ABBA Babble

Last night, on a beautiful fall-like night, I went to Wolf Trap's night of ABBA the Concert, with a cheery knock-off group of game ABBA impersonators. They even had a real ABBA side man sitting in on most of the ABBA like songs to lend some credibility to the performance--a nice touch. But as with other cover band performance, such as the Dark Star Orchestra's Dead on performances, you were conscious of their limitations. They would not permit themselves to extend their performance to anything outside of the originals and this group performing ABBA the Concert stayed within their concert lanes reasonably well. They did dig deeply into the ABBA catalogue of songs and did not stay with the hits, which made it a little interesting, but unfortunately, some of the deeper cuts were rather thin and formulaic, and ironically, knock offs of other's hits of the 60s and 70s. ABBA's music (at least the hits) lives on comfortably on the stage, in film, and in recorded music, and streaming and steaming in the exercise rooms of the boomers and gen xers and yers, and in the hearts of their againg audiences.