Olivia: By The Light Of Her Teeth....
So, this is what it’s like without Olivia Newton-John on this planet. Yea, it feels different. More than I suspected.
Even though my musical tastes had seriously mutated and expanded in the late 80’s, far beyond her records, this is quite the punch…..of course, this didn’t help that I was still enthralled with all things Xanadu, which helped Olivia along in my timeline along side everything else that I was picking up, bumping into and dropping off.
Growing up during the 70’s, I’ve heard of her and her music, but it wasn’t until her 1979 single Deeper Than The Night that she began to register in my sights, even more than Grease (which is a whole other deal, but I’ll leave that alone for this personal tribute). The music and song was quite good, thanks to John Farrar’s fine pop music production. The other half was Olivia herself. I gotten use to her country cosmopolitan sound of yore, but this new shading took up my time as I was fresh to this latest expansion of her sound thanks to her Grease success. Her voice is a bit thin, but she can easily muster enough emotions to effectively approach the drama of the lyrics. Even her earlier albums like Don’t Stop Believin’ were surprisingly gut-writching; the light music was hiding some very deep emotional baggage that I wasn’t prepared for at my young ears of 16. Goth and Olivia are two subjects you normally don’t read in one sentence, but it was a factor I wasn’t prepared for when I went through her back catalog after I discovered Xanadu.
Speaking of Xanadu….if you know ANYTHING about me, this part is self explanatory. My original desire to see this movie because of ELO was suddenly replaced by pictures of Olivia dressed up as Kira. Despite the potholes (mainly the script), the whole package was just about perfect for me during those final days of the “era” of the 60’s and 70’s and Olivia was certainly the centerpiece, for good and ill; she was perfect for the movie, but the results were the stalkers who took the movie too literally and, what could be the biggest sin this film would commit in Hollywood, it didn’t make Grease money.
Despite the arrows from the industry and those stalkers, she came back about a year later with something was perfect for me during those days of now increasing puberty: Physical! Even subtle things that made Olivia appealing up to Grease, especially with boys; the face, the voice and certainly those eyes, where now amped up as if Betty & Veronica had graduated from Archie Comics to Playboy Magazine. She always had an effect on boys during my school days when I would occasionally see pictures of her in locker doors, but with this Physical upgrade, even the cooler guys and jocks where now eyeballing her. As much they tried to maintain their “coolness” and toughness, Olivia had her reliable spell flatten all resistance.
This period was the height of my Olivia fan frenzy; she was everywhere as if Xanadu didn’t happen; I guess this was part of her plan and it worked quite well. She had her backlash and fans like me felt them; especially jokes and blunt remarks about the urban legend of her being a lesbian. The worse of it was when I bought a Xanadu OST mobile from a Long Beach record store and placed it on my lap on the bus long way back home. Half way through the trip, school was getting out and I soon receiving smirks from these kids with someone screaming “DIKE!” as I got off the bus. All that Physical and Xanadu-ness was a bit much for those new generation of “cool” kids can take.
When Olivia started to tour behind the Physical package, my sister gave me the $25 to buy a ticket to her show at the late Universal Amphitheater at Universal Studios. Needless to say, it was a trip watching her show and I shouted, yelled, clapped and screamed with the rest of them from this side of the stage. It was also the first time I realized that I wasn’t the only ONJ fan in the universe. Sure, it was largely the people jumping on the Physical fad train, but it was good enough for me. Much better than what I encountered before the show. I arrived early and tried to find and mingle with other fans. I did find such a crew of my age and wore ONJ t-shirts…...buuuuut after making a reasonable effort to introduce myself, they didn’t even bother returning the favor. Well, so much for fitting in with THAT clique.
I bought and saw enough of Physical gear (VHS tapes, buttons, posters, full page Billboard ads, etc.,) that my grandmother began to keep a weary eye on me due to the press focusing on stalkers at the time, thanks to the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt and all that ‘I did it for Jodie Foster’ jazz. Whenever I did visit grandmother, she acted REALLY nervous as if I would break into a chorus of Physical and go all American Psycho on her and her husband. It was bad enough that she had this fear that I might be gay…..
