RIP Olivia Newton John

Olivia was a huge artist in the soundtrack of my grade school days. Even before every other kid at St. Matthew’s got the Grease soundtrack as a gift, she was a staple of AM radio via WLS (Chicago) with her Soft Rock hits. The glamorized (and sanitized) Fifties® flick just made her a bigger star alongside John Travolta.

Two years later came Xanadu which was the soundtrack my mother played to death in our house! Thanks to Mom, it took me about a decade before I could listen to ELO again; it wasn’t Jeff Lynne’s best work. I could be wrong but I think Xanadu was a flop so it lives on as a cult flick for its pure cheese. To me, I felt the people producing it were trying too hard, believing that Gene Kelly’s fanbase still went to the movies in 1980.

Olivia dodged the fallout of the movie’s failure by hitching her wagon to the early Eighties fitness craze mostly attributed to Jane Fonda with her hit single and album Physical. The song gave a boost to numerous mediocre comedians as they used it as their lazy punchline for a year and then had to wait for Joey Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher’s murder conspiracy. How I cringed when Mork & Mindy referenced it for a sexual innuendo.

Then somebody in Hollywood went against all good advice by having Olivia re-team up with John Travolta in Two of a Kind. By now it was 1983. Travolta’s fame was waning because he couldn’t shake off his association with Disco from Saturday Night Fever although he did briefly with Urban Cowboy; this success only made him more uncool to Generation X and younger Boomers (aka Generation Jones). My brother saw Two, said it was pretty abysmal.

Her 1985 comeback Soul Kiss embodied all the excesses of production for that big-haired decade. Afterwards I wouldn’t say Olivia disappeared, more like she slowly faded away into Adult Contemporary and semi-retirement with a couple more releases in the Eighties and Nineties. Obviously, we all know cancer was another factor in slowing down her ability to keep performing. I am glad she defeated the illness as long as she could.

Thanks for everything Olivia. My previous negative-sounding comments are of my past thoughts. I had a major reconciliation with the Seventies by ignoring FM radio for a long time so I am truly going to miss you, especially those memories of coming home from St. Agnes and finding my mom jamming to Xanadu.

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