The making of a box set Part
5 (of 8): ABBA UNDELETED IS BORN But what about those other,
half-finished tracks, where the same lyrics were repeated over and over again,
often with a demo vocal by Björn? Michael came up with the solution to that
problem as well. Edit those recordings down to snippets, and then put the snippets
together into one long medley, interspersed with studio chatter, to emphasise
the point that this should be regarded as a peek into the working process and
not as a collection of "official ABBA tracks". Thus, the ABBA Undeleted
medley was born.
Michael Tretow set to work on the medley, largely drawing
from the tapes we had heard on that October day in 1993. He also took a listen
to some digitally recorded tapes, which he could only listen to at the Polar Music
Studios: that was the only place in Sweden that still had the 3M digital recorders
that Polar bought back in 1981. One example of a digital recording in the medley
is the Givin’ A Little Bit More demo. Some of the studio chatter and working
versions came from Michael’s own collection of tapes that he made to keep
track of where they were at with a particular song. I believe Baby, the early
version of Rock Me, may have come from those sources.
At the end of July
1994, Björn, Benny and Michael Tretow got together at the Polar Music Studios
to make proper mixes of Put On Your White Sombrero and Just A Notion, both of
which were scheduled for inclusion in their entirety. Put On Your White Sombrero
was completed without any problems: an effect or two were apparently added, but
that was all.
The mixing of Just A Notion was stopped fairly quickly,
however - this was not going to appear as a complete track on the box set. When
I asked Björn why, he replied that the recording was "unmixable".
By that I believe he meant that it just wasn’t up to standard; there might
have been too few overdubs, or perhaps the song felt unfinished as a whole. Personally,
I believe this was one instance where they were too hard on themselves.
It is true that the complete recording of Just A Notion drags on a bit in places,
some parts outstay their welcome and the same bit gets repeated over and over
again without anything really happening. But if a few bars had been edited out
here and there, the recording would have been tightened up considerably, neatly
solving the "dragging-on" problem. And as is evident from the snippet
that was ultimately included in the ABBA Undeleted medley, the backing track and
the vocal performances constituted a package powerful enough to merit inclusion
as a complete recording, especially compared to some of the extremely bare and
unfinished recordings that have been issued by respected acts such as The Beatles
and The Beach Boys.
But ultimately, only three previously unreleased
studio recordings were included in their entirety: Put On Your White Sombrero,
Dream World and the first take of Thank You For The Music. Incidentally, this
latter track featured some synthesizer playing that was not included in the final
mix. The reason was that the song should sound more like the ragtime music of
Scott Joplin, which apparently had influenced the arrangement.
Another
casualty of Björn and Benny’s quality control was a track called Chiquitita
Story, one of Michael Tretow’s ideas. With this track the listener would
have been guided through the evolvement of Chiqutita: from the original version,
In The Arms Of Rosalita - which featured a completely different backing track
- through the new backing track and the creation of the acoustic guitar introduction,
and then up to the final version. This would probably have been interspersed with
some studio chatter, to make up a sort of mini-documentary of the recording of
a specific song. However, I believe Chiquitita Story was ditched before Michael
had even begun editing the various parts together.
|
|
Michael Tretow, Benny and Björn at the Polar Music Studios in 1981.
|
