Olivia laserdisc
The hardware, they say, anticipates the software or is it the other way around? Frankly, I’ve never been able to get it straight. Then again, I can never remember if it’s the ontogeny that recapitulates the phylogeny, or vice versa, either, so perhaps I just have trouble with sequential thought. Anyway, it has been well over a year since the first MCA/Philips videodisc players hit the stores in Atlanta, and as the units have become available in other markets, video nuts with the wherewithal to purchase the hardware have been panting for more software - not just old and new movies, but less obvious kinds of entertainment programs as well.
Now MCA has at long last let loose two of these, musical extravaganzas starring Olivia Newton-John and Loretta Lynn, and.. well, Great Moments in Western Culture they are not. Which is too bad, really, because to my mind (this was my first hands-on videodisc experience) the hardware performed splendidly. For the record, the setup I used in auditioning the two discs was well above average. The audio was fed through a Carver C-4000 preamp, a Threshold Model 4000 power amp, and KEF 105 speakers. The disc player was the new Pioneer VP 1000, and the TV was a good 19-inch color set (these discs will play in black and white too).
The worst first: Ms. Newton-John’s “Olivia” album was done originally as a prime-time special for ABC television, and it is safe to say that after its broadcast it occurred to nobody to compare it to Mary Martin’s Peter Pan as a TV landmark.
Among the highlights are a truly bizarre disco production number, based on the concept of life as a Monopoly game (!), in which Newton-John portrays a divorced mother (Why? Don’t ask) and then sings a duet with gospel star James Cleveland that can only be described as Tepid Soul on White Bread; listless medleys of their hits by Andy Gibb (his chest hair, his medallions, and his orchestra) and Abba; and the show’s most off-the-wall moment, a “jam session” (apparently staged by director Steve Binder to recreate the effect of a similar segment in his great Elvis comeback show of 1968) in which the various performers wreak havoc on everything from old Beach Boys songs to “Una voce poco fa” from The Barber of Seville (I’m not making this up).
Throughout the rest, Newton-John disports herself in her inimitable I-Walked-with-a-Zombie manner, and the mono TV sound is roughly comparable to that of a portable AM radio during a period of heavy sun-spot activity. Video quality was, mercifully, pretty good, a bit grainier than I’ve seen with tape, but the color was excellent. Still, unless you’re a connoisseur of truly perverse camp or want to be able to boast ten years from now that you were in at the beginning, I can think of no really good reason to add this one to your collection.
The Loretta Lynn disc is nowhere near that level of ghastliness, to be sure, but it is problematic. Recorded live in Reno, the style of the production leads me to suspect that it was originally designed as a special for one of the pay-cable networks; whether it was ever shown I have no idea.
Ms. Lynn is, of course, one of the great voices of country music, but in this night-club setting she seems content to sleepwalk her perfunctory way through a predictable selection of hits (hers and other people’s). While nothing she does induces the God-help-us cringes brought on by Newton-John, there’s nothing particularly inspiring here either.
BUT the problems with the “Loretta” album are ultimately more technical than musical. For starters, the camera work is routine scaling down to mediocre, and the editing seems to be the work of that mythical assemblage of an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of editing decks. The sound, meanwhile, seems not to have been mixed at all: volumes rise and fall on individual instruments and voices with no regard to who is doing what at any given moment. Worse, the distortion level is very distracting even for TV, and to add insult to injury the whole thing, billed on the jacket in big red letters as stereo, is quite clearly mono. Unless the mastering engineer fell asleep during the tape-to-disc transfer, somebody is flim-flamming here.
Again, the picture quality was significantly better than anything else about the package, with reasonable color resolution, although the on-stage lighting was rather garish, making it difficult to judge.