From there, Olivia did her follow-up called Two Of A Kind and it tanked….the movie that is, I though it was worse than Grease. The singles did well enough, though I thought they sounded desperately too 80’s-ish as they didn’t have the polish that Farrar had crafted before. Two years later, she came out (and Farrar came back) with Soul Kiss and all was well….however, not so much as the lyrics tried WAY too hard to out camp Physical. A beautiful production that left a slightly sour, by now outdated, aftertaste.
By that time, my musical horizon was changing big time and I was bumping into acts like Stereolab, Negativland, Julie London, They Might Be Giants, etc., and despite the fact I was still a hard-core Xanadu fan, I began to leave Olivia’s newer efforts behind. I picked up some of her old stuff (largely compilations and on this new fangled format called Compact Disc) but her then-current music wasn’t much of a priority anymore….I guess IF she continued to make lush pop record like ‘Magic’ or my LP/CD budget wasn’t big enough, whatever the case might be, things changed and my ears were no exception.
It wasn’t until I bumped into a guy named Don Yee. I first meet him from another friend at a Japanese animation club. When we hit it off, I visited him at his apartment and just about flipped out on his poor ass when I saw his painting of Olivia from her Don’t Stop Believin’ photo session. He joked that he was a recovering ONJ fan and, I suspect, this was the first time he met another fan….a now freaking out fan, me!
It got worse (for Don and myself) in the early 90’s when I bumped into an ad for an Olivia fan club in the record collector magazine called Goldmine. I was impressed with this bold move for any fan club supporting an uncool artist like Olivia putting an ad within the pages for this magazine. I quickly sent in for my membership….and for Don’s as some sort of a sneaky birthday present. He didn’t appreciate the gesture, but deep down, he warmed up to the idea of reentering into World Of Olivia.
This is the closest group shot in the entire show. Me, Godzilla Joe (if you can see him) and Don Yee. My apologies to Mr. Ferrara
Our collective club membership lead Don and I to what can be a rather dramatic first encounter with other Olivia fans. The co-leaders of the club, Doug and Cheryl, were notified by the producers of the Vickie Lawrence talk show of Olivia’s appearance on an episode and invited fans through the fan club to attend the taping. Both felt that this was a chance to turn this into some sort of a fan club gathering in Burbank and spread the word through the clubs mailing list. However, when Olivia’s management later found out about this, they went into a panic mode….thus the start of the behind the stage drama.
To cut this REAL short, it was a mixed bag, it was great to meet Olivia in person, but the circumstances weren’t so nice thanks to the lack of organization on the producers part, the politics of Olivia’s management and a few unruly fans who really screwed things up. After the episode taping, they sequestered us fans into a section of seats with the rule of only one photo and/or one autograph per person as Olivia went orderly down the line. Well, once she gracefully appeared in front of us, any sense of order fell apart quickly and terribly. Don & I brought a friend to be in charge of taking our picture with her, but he and our plan got lost in the travesty as well.
The end "result": Olivia, me and Don Yee
At the end of this week of fandom fun, we met up with Doug at LAX to send him off and he filled in other details that made his tour guide/host position more challenging. It was kinda sad to hear these stories from Doug, but by this time, I was hanging out at enough fan gatherings in anime, comics and furry circles that I was getting use to the idea of hard-core fanboy behavior habits running amuck. We gave Doug an ear to steam off to and we wished him well on his flight home and sanity. Still, it was interesting enough of a disaster that I made a real life adventures comic out of this for one of my zines
One important lesson I got from this particular encounter was I gained much more personal and professional respect for Olivia; she was gracious and professional throughout this matter and even IF she barked orders at us like an angry over weight high school gym teacher, I personally wouldn’t hold that against her.
