Below find one of many of my favorite posts to the YDDoR&R Facebook page (I'm so pitifully self-entertained).
I'm in the process of discovering I can find a lot of past YDDoR&R posts through trail and error searches within Facebook. I'm going to post more of them here as a way of more reliably storing some of those posts that I thought had a particularly sweet turn of phrase or that, for whatever reason, I don't want to lose. If for no one else than myself, I'll rescue them from the non-stop, collapse-of-the-narrative river rolling into an abyss that social media feeds tend to be and preserve them here for anywhere from not many people to absolutely no one.
March of 1973 saw the release of the album Ring, Ring—an official precursor to the band ABBA. Their coyly clever name not yet coined, the quartet was then billed as Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Frida.
If Phil Spector created the Wall of Sound what Benny Anderson, Björn Ulvaeus (producers as well as band members/songwriters) and recording engineer Michael B. Tretow managed to create was a dense polymer block of sound in which the listeners' ensconced brain was allowed no air, no space, no reprieve from the relentless double-tracked, overdubbed, mixed down, hook-laden onslaught.
That sound was on its way to full fruition with the juggernaut commercial single "Waterloo" released the following March and winning the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest the next month.
Like the fast food of pop music, one whiff of ABBA can be hypnotically enticing leading to a nibble here and there and before you know it you've consumed enough to make you feel more than a little queasy.
Here's the clip of their victory performance.
