Olivia (14 page)

Olivia’s introduction to California had been less than friendly. During her first night in Los Angeles, at the Westwood Marquee hotel, she heard gunshots in the street below. But she was soon able to rent a house in Trancas, around half an hour from Malibu, an area much favoured by Hollywood stars. Eventually the financial rewards accruing from her massive record sales enabled Olivia to splash out $400,000 on a rambling ranch-style house set in four acres in the Malibu mountains, which offered glimpses of the Pacific Ocean. There she lost no time in surrounding herself with the kind of large menagerie of pets she had always dreamed about, including five horses, an Irish setter, a cat and three Great Danes, one of whom she had taken pity on after it was discovered locked in a house where it had spent a week without food or water.

Olivia liked to exercise and groom the horses herself and be involved with the animals as much as possible. But eventually she found it necessary to hire a girl to come in six days a week to look after the horses. It was no surprise when the singer’s accountant pointed out to his client that she was spending more money on caring for her animals than on anything else. Olivia felt it was worth it. Most mornings, sometimes even before dawn, she could be found running along the beach with her dogs bounding along beside her, and whenever she was home she tried to find time to ride out for a couple of hours in the hills behind her house. Her superstar status even meant that when she was doing shows in Las Vegas, she could lease a jet to fly back home to her Malibu base each day to go riding.

While Olivia was finding personal contentment in her new surroundings, her fortunes as a singer and recording artist continued to soar. America’s top three music publications,
Billboard
,
Record Mirror
and
Cash Box
, all listed her as the best-selling female album artist of 1975. She had scaled a peak she had never dreamed possible.

Chapter 7

Country Matters

COUNTRY SINGER JOHNNY PAYCHECK AFTER OLIVIA WAS VOTED FEMALE VOCALIST OF THE YEAR, 1974, BY THE COUNTRY MUSIC ASSOCIATION

 

 

EVER SINCE THE mid-1950s, Nashville, Tennessee has been the home of country music, and it’s a town that prides itself on being one of the friendliest in the United States.

The first million-selling country song was released as long ago as 1927, and Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame proudly projects the down-home, folksy, musical image of real country music: often impoverished, rurally raised musicians sitting on the back porch guitar-picking and singing sad songs, surrounded by family members who are steeped in the traditions of country living and will never forget their humble roots or battling through the hard times.

Nashville has always insisted country music is a distinctly American art form and it prefers its country music heroes and heroines, such as Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, to have experienced the rough, harsher side of life before finding success and fame. The legendary Hank was born with a spine defect which was aggravated when he was thrown from a horse at the age of seventeen, and he died a lonely death from heart failure at the desperately young age of twenty-nine in the back of a taxi, with only a bottle of whisky for company, on the way to a gig. Dolly Parton is one of twelve children born to farmers who were so poor they had to pay the doctor in corn meal to attend the birth of their fourth child. Loretta Lynn, a one-quarter Cherokee coal-miner’s daughter, was raised in a shack during the Depression and married a serviceman at the age of thirteen.

With such struggles chronicled for everyone in Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame, it’s no wonder that the town’s traditionalists were suspicious of Olivia Newton-John when she burst on to their music scene, not from the Appalachian mountains but from Melbourne via Wales, Cambridge and a smart house in London. ‘Appalachia? I’ve never heard of it,’ Olivia would respond to early interviewers quizzing her about her roots. ‘I sing easy listening, middle-of-the-road music . . . I sing new songs, old songs, and country songs. I didn’t think I would be considered a country singer. I was just hoping for a hit record, no matter what it was.’

Nashville had been given an early taste of Olivia the country singer when a well-known local DJ called Ralph Emery had given her version of ‘If Not For You’ an airing on his WSM show. But if the folks in Tennessee were a little surprised to find Olivia now being hailed as a country artiste, no one was more amazed than Olivia herself. ‘I didn’t realise I was a country singer,’ she said, ‘until I got a phone call from my publisher in America. He called me up one day and said: “You know you have a country and western hit and you should really come over here.” I didn’t know what that was. In the UK, the charts were all the same, but I discovered there was a whole new world of country music.’

