ABBA On Record - My Review

I got my copy of Carl Magnus Palm's newest ABBA book about three or four weeks ago, and ever since have been giving it a thorough read, and finally finishing the book last night.  Despite the fact that Carl Magnus Palm has written many ABBA books over the years, back when I was a frequent visitor of my local library and would ask them to inter-library loan all the ABBA books I could think of, I surprisingly had never read any of his original, published books before.  My first official Carl Magnus Palm book that I've ever read was his ABBA at 50 book that he did in 2022 for ABBA's 50th anniversary since People Need Love, and I unfortunately wasn't very impressed.  

I've always known that Carl Magnus Palm is a very lucky ABBA fan/ABBA historian, so I had gone into ABBA at 50 with high hopes, and.... I was disappointed.  There was something about it that gave off pretentious vibes, and I've mentioned in the past that CMP seems to have this vendetta against Stig Anderson, ABBA's manager, and it gave me the ick.  

But, seeing as ABBA on Record was CMP's newest big book venture, and there was a lot of hype going around about his book, I decided maybe it would be worth it, so I pre-ordered it. 

Now I just need to say, my error entirely, I read the title, "ABBA on Record - Packaged, Promoted, Reviewed" as if the book was packaged, promoted, and reviewed by ABBA and that this was like an officially authorized book.  I did not realize this book was entirely about the packaging, promotion, and reviews of ABBA's music/albums once ABBA were done with their part of actually making their music and how it becomes the record company's job to actually release their music to the world.  That's entirely my fault, but it left me a bit confused when I first started reading the book.

I will say, I now know so much about the music industry than I ever thought I needed to know and I don't know what to do with this information now haha.  Honestly it was quite a fascinating read, and it's interesting reading about ABBA's music from the perspective of the music industry and trying to promote them and figure out the best time to release a new album or single, deciding the next song to release as a single, and the different efforts that were done to promote ABBA in various countries under many different record labels.  I learned a lot of about the different key players involved in ABBA's success in the UK and Australia, and all about the various times ABBA tried to reach the US but weren't always successful.  It's interesting how to me, if an album/single even makes into the top 50 of the US Billboard charts, I think that's quite an achievement, but to ABBA's record label, it doesn't mean anything unless they reach the number 1 spot, which did happen with Dancing Queen in 1976, but like, Waterloo reaching a 6, The Winner Takes It All reaching an 8, Take A Chance On Me a 3, and Knowing Me, Knowing You and a bunch of other songs reaching a 14/15, that's not bad!  Yeah a lot of singles also flopped in the US, not even getting into the top 50 spot, but to chart at all still means something.  But that's just my opinion.

Interestingly in the main section of this book, the ABBA members aren't that big of a focus.  Like most of the book is about all the music industry people, and lots of talk about Stig and his ways of promoting ABBA, whether it was promising things or making statements about/for ABBA that didn't end up coming to fruition or being very ambitious.  I never realized how much went into releasing music, and this book makes ABBA seem so small in comparison to all the people involved, yet prior to reading this book, I would never have thought this many people were involved and thought it was all about ABBA.

In terms of talking about Stig, most of what CMP wrote about Stig was not good or bad, just stating facts, but especially in the beginning when Stig is first introduced, I still feel like the author has some personal beef against ABBA's fiery and perhaps overly ambitious manager, and specifically in the early parts of the book, everything is said as if CMP is always hinting at how "Stig seemed nice, but wait till you see all the bad things he did later!"  Luckily, as this book didn't really go into much of ABBA's personal story details and instead focusing on the actual promotional efforts for their music, no discussion was made about ABBA's feud with Stig.  Which I appreciate.  

One of my favorite parts in the book was the discussion of the making and designing of each album's cover art.  Especially the ones that turned out to be quite complex, like the making of the self-titled album's cover and Super Trouper.  And I enjoyed the discussion on the Voyage cover art as well, especially as Baillie Walsh's methods are a lot different than say Rune Soderqvist, ABBA's main designer,'s methods. 

I was a little bit bored on the speculation that CMP does on the meaning behind each ABBA album's cover, like what any reader can interpret from the cover, what does it mean and why type things, but also, I do my own speculation as well, so after a while I actually began to enjoy the speculation parts.  

