because the songs sounded faster and more vibrant than I had known them. The songs came alive and they were wonderful. I still didn’t have any expectation that I’d still be listening to the CD for more than a couple of weeks, but I was certainly enjoying it while it lasted.
My interest lasted longer than a few weeks and I decided soon after I wanted some more ABBA as ABBA GOLD didn’t completely replace “The Singles”, it was missing a few songs that I happened to like so I went to find a CD with those songs. At this point about the only thing you could get in the US was the ABBA GOLD collection. I was still a novice music buyer at the time, I had only just discovered that there are other places to buy CDs besides mall shops and only a couple months earlier I discovered the imports section of my local Blockbuster Music when I thought I’d see if there was anything different in the Roxette section than what I could buy in the domestic section. And at the time I was also quite new to the Internet and for all intents and purposes was living in a vacuum in terms of information about my favorite groups.
In one of my visits to another Blockbuster Music store I saw a German import of More ABBA GOLD and I thought it was extremely expensive at $26 when I only spent $12 to get Gold but it had a few of the songs I was missing from “The Singles” tapes that I wanted to hear on CD for the first time and even though there was a sticker on the jewel case mentioning an unreleased track, I didn’t care about that because I couldn’t tell which one it was from the listing on the back, there were a number of songs that were new to me. As much as it pained me to spend that much money on one CD, I did it anyway and never regretted it, even if “Summer Night City” about scared me to death when it blasted from my stereo the first time at too loud a volume because I forgot to adjust it down before changing the discs.
After a couple of months my ABBA Collection still just consisted of Gold and More Gold but a trip to another record store I saw on their new release board that something from ABBA was coming out in another week. I thought it was perfect timing, just as I was getting into the band something new was coming out. I just didn’t know it was going to be the box set so when I returned to the store on the day of it’s release, I wasn’t expecting to spend more than $13 dollars. But I decided to go ahead and spend the $50 they wanted for the box set even though I thought there was quite a bit of duplication between what was on the set and the Gold and More Gold CDs I already owned.
In the box set there was a lot of material to enjoy and I soon discovered that ABBA was going to a group that for the most part I was going to like nearly everything on any of the albums I bought. The only other group that could do that for me was Roxette and the fact both ABBA and Roxette are from the same country, I was more willing to give ABBA the opportunity to impress me. So I decided I wanted to add the albums to my collection. Again at this point, none of the albums were available on CD in the US, except as imports. So I would buy one or two at a time.
However one of my amusing stories about buying ABBA music is that I had to go to Las Vegas to find ABBA Oro. In San Diego, there is such a prevalent Latino market that Spanish language music has its own section. I never would have thought to look in the Spanish section for ABBA. I had no idea they sang in Spanish, but it took going to a city where the Latino market isn’t large enough to justify a separate Spanish language section in order to find that out.
As I gradually collected the albums, and my Internet skills started to build I had discovered an ABBA mailing list on the Internet and got to meet other people around the world who also liked ABBA. For the first time, one of my interests had easy access to others with similar interests. Prior to being a music fan, I had been a Star Trek fan and found most of those fans to be more competitive in terms of always wanting to be better than each other. So I was very intrigued by the ABBA fans I was meeting because instead of gloating about how much they knew or had in their collections, the ones I was meeting were extremely generous to share their knowledge and willing to make copies of unreleased material. This level of generosity was just not something I was used to coming to ABBA from the realm of Star Trek fandom. Those fans helped educate me well beyond the level of being a “Goldie” fan, that many people are surprised when I tell them that I’ve only been a “fan” of ABBA since 1995.
As ABBAMAIL came into being, being an ABBA fan has truly become secondary to participating in a community of fans. Outside of Agnetha’s upcoming album, there isn’t a whole lot going on in the ABBA world that I’m all that excited about. But give me an opportunity to spend a weekend with fellow ABBAMAILers or even talk to some on the phone and its makes being an ABBA fan worthwhile. Because of this community of fans I’ve travelled to Australia, ventured to New York just a month after the World Trade Center towers were destroyed, and seen Mamma Mia more times than any sane person should.
Most of my periods of peak fandom (aka obsessions) have been short lived, but my ABBA obsession is still going nine years after it started. The ease of finding information on the Internet and a community of friends to share that information with have greatly expanded my ABBA fandom well beyond the albums and solo works of the members of ABBA. I could literally play “Six Degrees of Separation” and tie just about every part of my life for the last nine years back to that one purchase of ABBA GOLD. Who knew that one $13 CD was going to have such an impact on my life. Not bad for a CD that I bought with no intentions of keeping.