The making of a box set Part
4 (of 8): THE BOX SET STARTS COMING TOGETHER Towards the
end of 1993 I was contacted by Chris Griffin, who had assembled a preliminary
track listing for the proposed box set. Chris requested a meeting at the PolyGram
offices in Stockholm with himself and George McManus at Polydor, who was also
heavily involved in the handling of the ABBA catalogue.
I suggested a
couple of changes in the track listing: for instance, since at least all the non-album
single B-sides were supposed to be included on the box set, I felt that That’s
Me - the B-side of Dancing Queen - was a more natural choice than Arrival, which
was slated for inclusion. Later on in the process, two live tracks from the Dick
Cavett Meets ABBA television special had been included in the track listing, one
of which was Knowing Me, Knowing You. I suggested that Me And I might be a more
interesting choice: the studio version of Knowing Me, Knowing You was already
going to be on disc 2, whereas Me And I wasn’t represented at all.
Then began the long and hard process of convincing Björn and Benny to allow
for some of the previously unreleased tracks to be included in the box set. From
the start, Björn was slightly more in favour of this prospect than Benny.
Björn and I discussed the possibility of including a disc of unreleased material
together with my upcoming book. He seemed to like the multimedia aspect of it,
and agreed that it would be the right context for these recordings.
But
as Chris Griffin recalled in his liner notes, both Björn and Benny "would
repeat the comment ’that they were not good enough then, so they are not
good enough now!’" I remember sending a fax to Benny, pointing out that
the concept would be the same as the recently released Beach Boys box set, which
contained a fair amount of unreleased material. Since Benny is such a huge Beach
Boys fan, I thought that might be a good argument: if his "heroes" could
do it, perhaps so could he.
I don’t know if my little plea made
any difference, however. Björn and Benny seemed to be very uncomfortable
with the thought that unfinished, often very barely arranged material would be
made available to the general public - and that was that. According to Chris Griffin,
Michael Tretow was the one who provided the two vital breakthrough. At one meeting
Benny asked who would be buying this box set. An ardent Elvis fan, Michael suggested
that if it had been The King, he would buy it. Perhaps this was the point when
fairly finished recordings such as Dream World and Put On Your White Sombrero
came a little closer to a release.
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The part of my fax to Benny where I was trying to explain that ABBA fans would
get the same kick out of hearing unreleased ABBA recordings as Beach Boys fans
- like himself, presumably - got out of hearing the rare material in the recently
issued Good Vibrations box set. "No one is naïve enough to expect an
album of Super Trouper calibre," I wrote, "but they would still find
it highly interesting to hear these tracks." However, I doubt that Benny
is the kind of person who listens very much to unreleased recordings by his favourite
acts.
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