Olivia Lure Leaves 'em Limp
By MAUREEN PETERSON Journal Critic
In a red T-shirt and patch-worked jeans, Olivia Newton-John looked like a sweet, scrubbed kid, a grown-up Ivory Snow baby.
What is it that has made her the guaranteed draw that filled the grandstand at Lansdowne Park Sunday? What is the secret ingredient that raised her salary in one year from $500 to $7,000 for a single performance?
Live concerts especially open-air daytime shows, often provide clues to the real reasons behind show business success stories. It might have been possible, for instance, to believe it was her personality that turned the crowds on, but when she tried to talk about being raised in Australia or when she said she really liked singing oldies the reaction was a shade above tolerance.
When she sang a vintage love song, “Nevertheless I’m in Love with You”, the audience nearly froze her out. What they really like is for her to put on the twang and sound like a female country amalgam. That’s what brought success and that’s what she’ll have to do to keep it. No one is interested in Olivia Newton-John as an individual.
The world has turned a few times since the superstars of the moment called the tune and then the style of clothes and coiffure. Remember when kids copied performers and the Beatles brought long hair to North America?
It seems that what the world wants now and what it gets from Olivia Newton-John is that she remain sufficiently low-key, sufficiently non-descript for all of us to catch our own reflection. It’s a new Image. A return to some semblance of decency, perhaps. It should not be overlooked that she is a U.S. idol first.
Let Me Be There, she sings, and I can’t help feeling the lyric is ironic. She was there. At the right time., in the right place, swept to the top on the wave of a nation’s desperation and identify crisis. It is more than coincidence that one of the New York Times top political analysts Tom Wicker, recently wrote a long and serious analysis of the film Nashville. Country Music is where its at south of the border, and somehow Americans seem to believe that inside its whinning innocence and pubescent romanticism lie the answers to some great American riddle.
Olivia Newton-John is almost an accidental product of that paramount enigma.
Her material is basicly cloying, breathy “I love you’s” and lifeless rhymes. She can even smother poetry of Dylan’s If Not For You in formula mush and syphon the humor out of the Beatles’ Honey Pie.
But when she lays on the Nashville, Mister Don’t Play B-17, the grandstand just laps it up like cotton candy.
Someone threw a pink stuffed dolphin on stage at the end of her act and I couldn’t help thinking of one of the Mouseketeers. Annette Funicelo, you came just a few years too soon.
The grandstand show opened with Nashville’s latest hybrid of Elvis Presley and Hopalong Cassidy. His name is Billy Crash Craddock and his material is pretty primal in the rhythm and lyric departments.
The pretty miss and the dirty cowboy will be on stage again today at 5:30 and 8:30 p.m.