A Hint Of Country
By Michael Bane
Olivia Newton-John moves with a kind of understated grace normally reserved for the very young, as if she were a puppet and the puppet master had just dropped all the strings. She folds onto the beige couch at the Park Lane Hotel, overlooking a very inviting Central Park, sighing as she pulls her knees and sneaker-clad feet onto the couch. She looks tired and very resigned in the face of another interview, like a little girl in sneakers and jeans who looks out the window at the park and sees where she’d like to be on this perfect spring afternoon, but instead must spend the afternoon writing time after time on some schoolhouse chalkboard: “My name is Livvy. I am a country and western singer….”
There were the whispered warnings before the interview, outside the door to Olivia’s suite. “For God’s sake, ask her about her music,” a record company representative said as we killed some time waiting for the previous interview to end. “So far she’s been asked about her sex life, her fashion designer, her hair stylist, her boyfriend, her family, what parties she attends everything but her music. She is a singer, after all.”
Not only is she definitely a singer, but one of the most popular singers around, if record sales are taken to be the final arbiters of such things. In fact, Olivia Newton-John sells records about the way McDonald’s sells hamburgers over 10 million. Since exploding on the American music scene in 1974 with Let Me Be There, Olivia has managed to surround herself with a mini-hurricane of controversy and become something of a phenomenon, all with the best of intentions, of course. At the core of both the controversy and phenomenon lies the definition of what is and what is not country music, and that definition has changed drastically since Olivia started her mellow crooning. Olivia is smiling and gracious, but her attention keeps wandering back to the open window, to a world away from interviews and concerts at the Metropolitan Opera House and picture sessions with the press. She doesn’t look like somebody with a hyphen in her last name, rather some misplaced flower child from the days of miniskirts and be-ins. Which is, perhaps, one of the reasons that the controversy around Olivia refuses to simply go away.
There’s no way that this frail young woman sitting across from me on the beige couch can fulfill the live-hard honky tonk philosophy traditionally assigned to a country singer. She is delicate, and country music is not. Her drawl is Australian, not southern. And her music is, well, better let Olivia do her own describing. “I do new songs with a country flavor,” she says, staring out the window at Central Park. “I mean, this thing about hard country and soft country just doesn’t make it for me it’s all music. I mean, country music has a style - country music I love it for its simplicity, although it’s getting more complicated lately” (More complicated, in fact, as a response to Olivia Newton-John’s assault from Down Under.) The Olivia story has all the earmarks of a contemporary fairy tale (“Yeah, I guess it does,” Olivia agrees).
Raised in Australia by college professor parents, listening to classical music. Her own television show “Lovely Livvy” by the tender age of 15. To England compliments of winning a song contest, to begin the rounds of English club singing, until she clicked a few years later with Bob Dylan’s If Not For You and Country Girl. If Not For You marked another very important point the beginning of her business relationship with John Farrar. Unlike Olivia, whose knowledge of American music was limited to pop artists like Nina Simone and Ray Charles and the folkie explosion of the early 1960s, Farrar was a manic country music fan. When he heard the tapes of Olivia’s version of If Not For You, he figured the song would be perfect with just one more touch a steel guitar. So he added one, and DJ Ralph Emery even played the song on his WSM show in Nashville, of all places.
“I can’t tell myself if a song is country,” Olivia is saying. “Crystal Gayle, for example, is very pop to me. Country people don’t have any qualms about buying her records. Don’t get me wrong her records are fantastic. I love ‘em. I love what she does. But she seems to me to be more in the vein I’m in, yet she has more trouble going into the pop thing. I think the gap is very narrow now between the two, country and pop.” One would be hard pressed to find any two words that weigh any heavier on Olivia Newton-John than country and pop. Pop because, well, that’s what she is a pop singer. Country, because she’s that too a country singer. At least, she is now. But when Let Me Be There took off on the country charts (with the not-unsubstantial help of Nashville’s own Al Callico, whose music publishing company owned the song), Nashville cried “foul!”
When the Country Music Association named Olivia Newton-John the best female vocalist of 1974 over such established country artists as Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn, the cries escalated to a thundering crescendo. Why, she wasn’t even American, and how can you be country if you didn’t grow up with your bare feet in the good old US of A? Overnight, a new country music group the Association of Country Entertainers, with such luminaries as Hank Snow, George Morgan, Minnie Pearl, Tammy Wynette, George Jones and Dolly Parton sprung up to defend what was left of the status quo. Olivia Newton-John, they said in press release after press release, was simply not a country singer.