Another round with Olivia (and her fans) was at an engagement at the Greek Theater near Hollywood. This time, she was touring with an orchestra and I witnessed another pack of fans, only this time they where all wearing the same white shirts with the same picture of Olivia on them; this was a vision I imagined Olivia saw back at the talk show as she talked onto that set and seeing her pictures staring right back a her….must have been uncomfortable! This time, they were from another ONJ fan club called Only Olivia (Doug and Cheryl’s club had since gone out of business and this group decided to pick up the slack). However, this time they behaved and actually had fun.
However, there was one guy not in that batch was making himself a walking nuisance; first by running up and down the theater aisles looking for other ONJ fans (like me as I was wearing my hand-painted Xanadu t-shirt….that didn’t help much) and trying to invade the white shirted fans, but failed many times as he didn’t have the proper ticket for that section. It wasn’t until the end of the show that Don & I were leaving the theater and into the dirt parking lot that Mr. Nuisance spotted me again between running around looking for innocent fans and followed us to Don’s truck and even then he wouldn’t move out of the way of the truck door. This wasn’t helping my mood of the night and a great show.
I was beginning to witness first hand and blacken eyes of those stalkers Olivia and other celebrities were talking about from the early 80’s…..only ten years later…..only it’s stalkers stalking other fans. I would later bump into him on the occasional Xanadu screenings and I began to develop this talent of avoiding him as he was trying too hard with what little social skills he had. Sure, I went through that phase in school, but I grew out of that and, thanks to years of fandom conventions, my own self consciousness was pushing me out of THAT same phase pretty quickly.
In October 2001, a staged production of Xanadu called ‘Xanadu Live!’ played for a month in a 99-seat theater in Culver City. There was a bit of behind the stage drama as this was some-what unofficial and there was some level of lawyer involvement, right up until the day of the opening. Still, fans showed up and had a blast. Mr. Nuisance was there, well as showing up at almost every performance. I was fortunate to show up on opening and closing nights. There was a plan to extend the run to another month, but that pesky lawyer politics got heavy, so the show closed as planned…..and later played in North Carolina under the lawyer’s radar.
.jpg)
ABOVE: the official poster of the unofficial 'Xanadu Live' from 2001. LEFT: official ad placed in the L. A. Weekly for the unofficial anniversary screening.
The unofficial 25th anniversary Xanadu screening put together by Heather Hoban was were things got murky. It was a great event; she got a few of the original Xanadu Dancers to talk to the audience, had a cosplay contest, the audience had a small parade of home-made Xanadu t-shirts of their own and as a topper, she hired professional dancers to perform a surprise ‘dance along’ appearance during the ‘Dancin’ scene on stage underneath the screen. Things got so hyper for the fans that they sang along to all of the numbers. That last part wasn’t planned which made it great.
For me though, the other side of this fandom coin came when everybody was leaving the theater soon after the show. After successfully avoiding Mr. Nuisance all night, he finally snuck up to me while I was talking to another fan in front of the theater…..and a few minutes after that Mr. Nuisance and I where corralled (more like pushed) into a conversation with a camera crew from a public access cable show. I knew this was going to smell bad when everybody around us (including my ride) began to disappear. The host wore a tuxedo, but he wasn’t being classy at all and forced his smirky questions on us as if he was happy to find, in his view, the biggest retards in the zoo.
After a few seconds, I tried to pull away, but he had, by now, grabbed my upper arm and wouldn’t let go. Nuisance was being hyper about being interviewed in front of the “press”, host was laughing in his passive aggressive way of acting “normal” and, soon, I was making fun of both of them in angry defiance. The “host” didn’t like my attitude when I jokingly refereed to him a low-rent Steve-O from The Gong Show (a revival of the show was on TV at the time). However, a few more second later, I broke free to look for my ride and got the fuck off THAT stage. They were barking at me to come back, but I had enough of people blowing up my good time and reliving high school social games again...theirs and mine. I later got an e-mail from that crew about them airing THAT episode, but I never did hear and seen them again. No wonder everybody avoided them during the screening.