There was also a lot of sections that I felt weren't actually relevant to the story and ended up being mostly long and drawn out and boring.  Like there's this whole section devoted to the club scene in Stockholm, and Alexandra's club and the difficult history she had with business deals and splitting the company and wrongly using the title Alexandra on the new club that had nothing to do with Alexandra herself, and I just don't see the relevancy?  I feel like there was just a little too much information on this when it could have easily been summarized briefly to just a couple of paragraphs.

 Also, at the end of each piece of music that was release, be it single or album, Carl Magnus Palm would include reviews from that time on what so called professional music critics would say on ABBA's newest release, and gosh so many of these reviewers are gosh awful and mean. As an obsessed ABBA fan, I love and worship literally every piece of music ABBA have ever created, so seeing people criticize ABBA's music for things I literally love??? is so baffling to me.  Still, the reviews, especially the ridiculously rude and negative ones, made me laugh.  I know I'm overly positive when it comes to ABBA, but these people are just overly negative for no reason.  Music Critics are just impossible to please I guess.

Of course I'm a sucker for pictures in books, especially rare photographs, and this book did not disappoint.  Especially in late 1974/75, there are some rare photos from ABBA's late Autumn trip to the United States like when they appeared on the Mike Douglas show, as well as this super rare, unseen photo from the session of their self-titled album cover's photoshoot.  And I really enjoyed them.

The next section of this book was on the making of ABBA Voyage, written in the style of Carl Magnus Palm's previous book, ABBA The Complete Recording Sessions - Revised & Expanded.  I unfortunately have not been able to get my hands on that book (It is available as an ebook but I am a physical book girly and literally cannot read books on a digital device.)  Even though not a lot of new information was offered, it was nice to see everything in chronological order.  Also it was a little painful having to relive those 3 years since ABBA made the first announcement of the two new songs, and then the long long wait when they'd say "oh no the songs are coming they will be released soon" but no songs were released... until September 2021 of course.  I do very much appreciate that CMP did clarify some information on Just A Notion, explaining that all of the vocals and Lasse Wellander's guitar were taken from the original 1978 recording, but the last line of the song "I, I think it's more than a notion.  In a moment that dream is about to come true," was recorded in 2021.  Not much more information was shared about the two unreleased songs from the Voyage sessions, except that there was an early version of Ode To Freedom from 2019 that was completely different to the one that eventually got released, and that one of the songs was called Hit By A Train, but that's all that's said.  We know literally nothing else about what they sounded like.

But the real highlight of the book, for me at least, was the section on the Michael B. Tretow tapes.  Of course I'm definitely jealous of the fact that Carl Magnus Palm got to listen to all of this absolutely amazing and special material and I cannot, but also I'm glad he has shared some very detailed descriptions of what it's like.  There's this one part of Michael B. Tretow's tapes that was of when Agnetha and Frida were recording the vocals for That's Me, and we've always known that they'd give input on certain words or phrases or arrangements, but this recording actually reveals some of that and you get to hear (or more like read because fans like you and me just aren't privileged enough to get to hear these sort of things....) Agnetha and Frida in action.  I also like that we have a lot more context to the studio chatter that was included and interspersed throughout ABBA Undeleted, like there's a scene when Agnetha and Frida are mimicking a line from a comedy show/movie/film? that they'd seen and some audio issues they were having reminded them of it.  Also it's revealed that the demo track for Rock Me, titled Baby, is actually called "Didn't I", with the line "didn't I, didn't I" sung where Bjorn sings "Wanna be wanna be" in the finished version of the song.  And there's a lot more goodies that reveal how musical pieces that Bjorn and Benny would be working on in the early 70s would end up on music they'd write in the 90s and beyond, which just goes to show how long they've had these musical pieces in their heads.  Really really fascinating.  In this section though, I don't like how CMP references things from his Complete Recording Sessions book, like telling me that I can find more information in that book, but I literally cannot get my hands that book because it is sold out everywhere and no one is willing to give up their versions of the book!!  So please don't tell me that I can read more in that book when I legitimately, physically cannot.

In conclusion, if you take out the sections on Voyage and the Michael B. Tretow tapes, I'd give this book maybe a 6.5/10, but with the inclusion of those last two sections, my rating goes up to a 8.5/10.  I can't say this book was worth the ~$135 that I paid, but the fact that I got the book signed and addressed to me is very nice. :)