Country Music - Waiting for the right vehicle
A small MCA Records luncheon honoring Olivia Newton-John a few weeks ago was held rather fittingly at Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, a place in which traditional country music fans would feel about as comfortable as nudists in the Klondike. Miss. Newton-John herself didn’t seem at particularly comfortable there, at the luncheon, anyway. The function was an excuse for record salesmen, disc jockeys and advertising and media people to have their pictures taken with her. It plainly wasn’t the most fun she’d ever had, but whenever a camera flashed she smiled that captivating smile.
“I tell you, she’s the prettiest woman I ever saw,” solemnly attested one record man. “She reminds me Of mythology of Helen of Troy and-the face that launched a thousand ships,” her face gets no bad review. The only criticism she has received of her voice (too thin) and (too bland), and sometimes her interviews, characterized by such exchanges as this at the Ritz: we expect you to have your own TV series A. I’ve been offered a TV series, but I didn’t want to do it because I think it’s very hard to maintain a high standard on a weekly basis. I prefer to do specials where I can spend time on them and make sure they’re going to be right.
Q. What about movies? A. I’ve been offered a lot of things, but nothing that was right for me. So until it comes along, I’m still waiting.
Q. Is it a dramatic role you’re looking for? A. Yes. I’d like to do a musical, but they don’t seem to be making many of those
Q. What would you consider “right” for you? A. I don’t know. It’s like a song - I’ll know it when I read it, I guess. You know, it’ll feel right to me.
The guarded quality of her conversation may be due to the reserve of an outlander still treading unfamiliar ground; she is, after all, an English-born, Australian-reared daughter of a professor who has lived in the United States only a couple of years. The adjustment she has faced is hinted at by a response she made to another question that afternoon. “Before coming to America, I never knew anything about politics,” she said. “But living in America, you have to. It’s on the media all the time. You can’t help but learn about it.”
(She has no interest in supporting any candidates, she added; she is interested only in “environmental problems” and the way politicians deal with them.)
It has been nearly three years since her controversial election as the Country Music Association’s female vocalist of the year in 1974, but she remains to traditional fans of Country music at least a symbol of the uneasiness between traditional country music and its pop, progressive hybrids. She was as surprised as traditional country fans, she says, when country radio stations started playing her records.
“My records started sort of quietly in England but finally took off here because I was more into country stuff, which wasn’t big in England then, although it is now,” she said, “I was never aware that in America country was such a different category from other kinds of music When they released ‘Let Me There’ in America, and then a they were ‘re-releasing it country didn’t know what they were talking about.”
Her latest album was recorded Los Angeles, and the one before that in Nashville. She says protests that arose from some traditional country stars over her winning of the country music award have left her with no bad taste in her mouth for Nashville. “I think it’s all pretty much forgotten, although every time I do an interview I’m asked about it,” she says “I was, in a way, a scapegoat because I was, like, the first (pop performer to win a country award). But (the protests) came from such a minority of people in the business who were a little envious and upset. “I understand their feelings, because to hard-core country people it looked like a threat. But actually was the opening of new things to them.”
“They have a chance of having hit on the pop charts themselves. And people who might’ve never listened to country before may be listening to more of it today because they might’ve heard something I did that they liked.” She shrugged and smiled that captivating smile. “In a way,” she said, “I really think it’s kind of nice to have been the first.”