By then, I had enough of the fandom jungle surrounding Xanadu and Olivia and were going to these screenings less and less as I began to understand Olivia’s relationship with her more intense fans more and more; it was bad enough reading about these occupational hazards she was going through with these type of fans, but the emotional and psychological wrestling match with each other? And being caught in the middle of it? And being a target?!?! I went to two more L. A. screenings, but, by then, I was fucking tired of Mr. Nuisance jumping into everyone's fun….and singling me out. After awhile, many people where confusing the both of us. True, I run a large Xanadu site, but this level of mildew was pissing me off.
The last Xanadu screening I went to was in Westwood as part of UCLA’s Some Sort of a Film Series; the print was terrible as was the speaker with only 20 people showing up, including Nuisance. However, I decided to shut him out completely and enjoy the screening….period. I even talked to a few innocent fans before the show. I didn’t even eyeball Mr. N.
After the show, I shooed Nuisance away and ended up talking about the history surrounding the film with a couple of fans. We enthusiastically talked while Nuisance was running up and down the outdoor lobby either in a sugar rush or in raging disappointment that he wasn’t invited our conversation. Whatever the case might be, the three of us continued the reasonable fan talk out the theater and on to Wilshire Blvd. We split up to go our separate ways and I remember walking down Westwood Blvd. as if I was on a bed of clouds from seeing the film and having that healthy interaction with those two fans.
In 2017, I went to Las Vegas and saw Olivia and had a blast with two of my favorite things; Olivia and Vegas. She even performed ‘Cry Me A River, Julie London’s first hit. Olivia might not have the high toned voice as she used to have from the very early days, but I found her new lower tone much more mature, natural…..and sexier. Her covers album, Indigo: Women Of Song (cover to the LEFT), is a brilliant example of this stage of a singer and I prefer this title above the rest of her albums…..outside of Xanadu, of course.
As things were leveling out between Olivia and her fans (thanks largely to getting old and all other forms of maturity creeping in), we ended up as some sort of “family” and that was something I finally found during those Vegas shows. She sold VIP passes that included a meet and greet with a picture with her and one autograph per person. THIS was the part I was originally dreading; held over battle scares from that Vickie Lawrence show hanged over my head as this live show was nearing the end. However, in the bowls of the psychological demolition derby that is Vegas, I was surrounded by happy fans who calmly showed appreciation of what she gave us. In that VIP room, she was a welcoming host and we were her guests (or ‘subjects’ if you want to go that far). It was brief, but there was enough respect from both sides that made this event very pleasant and a major relief; a quick cocktail party without that fanboy booze. It was a rare pleasant moment from my fandom years.
….and now we have wound down into normalcy….and, even more blunt, no Olivia.
….and, of course, silence.
I’ve been reading the articles since her passing and even her haters have calmed down enough to give her respect for her legacy and her humanity (hellooooo, Rolling Stone!!). Sales of her catalog is blowing up the internet like any recently dead celebrity, so I guess that is part of the modern pop cultural grieving process. Of all the scribes I’ve read about her, the phrase I’ve been picking up on is “geek love”. This phrase makes some sense as she always had that level of ‘geek’ within her career which added much love from people like me and fuel to disbelievers who threw their hipness anger at her….well, mainly at us…..the geeks a. k. a., her fans.
There have been other musical artists that I was sad to see go like Leon Redbone, Julie London and Frank Zappa, but this one packs a good/bad/heavy punch.
A resent posting by a FB friend pretty much pin pointed the reasoning behind this punch on us fans. He wasn’t a fan, but he understood nevertheless….
He lamented that celebrities like Olivia, who took care of herself, fought cancer for 30 plus years and treated those around her with humanity and respect, are gone while those like Donald Trump, guzzling diet Coke, stroking the worst of human nature to assimilate personal power and ego and hated pets, is still walking the earth….or what’s left of it in his wake. My friend began and ended the post with the words, “There Is No God.”
Olivia Newton-John was no god, but she was good enough…..certainly good enough for us fans …...including me (below).
Thanks, Olivia…..especially for putting up with us fans.
Oh, and apologies to Vickie Lawrence. Nothing personal…..
P. S.: For more Olivia fun, check out an episode of my The Hour Of Crap show I did with buddy Otis Fodder; to celebrate, well…..everything that is Olivia!!