Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Revisiting the albums of my youth: Super Trouper


Released in 1979, ABBA’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2 was, in my home, generally acknowledged to be my father’s album, though anybody in the family might open the gatefold and crank up “Does Your Mother Know” or “Take a Chance on Me” to summon a quorum in the living room. It was perhaps the first album I recognized as a family endeavour, like Disney World or cross-country skiing. Until then, my father listened mostly to country music, which I hated.

Jump ahead two years and ABBA’s The Visitors was most emphatically my album (returned twice because it kept skipping during “One of Us.” But Super Trouper, the biggest selling album of 1980, was the album that my father bought and seldom listened to, while my sister, three years younger, and I ate it up like roast beef after a famine. To this day, I can easily lip sync most of it, even the songs I disliked.

Super Trouper was not my favourite ABBA album. That was, you guessed it, The Visitors, ABBA’s mic drop, their last waltz, something to decode and obsess over. Having discovered Super Trouper among my father’s collection rather than buying it myself, it took a while for it to work its way into my consciousness. I was first pulled in by the cover. Dressed all in white, Benny, Bjorn, Freda and Agnetha were circled by an array of moody circus performers, swathed in dim amber light. The superstars had come off stage to be worshipped and to cavort with their adoring, though much lesser, co-performers. The young man holding the torch in the foreground seemed ready to lead everyone to darker places. It wasn’t quite sinister or sexual, but hinted at both.

The first single was “The Winner Takes It All,” but this was the era of albums, where you made up your own mind what the best tracks were. Plus “The Winner Takes It All,” about a divorce, had mature subject matter. Adults seems to get tense when it played. It was not “fun” ABBA the whole family could share, though eventually we discovered that campy enactments of the lyrics could be quite delightful.

As a family, the consensus that the best song was “On and On and On.” Its chorus and honky-tonk piano were grounded in rock and roll, which my parents appreciated. But the story-telling lyrics that gave me great joy caused them some consternation. The word “Hell” was not appreciated by my mother. I can see now that the words painted too vivid a portrait of urban moral contingency. The party where the world unfolded was not one you’d want your kids at. “I was at a party and this fella said to me/Something bad is happening, I’m sure you do agree/People care for nothing, no respect for human rights/Evil times are coming, we are in for darker nights.” But at 12, I was starting to appreciate the idea of a cold, smartass comeback. “I said I was not exactly waiting for the bus” seemed like the perfect answer to “What’s our situation, do we have some time for us?” even though the sexual connotations of the question went way over my head.

The title track, too, was alienating to someone who wasn’t a global citizen. The chorus’s chugging bass was fun to crank loud, but who wants to listen to the complaints of a planetary superstar?

The Super Trouper song that totally alienated my parents was the one my sister and I loved the most. Or, I should say, most loved to perform. “Me and I” was not just a song, but a theatrical production. The opening synths seemed like explicit instructions to a stage manager where to direct the spotlights, which we, as super troupers, could walk in and out of as we pleased. The relentless beat made it easy to synchronize our moves, the wobbly bass created it a sense of suspense that covered missteps and unsuccessful improvisations.

Growing up in a rather sheltered rural environment, I had little awareness of mental illness until I was in my late teens. So my pure delirium at lines like, “Part of me is acting while the other stands beside/Yes, I am to myself what Jekyll must have been to Hyde” was independent of the cultural presentation of split personalities. But I must have heard the Bee Gees in the “Hy-y-Y-Y-HYDE!” My parents must may have been turned off by the song’s disco influences, too far from country or rock and roll, in it. Or maybe it was just the silly behaviour it brought out in their kids that made them tell us to turn the song down and stop making the whole house shake with our jumping.

Four of Super Trouper’s 10 tracks are ballads, the spinach of a 12 year old’s musical taste. “The Way Old Friends Do” was something you’d hear at a wedding dance you didn’t want to be at. My sister loved “Andante Andante,” but it put me to sleep. I didn’t even know what the title meant. I liked the clever, hook-filled songs that were for and about nightclubs, not the ones set in a meadow. Their “pretty” songs have always left me cold.  

With its jet-setting ennui, Super Trouper was not an album for kids, nor was it an album for adults who considered “Mamma Mia” the pinnacle of ABBA’s achievements. But for a 12 year old yearning for something to expand his world, it was worth rooting through the kitsch to find something unapologetically modern, cosmopolitan and curious.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Travel as nostalgia

This piece, which I wrote for National Geographic Traveller India, about revisiting places after a long time away, had been floating around in my head for a while.

Getting older, I realized that, as well as seeing new places, I wanted to remind myself where I had been, the places that had shaped me and my world view. But I often found that when I went back, I would mostly fixate on what had changed, which would bolster my memories about how things had been. It was like a spot-the-difference puzzle.

The intersection in Galway where, so many years ago, I called home to discover my granddad had passed away. I'm sure it's a different phone in front of the old stone building, but standing there conjured the same emotions.
What I left out of the Nat Geo Traveller India piece was that on my 2015 trip to Ireland, where I revisited the site of where I received news of my granddad's death, I also visited, for the first time, the port where the Irish side of my family--my granddad's family--left Ireland for the New World.

Maurice and wife Catherine Riley left Tralee County on the Brig Martin in July 1820, according to Prince Edward Island history. At Tralee's historic Blennerville port, I wasn't able to find records of their departure; it was before peak Potato Famine migration. But in revisiting a piece of my own past in Galway, I was able to go on and act as a proxy for my ancestors, who, never having returned to their birthplace, made me a Canadian.

It's hard to imagine a ship capable of crossing the Atlantic loading up passengers in this mucky spot in Blennerville, Ireland.