The first sounds of discontent from Nashville diehards about Olivia’s C-and-W credentials were heard when she won a Grammy award for the Best Country Vocal Performance, Female, for ‘Let Me Be There’ in 1973. The Grammys are music’s equivalent of the Oscars. For Olivia to win the 1973 award over Nashville’s established female stars, women like Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette and Lynn Anderson, was an extraordinary and unexpected triumph.

Her success was vindication for MCA, Olivia’s US record company, who deliberately marketed ‘Let Me Be There’ as a country-flavoured record. Advertisements for the single in the trade press featured Olivia, photographed very simply and sporting a sunny smile, in a wood. Above it, the blurb proclaimed: ‘Olivia Newton-John lives in the country in England and sings for the country in America and is as pretty as her newest single.’

The purists could hardly disagree with Olivia’s being hailed as pretty as John Rostill’s melody that had won her the award, but it rankled with them that she had come to prominence in America’s country music circles via England by way of Australia and that she had never in her life strummed a guitar in an American honky-tonk bar or set foot in a Nashville recording studio, much less the Grand Ole Opry.

‘It’s probably the first time an English person won an award over Nashville people,’ Olivia innocently acknowledged on receiving her Grammy award, little realising that there was deep consternation in some quarters over what she intended as a light-hearted rather than a loaded observation. The significance of such a truthfully accurate remark was too much to stomach for some country traditionalists. And yet, by pipping Nashville’s finest, the reality was that Olivia had nothing to apologise for.

While country music may be regarded in some circles as a distinctly American art form, aficionado of the genre Peter Doggett says, in his introduction to
The Guinness Who’s Who Of Country Music
: ‘Like the nation which spawned it, country music is deep and wide. It can encompass the hillbilly laments of Hank Williams, the honeyed velvet tones of Jim Reeves, the feminism of k.d. lang, the cowboy ballads of Gene Autrey, the mountain music of Bill Monroe, the energetic showmanship of Garth Brooks, the outlaw imagery of Waylon Jennings, the honky tonk anthems of Lefty Frizzell, the traditional Irish songs of Daniel O’Donnell and the infectious mimicry of The Rolling Stones.’

MCA clearly had no doubts about Olivia’s credentials as a country star. And in August 1974, just when she was topping the US charts with ‘I Honestly Love You’, a special luncheon was held in her honour in Nashville by MCA’s vice-president Owen Bradley. It gave Olivia the chance to explain that she had rescheduled a stateside concert tour to make a stopover in Nashville specifically to show her gratitude to the many people there who had fostered her country music success.

‘In Tennessee they told me that unless you’re born and bred in Nashville, it’s usually impossible to be accepted as a country artist and that I should realise how lucky I was,’ she said. ‘Country fans are much more loyal than pop fans.’

The Nashville visit was a genuine gesture of thanks by Olivia, but it didn’t entirely stop the debate as to whether she qualified as a true country singer. Which explains, in its own way, several derogatory stories about Olivia that did the rounds of Music Town thanks to mischief makers: how, upon hearing a record by Hank Williams for the first time, she had allegedly expressed a desire to meet him (Hank died in 1953); and how, when informed she had a country hit on her hands with ‘Let Me Be There’, she had to ask for an explanation of what country music really was.

She was by no means the first singer to blur the boundaries between country and pop. But the issue came to a head in startling fashion when the Country Music Association (CMA) controversially voted Olivia the 1974 Female Vocalist of the Year. The other nominees included Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Anne Murray and Tanya Tucker, four popular, bona fide, country music queens, and there were howls of protest about Olivia’s win from various sections of the Nashville music fraternity and from diehard country fans alike.

As with her Grammy award, it was hardly Olivia’s fault she had won. The annual CMA awards were then, as now, decided by their members, who include singers, musicians, record company officials, promoters, agents and broadcasters. And the awards themselves are given not to honour long-term service to the genre but to acknowledge the previous year’s most popular country songs and singers.

