Comment on Have You Never Been Mellow
Making A Case For Performers' Artistic Control
OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN is another artist whose image and sound seerns to be increasingly manipulated by her record company.
Her first hit was Dylan’s “If Not For You” and her first album cover made her look like a bucolic hippy. Now her hair is trimmed and curled, her frocks are frilly, and her songs have turned into whispery answers to every adolescent male’s daydreams.
With songs like “Follow Me” and “Loving Arms,” she delivers her repetitive message of persocal ceed that only we boys can fill with a saccharine sweetness soaked in swirls of soft strings. I said after the release of her last album that she was walking a thin line between folk-country and middle-of-the-read pop. That line has become a tightrope and she just fell off, the latest candidate for Muzak and the Vegas circuit.
It’s all a matter of taste. Whether artist manipulation is good or bad depends upon the particular album aed the public’s fickle reaction. But perhaps as the seventies continue we’ll have a healthier mix of artist-produced and professionally-produced records and the decisions about who controls what will be based on talent and ability and not simply the habits of the times.