Lovely Livvy - Country Style

Lovely Livvy

By James Neff

ED - photos on next page

Who are all those people ganging up on Olivia Newton-John and what do they want! What could they possibly dislike about the pleasant hyphenated honey who outsells every female singer in the United States? It can't be her looks. The blue-eyed, slender blonde is beautiful in a wholesome, feminine, fresh way, with a hint of little girl sexiness. Like Marie Osmond, you just know she can't be that nice. There has to be a dark streak however faint, somewhere deep in her soul.

It's not her singing. Having strong opinions about the Australian singer's pleasant voice is like having an aversion to ice cream. Where's the irritant? Songs like Have You Never Been Mellow hardly excite one to violent dislike emotional or otherwise. Her appeal, as one reviewer put it, is wholesome, rosy-cheeked fun fun fun. It's enough to make decadence passe. But then there's Loretta Lynn's theory why people attack the famous. In her case, a woman attacked her with a knife at a recent concert, cutting off her dress. I was nominated for one of the most admired women in the world, the raven-haired singer relates. So if you're considered one of the 10 most admired women, you also have to be one of the most hated women. That's the logical thing.

Whatever, Olivia, Liv or Livvy to friends did tick off a bunch of Nashville musicians when the Country Music Association voted her female vocalist of the year in 1974. The traditionalist musicians felt it a slap in the face. This middle-class, Down Under woman even admitted that she didn't even know it (country music) was a separate entity from any other kind of music. And this was after her version of Dylan's If Not For You became an international hit in 1972, a song with pedal steel guitar! If she paid her dues at all, it was in pounds and shillings, not in honky tonks booze and pain.

We didn't want somebody out of another field coming in and taking away what we've worked so hard for, groused Johnny Paycheck, Olivia Newton-John couldn't drawl with a mouthful of biscuits, complained the Nashville Tennessean. Before the brouhaha subsided, a group of traditionalists formed an association to keep the country in the music and the pop music Huns outside the Nashville city limits. Calling itself Association of Country Entertainers, the association included such artists as Dolly Parton, Hank Snow, Barbara Mandrell, Roy Clark, Merle Haggard. Ironically Parton and Snow have since changed musical direction toward pop. Unlike some of the people in her songs Olivia is not exactly crying her eyes out over the hostility, most of it now past. Millions of people buy her albums - teenage boys, middle-age housewives geriatrics. So why worry?

To the vast pop audience that regards country music about as appetizing as Limburger cheese, Olivia is a reassuring Velveeta. And furthermore who cares if she can't drawl. So what if she might have to hold her nose to get out a twang? She's America's adopted musical daughter. Any doubts, just check her birthright, all those network TV specials. Besides, I've never claimed to be a country singer, the 28-year old singer says You have to be born in that background I simply love country music and its straightforwardness. And since my records have also sold well outside of the country audience, it seems to me that we're broadening the acceptance of country music.

I wasn't out to do anybody out of an award. I didn't put myself up for it. Even though there was a lot of resistance from the old school of country the twangers and all, I think I've done them a favor. My music's opened the doors for a lot of people who've never listened to country before. They're now listening to standard type country singers. Although she may have never consciously tried for a country audience, some Nashville insiders claim Miss Newton-John's first American hit, Let Be There, was deliberately released as a country single by powerful country music publisher Al Gallico.

The reason: Galilee has clout with country disc jockeys and the chartmakers, and it's easier to break a new act on the country charts than the pop ones. Olivia remembers the song did nothing in England, did nothing in pop. We came out here and my producers said they were re-releasing it country and I didn't know what they were talking about. The publisher rang me up about three weeks later and said, 'listen, this is going to be a country hit' and I didn't knew what that meant. Let Me Be There showed success on the country charts and was picked up by pop radio stations several weeks later. Since then all her singles have made both country and the more lucrative pop playlists.

But her early ignorance of the finer points of American music should be overlooked. After all, she did grow up bouncing on the knee of her Nobel Prize winning grandfather, Max Born, worlds removed from the Grand Ole Opry. Olivia was born in Cambridge, England, and moved with her family to Melbourne, Australia, five years later. Her father, a language professor, took over as master of Ormond College. Her dad had considered becoming an opera singer and was an early musical influence on his second daughter. He didn't think he was quite good enough, Olivia says. Actually he was. He has a beautiful voice, and he had an offer to go and train with one of the top bass-baritones in Italy. When I was a kid, I always heard classical music playing full blast around the house. It's funny, but I can't listen to classical music today because I get really depressed, really sad. I think I must relate that music to my father, and I don't see him much these days he and my mother are divorced.

Other musical influences were Joan Baez, Ray Charles, Nina Simone and Dionne Warwick. Australia didn't have much music of its own, so we'd listen to the Americans, she points out. I think l had the intelligence to get an arts degree in school, but I didn't apply myself at all. Probably I was subconsciously rebelling against the whole academia thing. My sister and I both dropped out of school at 15; she went into acting. She was the first black sheep. Then I went into singing at 15. By this time my parents weren't shocked - just disappointed that I didn't get a degree in case it all fell through. She started singing with friends in coffee houses.

Her good looks landed her on a daytime TV show, Lovely Livvy aimed at housewives and pre schoolers it was typical morning fare - games, prizes and giveaways, with the necessary screaming and shouting. Then she won a singing contest. The prize - a trip to England. Olivia collected the trip two years later, arriving in England just before her 17th birthday. She started working on her own and later hooked up with an Australian girl friend. They toured Europe, Army bases and all the sleazy clubs around England. Then I joined a group called Toomorrow which was a disaster,/ Newton-John relates. It was three guys and me, and we were going to he the new Monkees so they thought. We did a full-length feature film, and it just all fell apart.

After two years of Tomorrow, she split on her own, and got a break: she appeared on TV shows hosted by Cliff Richard, the British equivalent of Pat Boone. In 1971 came her hit, If Not For You, followed by another, Banks of the Ohio, which was given airplay by Ralph Emery on Nashville's WSM Radio. The rest, as they say, is history: platinum albums, international acclaim, Las Vegas engagements, a $450,000 home in Malibu, California and more than 2,000 fan letters a month.

For the last few years, Olivia has been linked romantically with Lee Kramer, a one-time shoe importer who helped manage her career until it became too big a task. The possibility of their marrying frightens her. She remarked to writer Cliff Terry last fall: I wouldn't rule out marriage completely, because you never know, but right now it's really not a necessity for me. I don't want to have children yet and I don't know if I would. I'd have to devote time to them and not be flitting off somewhere. Some people have kids and spend 30 days in a row on the road and do it all well, but I wouldn't want to. Also, I've gotten a bit selfish. I want to see a lot and do a lot more things - things I haven't explored yet, like making a film if the right script appears. I'm also finally interested in American politics, because I'm concerned, as everyone should be, with the way things are going. I've been a bit of an ostrich in the past, just leaving it to everyone else. I think that's what's happened to England people haven't been aware enough, and they're getting into trouble now.

One of her political concerns now is animal care and the preservation of endangered species. Her interest stems from her childhood dream of becoming a veterinarian. She houses one cat, four dogs and five horses at her Malibu home. Although she and Lee Kramer have lived a low-profile life in Los Angeles, they were the subject several months ago of the gossip press, which reported that the two had split, with Olivia nursing her heartache in Hawaii. Kramer has acknowledged an end to their business relationship. He said it was difficult to close the door on business matters when the two were home. Or as he explained to Rolling Stone: I live, sleep, eat, everything else, Olivia.... The most important thing is her and me and whatever future we have together.