FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'
Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan
40 years today since ABBA swept Eurovision Song Contest with their song Waterloo, becoming first Swedes to win: http://t.co/aLNQJtziq3
— Sweden.se (@swedense) April 6, 2014
TheSpringOf74 YouTube Channel video: ABBA - Dancing Queen - LIVE at the Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm, June 18, 1976, at the gala tribute to Sweden's King Carl XV1 Gustaf and future wife and Queen, Silvia Sommerlath, the night before their wedding.
This was the first time the song had ever been performed in public in Sweden.
Euronews YouTube Channel video: Euronews reporter Valerie Zabriskie speaks with lucky Abba fan club members selected to get a sneak preview of the new museum in Stockholm. Uploaded May 5, 2013. http://youtu.be/xbDW3FdtEgM
"A" is for Awesome and ABBA and the new ABBA Museum in Stockholm, which officially opens today at 1600 Stockholm time/10 a.m. Eastern U.S. Monday night's gala premiere brought Anni-Frid, Benny and Björn together, cheered on by a select group of invitees from across Swedish society and the music industry, who are, in the end, just fans of the band like everyone else, and very excited that this amazing museum is FINALLY a reality; #abba, #AbbaMuseum, #ThankYouForTheMusic, @stockholm, @sweden
I could mention who some of these VIPs are and why they're important and why they're there,
but that's not worth spending the time it would take today to do that, and besides, TMI as I'm sometimes reminded by friends here in Hallandale Beach and elsewhere around the globe. Plus, I've had a very clear idea of how this particular blog post would look ever since I was there in January, so trying to explain to you all who Carola or Sarah Dawn Finer are and why they are in the video below iis, well, just a losing proposition today.
Tickets for the much-discussed and anticipated museum that's full of innovative technology run about 195 SEK/ just under $30 U.S. for adults, and 50 SEK/$7.63 for children up to age 8, at today's current ratio of about 6.52 Krona to the dollar, more or less.
But fair warning, the museum in the beautiful Djurgården section of Stockholm WON'T take bills or coins, only electronic payments, because as the museum puts it loftily, "Vi har en dröm om ett kontantfritt samhälle, därför går det inte handla med mynt eller sedlar hos oss." ("We have a vision of a cashless society, therefore we don’t handle coins and bills." )
Yes, sorta like in the future as seen in Star Trek, but not quite, since there's a 5% discount with MasterCard. Björn's explanation on why abba-museet doesn't take bills and coins, largely to prevent crime, has a great introduction that only a real genius like him could get away with saying in his Big Picture way
There was a time when bills and coins served their purpose. They replaced cumbersome barter and made trade between people and nations possible. But do they still serve this purpose? Do we really need cash? Or is it a fixed idea like with Scrooge McDuck? Have we lost the ability to see that coins and bills are mere symbols and that those symbols easily could be exchanged for others? Cards and smartphones today and who knows what in the future.
According to Lars Epstein's post yesterday, above, at his Stockholm-centric Epstein's STHLM blog at Dagens Nyheter, the museum is expecting about 217,000 visitors a year.
For someone like me who has been a huge ABBA fan for more than two-thirds of my life, the biggest ABBA fan that most people I've known have ever met, as small as this exhibit at the airport was, in looking at it and reflecting back on everything, it was hard to get over the fact that for so long, like millions of other fans, we fervently hoped that there'd be a museum some day that would be shaped along the lines of,,, well, just what they seem to have actually done: music plus heart -musik plus hjärta.
Like those other fans of the band, over the past 20 years I've given up counting how many interviews I'd seen with the band members, especially Benny and Bjorn, discussing the idea of it, but quite naturally, being somewhat unsure of how to answer such a question without seeming pretentious. But it IS a weird question, isn't it, when you really think about it? Should there be a museum that people pay to get into that's all about you and three other people you've known for most of your life? How do you answer that?
TheSpringOf74 YouTube Channel video: ABBA - Dancing Queen - LIVE at the Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm, June 18, 1976, at the gala tribute to Sweden's King Carl XV1 Gustaf and future wife and Queen, Silvia Sommerlath, the night before their wedding. If I remember my ABBA history correctly, this was the first time the song had ever been performed in public in Sweden. http://youtu.be/33Yj5pbsXAs
Above, in my humble opinion, the single best version of this iconic song ever recorded on film.
Here are those January 10, 2013 photos I snapped at Arlanda before and after grabbing my luggage:
You can see more photos of this exhibit by going to Google Images using these words as your search terms: "Terminal 5, Arlanda, ABBA"
Here's the link to the ABBA Museum-related news videos that have run on TV4, most recent first, obviously, in Swedish, but many with lots of great video of the musem: http://www.tv4play.se/s%C3%B6k?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Abba
2Shaymcn YouTube Channel: ABBA - Dancing Queen (HQ) - LIVE at the Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm, June 18, 1976. http://youtu.be/qk_Vu6AcbWg
Above, in my humble opinion, the single best version of this song ever recorded on film.
Thirty-five ago today, one of the most popular songs of the late 20th-Century got the definitive visual look it needed to go supernova, and there it stays, frozen in our collective memories.
Well, at least among those of us with a yen for genius lyrics and power-pop harmonies.
The day before the 1976 Royal Wedding in Stockholm of King Carl XVI Gustaf and his fiancee, commoner Silvia Sommerlath, the present Queen Silvia, during a variety program celebrating the nuptials, ABBA performed a never-to-be forgotten costumed version of Dancing Queen at the Royal Swedish Operafor them and their invited guests.
As you watch the video, you can see the almost bewildered look of many of the officials and other musicians seated behind them on the stage, who, the story goes, because of their unfamiliarity with the song, had no genuine idea whether or not the song was supposed to be about the future queen -or not.
And yes, it does remind all of us again of the group's marketing genius, since two years prior, at the 1974Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton that made them famous, they wore early 19th-Century costumes when they performed Waterloo, which earned them first place.
As of today this video has received 9,355,415 views.
The current population estimate of Sweden by the CIA is 9,088,728.
Benny sliding his fingers across the piano keys at the beginning -so very, very simple and yet so genius!
Fox-TV's multi-national hit Glee featured a performance of Dancing Queen in their May 10th episode titled Prom Queen, with Amber Riley and Naya Rivera doing the duet.
You can watch the entire episode on Fox's website until this coming Thursday at
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