By this yardstick Olivia was a worthy winner and yet, despite Nashville heavyweight Loretta Lynn, who also won an award that year, declaring she was glad someone new had come along, Olivia’s award still caused discontent and uproar. ‘Some of them weren’t too thrilled about this impostor, this outsider, this Australian person from England,’ Olivia said with understatement. ‘They couldn’t quite figure me out.’

The Tennessean
, the state’s primary daily newspaper, firmly stuck the knife in by declaring that Olivia couldn’t drawl ‘with a mouthful of biscuits’. Another critic called her ‘as country as a kangaroo’. The basic objection was that Olivia lacked the traditional roots of a country singer. The purists felt she hadn’t paid her hillbilly dues and they were horrified that she had scooped prestigious awards for records that bore little resemblance to the traditions of Hank Williams or Bill Monroe. Olivia’s pop-flavoured hits had no place in country music, the traditionalists argued; they cited country stalwart Waylon Jennings, who famously said: ‘I couldn’t go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers.’

Olivia wasn’t, in fact, at the CMA awards ceremony when she was named Female Vocalist of the Year. She was back in England for some television performances and had pre-taped an acceptance speech in case she won. She was largely oblivious to all the fuss that ensued and only learned about the controversy much later on. She therefore had no chance to speak up for herself when the commotion was at its height.

The debate over Olivia’s country qualifications raged so heatedly in Nashville’s tree-lined streets, known as Music Row, that it led to a serious split among the members of the Country Music Association, an organisation that had been solidly united since its formation in 1957. A few days after the announcement of Olivia’s contentious award, an angry protest group of singers, musicians, songwriters and studio officials gathered at the home of traditional country music greats Jack Jones and Tammy Wynette, then Nashville’s most celebrated married couple, to determine what to do about Olivia and other pop-influenced songs muscling in on their country territory.

Among the angry protesters pledging their solidarity were more than twenty leading country singers, including Dolly Parton, Johnny Paycheck, Porter Wagoner, Jim Ed Brown, Dottie West, Bill Anderson, Faron Young, Mel Tillis, Conway Twitty and Barbara Mandrell, established performers all. Johnny Paycheck, born Donald Eugene Lytle, and a man for whom trouble was a close companion for much of his life, summed up the injustices they all felt by saying of Olivia: ‘We don’t want somebody out of another field coming in here and taking away what we’ve worked so hard for.’

The outcome of the meeting at George and Tammy’s home was the formation of a breakaway country solidarity movement, called the Association of Country Entertainers (ACE), dedicated to ‘preserving and recognising the basic and traditional country singers’. ACE’s aim was to challenge the establishment’s intention to modernise the country music industry, and the new organisation also demanded valid representation of traditional artistes on the CMA’s board of directors and on the playlists of country radio stations.

Such an outcry could have done irreparable harm to Olivia’s standing in America, but the breakaway group soon found themselves overtaken by changing trends, popular opinion and commercial values. ACE turned out to be short-lived, and eventually the group broke up when founding members such as Dolly Parton went off to Hollywood to become movie stars. ‘I’m not gonna leave the country,’ Dolly assured her fans. ‘I’d just like to take it with me wherever I go.’

Olivia was understandably hurt when she eventually found out about the furore she had unwittingly caused. She always wanted to do the right thing and was upset that she was perceived as a Nashville transgressor. ‘I feel like I was a scapegoat in the whole thing for some angry local artistes who weren’t winning any awards,’ she said. ‘I’ve never claimed to be a country singer. To call yourself that, you’d have to be born into that background. I simply love country music and its straightforwardness. And since the records have also sold well outside the country audience, it seems to me that we’re broadening the acceptance for country music.’

Olivia stressed: ‘I wasn’t out to do anybody out of an award. I didn’t put myself up for it.’ She also pointed out that popular music in the UK was not categorised as either pop or country in the way it is in America. All she had done was simply set out to make the best records she could.