Slice it any way you want to, but an Australian singer who sang vanilla-soft pop music was not the country female vocalist of the year, steel guitar or no. It was downright hostile. “I really think it wasn’t personal,” she says of the Nashville blitz. “I mean, I didn’t cut myself in. I didn’t go out and convince anybody to buy me or vote me in or give me an award. I just happened to make a record, and it was very popular. I really think it was a minority of people in Nashville. And I think it was only a few insecure people in the business. “If it had been the public saying, ‘Hey, you’re moving in on our territory,’ I would have said fair’s fair. But when it’s people in the business thinking that you’re taking something that is theirs, I really think…”
Regardless of how Olivia chooses to turn aside the barbs of years past, she is still bitter. Even more bitter, I think, because she’s still not sure what happened. Olivia the country singer was not necessarily her choice her producer picked the instrumentation; her business managers made the decision to release the record country as well as pop; her record company decided to pursue country publicity. In fact, there’s this distinct feeling that Olivia the singer, Olivia the person, barely figured into the conglomerate decision to make Olivia Newton-John a country star. Which explains, in its own way, all those Olivia Newton-John stories you’ve heard: How, upon hearing a Hank Williams record for the first time, Olivia expressed an interest in meeting the fellow with the piercing wail; how Olivia, when informed that she had a country hit on her hands in Let Me Be There, asked for someone to explain exactly what country music was.
There is a feeling in this swank hotel suite, with its beige couches and deep blue carpet, that the frail girl in the jeans and sneakers and the ability to strike the most amazingly innocent poses without the slightest hint of pretension just might have represented a blank slate, a voice in search of a face. “I also believe, and I’ve said this before, that you can’t put a passport on music,” Olivia says. “That it doesn’t belong to one section of the country. Music is international; the notes, the sounds belong to anyone who can sing them. You don’t have to be a rock person to have soul, either. Or to have rhythm all of these cliches. So I really think now, judging from the people I’ve spoken to since, I think they’re really pleased,” she continues, uncoiling from the couch and placing her elbows firmly on her knees. “I’ve opened up doors for artists who otherwise wouldn’t get airplay; or wouldn’t get as broad a country airplay. And people who didn’t use to listen to country music really found that they might get to like it.” And that, pretty much, is the crux of the Olivia Newton-John story regardless of what you think of her music, Olivia has done as much to open up country music as, say, Willie Nelson or Waylon Jennings.
She was the vanguard, the first pop singer to make any serious inroads into country since the years of Bing Crosby singing Hank Williams, and that alone was enough to engage the wrath of Nashville. Coupled with having the poor taste to sell more records than the biggest country star, it’s a wonder Miss Livvy wasn’t tarred and feathered when she set foot in Music City. But things have mellowed since 1974, mainly because in the music industry, dollars speak louder than any ideology. While it might have been a little hard to swallow at first, those gold Olivia Newton-John records were powerful persuasion for the Music City heavies. The Nashville Sound had already gone just about as far as it could, and it didn’t seem possible that everyone in Nashville could grow a beard, move to Texas and become an outlaw.
It was time, around 1974-ish, for a new trend, and Olivia Newton-John proved just the key. Keep the music simple and melodic; once again, keep your lyrics out of the honky tonks and safely in the realm of something universal, like love; keep everything, well, mellow; then stand back when the fans rush the record racks. Whatever chemistry Olivia Newton-John had (and still has), it worked. “I like to sing songs that I like, basically,” Olivia says. “Love songs. I like to know the feeling. And much to her credit, as soon as Olivia figured out just what a country star was supposed to do, she set about doing it. She went out of her way to place herself at the disposal of her critics, responding to their hostility with a surprising amount of sincerity and even in Nashville, that sincerity went a long way.
Her next-to-the-most-recent album was recorded in Nashville, with local pickers backing her up. She gave news conferences in Nashville (where she was asked about her sex life, hair stylist, boyfriend, etc.) and even tried to book a concert at the Opry House at Opryland. One thing for certain, no one could accuse Olivia of not trying. That sincerity even carries over to her stage shows, where she hustles across the stage like a veritable demon, kicking up her heels and generally creating a storm. On stage more than ever she seems like just a little girl, slightly awed by the fact that there’s a 70-piece or so orchestra standing right behind her and taken with the idea that all those people out in the audience paid money just to see her. And even her cruelest critic would have to admit that her stage shows are pretty good; that even if her songs tend to run together into one long melody when presented in one setting, her enthusiasm and exuberance carry the day. Even on her tear-jerkers, such as I Honestly Love You, Olivia Newton-John really enjoys her music.
So what, then, is country music? Are there limits, and if so, just who determines them? It’s a question I’ve considered at various times, such as when Olivia Newton-John encores her New York show at the Metropolitan Opera House with Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, a song from Evita, a rock opera based on the life of Eva Peron. Olivia is backed by a full orchestra and a rhythm section complete with steel, and darned if she doesn’t sound very, very good.
I’ve also considered the question with Alexander Harvey, late of Delta Daten and Reuben James songwriting fame. Seems Alex was the opening act for Dolly Parton in her gala New York premier, and Alex and I found ourselves invited to the same party to honor Miss Dolly, along with folks like Mick Jagger and Lily Tomlin and Andy Warhol and, of course, Olivia Newton-John. Alex and I, feeling somewhat out of place, holed up at a back table, eating fresh crabmeat and looking out over the greatest city in the world from a mile-high building, one of the World Trade Towers, where Miss Dolly’s record label chartered the tres-swank Windows On The World restaurant. We didn’t reach any decision, Alex and I, but we did drink a lot of champagne and settle on one suitable irony for the evening. Olivia may have come to Miss Dolly’s party, but Miss Dolly came to Olivia’s music.