Olivia Newton-John (1948 - 2022)

Olivia Newton-John was the first artist who sparked completist tendencies in me. With Grease injected into my arteries, I needed her all. I owned every one of her (USA-released) albums up to and including Olivia's Greatest Hits Vol. 2 (MCA, 1982). What I couldn't find as a cut-out at K-Mart my mom ordered for me at Rose Records, the anticipation of finally getting to hear Let Me Be There and If You Love, Let Me Know unbearable. In this obsession, I was not alone. My fellow ONJ fiend Carolyn and I would write our favorite songs on our folders, sing "Making a Good Thing Better" sitting in the school entranceway during recess, and single out deep cuts like "I'll Bet You a Kangaroo" or "Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying" for ridicule, less out of conviction than a longing for any modicum of authority.

And all this before the twin miracles of Xanadu, the summum of 1980s preteen cinema, and "Physical," the top single of the decade according to Billboard. By this point, I could watch Xanadu on VHS which I did dutifully, daily, until a fault line formed in the cassette. But that was a more private obsession, bewitching me throughout my near constant occupancy of the den while the neighborhood boys played dice baseball across the street. The ubiquity of "Physical" meant you had to take a stance and it marked any boy who held even mild affection for it as queer. MTV cut out the gay ending to the video but the repressed returned in my flouncy behavior whether I wanted it to or not. And given the homophobia surrounding me, I didn't. A few years later, my mom took me to see Culture Club at Poplar Creek where she bought me a t-shirt. I never wore it, especially not to school. I would have sooner gone naked. 

But market forces caused me to abandon ONJ around 1983, the year of her last top five single, "Heart Attack." MTV and The Rock Yearbook gave me the new wave flu. I discovered The Turntable, an independent record store in Schaumburg where I bought imports like the 1982 Cherry Red compilation Burning Ambitions: A History of Punk. And by the end of high school/the 1980s, I was diving into the canon of which ONJ was decidedly not a part. I don't recall hearing 1985's "Soul Kiss," her last top 40 single, at the time and didn't listen to the accompanying album until this century. 1988's The Rumour I heard for the first time Tuesday night. These are decent, painless releases you need not bother with (check out Chuck Eddy's appraisal where he compares it favorably to Patti Smith's Dream of Life). After that came albums of lullabies, covers, and Christmas songs as well as something called Gaia: A Woman's Journey, none of which I've heard and likely never will. So when I learned that she died on August 8th at 73, I was embarrassed to discover some basic facts from the inevitable Wikipedia run, namely, that her grandfather was physicist Max Born, who won a Nobel Prize in 1954, and that she was born in England, not Australia (her family moved to Melbourne when she was six). 

Nevertheless, I always held on to my affection for ONJ. She evolved into a queer materfamilias appearing in the underseen AIDS drama It's My Party (Randal Kleiser, 1996) and the overseen Sordid Lives (Del Shores, 2000) as well as two episodes of Glee. For years at my New Year's Eve parties, I timed my DVD of Xanadu so that her appearance as the space queen towards the end happened right at the stroke of midnight. But until her death, it never occurred to me to dive back into her discography.

Too much is made of the country/pop bifurcation of her career. It didn't take much of an adjustment for her songs to sound like one or the other, both or none. Add a steel guitar here, remove a bass vocal harmony there, and she could capture whatever demographic suited her masterplan. Sculpted by her canny producer/songwriter John Farrar, the early smashes hit higher on Billboard's Hot 100 than they did on the country chart save for "If You Love Me (Let Me Know)" which did #5 pop and #2 country. 1978's Totally Hot is supposedly where she went pop/rock. But you could hear her sound get less twangier before then, especially on 1977's Making a Good Thing Better where she essays "Ring of Fire" and "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina." And after my pal Jody taught me to hear Alicia Bridge's "I Love the Nightlife" as country rather than disco, I now perceive Totally Hot's "A Little More Love" and "Deeper Than the Night" as country songs in pop/rock drag, both of which hit low on the country chart. 

Uniting it all is what John Darnielle calls, in a phrase I never tire of quoting, "the endless mercy of pop music."* In ONJ's songs, a cruel world is always standing by, even for the singer as witnessed by her decades-long battle with cancer. Her interlocutors are a distressing lot - people who have never been mellow or who think the world should see things their way. Sometimes she's the one in need of her own brand of Downy-drenched therapy. Listen to her go full-tilt Yoko as the wronged siren of "Please Don't Keep Me Waiting," the Totally Hot opener used to devastating effect by Crispin Glover and Sean Penn donning Olivia drag in The Beaver Trilogy (Trent Harris, 2001). But with a voice free of Celine Dion-grade will to power, she radiates motherly, if not grandmotherly, acceptance and patience. On Xanadu's "Magic," she holds out her hand while telling no lies about the evils surrounding us. As the song opens, it could be ending or beginning. Depends on if we take her hand or not. "We have to believe we are magic," she implores, because there are so many people who think the worst of us. And if we believe them, then the alternative that awaits us is almost too grim to ponder. 

* John Darnielle, "Dionne Warwick - Legends," in Marooned; The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs, ed. Phil Freeman (Da Capo, 2007), 160.