JOHN TRAVOLTA AND OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN – "Summer Nights"

One mark below my prediction once again. I thought the big lift and breakdown at the end might give this a n edge over YTOTIW somehow.

“Louis St. Louis…oh no, we gotta go…”

Apart from “Greased Lightning,” “Summer Nights” was the only hit single from the Grease soundtrack to be taken directly from the original stage show. There is a logic to this, in that songs like “Look At Me (I’m Sandra Dee)” or “Freddy My Love” were never likely to go platinum on their own. However, “Summer Nights” is far more audibly in the tradition of the Broadway musical than “You’re The One That I Want” and therefore represents a step backwards – literally, since it appears near the beginning of the film.

If American Graffiti reinterpreted The Fifties as pre-Vietnam rite of passage, and Happy Days converted that into Ozzie and Harriet Nelson with Attitude, then Grease represents The Fifties (though I think 1960 or 1961 to be a more realistic setting, given the show’s general Frankie Avalonism) as filtered through Rocky Horror camp; in the movie, the likes of Eve Arden and Avalon himself make no pretence to taking it at all seriously, but the likelihood that intentional camp is an oxymoron (pace Sontag) confines natural enjoyment to a certain degree.

“Summer Nights” is, nonetheless, a fine pop single in itself – a double ensemble piece which derives directly in mode and practice from West Side Story (the long “Tonight” sequence in particular, which cuts between the various factions involved). Danny and Sandy have had some kind of a summer, and it may have come to something; but now they are back at school – at this stage, unbeknownst to either, the same school – and are describing their experience; Olivia, demure and bright-eyed, to a group of slightly cynical girls (“’Cause he sounds like a drag”), and Travolta to a veritable Boystown Gang of leather-clad chaps. The song cuts between each perspective and perhaps could even qualify as Baudrillardian pop, with stories and subtexts true only in the eye of the narrator and their audience – Travolta leerily boasts “I saved her life – she nearly drowned!” while Olivia smiles, “He showed off – splashing around” (a venerable device in musicals and this won’t be the last that we see it on Popular).

As the song progresses and escalates – key changes, more intense choral harmonies and counterpoints – we end up listening to two different stories entirely; Travolta says he “took her bowling in the arcade,” Olivia counters “We went strolling, drank lemonade”; Travolta giddily swoons, “We made out under the dock,” Olivia claims “We stayed out ‘til ten o’clock.” The responses also differ; the girls ask “Was it love at first sight?” while the boys query “Did she put up a fight?”

In the end, it doesn’t really matter since they are individually so happy; Sandy’s story is obviously far more credible, but her remark of “He was sweet – just turned eighteen” tells us that even Danny’s fake braggadocio is endearing – those eyes, that smile of Travolta’s, encapsulate super-innocence, as in “not guilty your honour.” The song slows down to its climax as the summer ends and they separately harmonise “Summer dreams, ripped at the seams” – the inverse of “Sealed With A Kiss”’s doom – but there is not much room for grieving as they simultaneously breathe a post-coital “Ah” before the falsetto “NI-HIGHTS!” ending, sung with a sense of awe that is triumphantly virginal. The single stayed at number one for seven weeks – the sixteen weeks which Travolta and Newton-John spent together at the top in 1978 was the longest spell spent by a single act at number one in any given year since the Beatles in 1963 – and little wonder; this was essentially Donny and Marie with a tinge of carnal punctum.

Number Two Watch: Rose Royce’s divine “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” (2 weeks), Boney M’s hellish “Ra-Ra-Rasputin” (2 weeks) and Travolta keeping himself off number one with “Sandy” (1 week).

A good old-fashioned show-tune. Oddly enough, both of its time and an anachronism; by this time I don’t think young audiences would have been rushing to the stage show. This is another one that I like but can’t get excited about.

What a shame Rose Royce never made number one. Both Love Don’t Live Here Any More and especially (for me) Wishing On A Star (which is one of my real toe-curlers) would have graced Popular. Forget the Commodores; that’s soft soul!

Wow, did this really not top the charts until late September? A strange realisation, as this is forever linked in my mind with the summer of 1978: for me, a brief window of connection to kids of my own age (and slightly below) in the North Notts village where I spent most of the school holidays. My younger step-sisters, still quite new to the place, availed themselves of me as a social conduit for as long as it took for them to nab a) boyfriends and b) a social life, after which the power structures shifted and I returned to the safety of bedroom-bound solitude.

But for those couple of months of temporary social integration (shooting the breeze in the adventure playground, singing “Jilted John” with the village metal band down the youth club), when I almost felt like a normal teenager, doing normal teenage things, Grease loomed large (I drew the line at Kiss and sodding “Doctor Doctor” by sodding UFO), and that “Summer Nights” video on the telly felt like a proper, participative event. (Hell, we even laughed at the Little and Large parody.)

As such, I vastly prefer it over “You’re The One That I Want”, for all the reasons listed above. A clever, witty succession of Good Bits piled upon Good Bits, with a delightfully ridiculous ending: Travolta’s campy “aoh”, and the massed nose-pinching which accompanied the almost Gibb-like “naaa-haaaats”.

The first half of 1978 was horrible, the last quarter of 1978 was worse, and my timing is obviously totally skew-whiff (late September, really?), but this gets a cheerful 8, for jollying me up just when it was needed.

(last line of the post, rather than the last line of the song, which I think Pete nails in exactly they way they didn’t)

It’s a testament to the tune and the performance that it can shovel so much backstory into your brain without making it feel like hard work. Not a word is wasted. Plus, as DJP has indicated, by making it a duet, you immediately apprehend the disparity of innocence between Danny Zuko and Sandra Dee: “We made out under the dock/We stayed out ’till ten o’clock.” I love it when lyrics cover a lot of ground without breaking into a sweat. The best for that surely has to be The Hollies’ Bus Stop: “Bus stop, wet day, she’s there, I say/Please share my umbrella/Bus stop, bus goes, she stays, love grows/Under my umbrella.” God, just typing in those words elicits a tingle. Shame it only got to number two, but anyway, I’m digressing…

DJP #3 – it can’t be any later than 1960 because of the gag at the end where the Principal is giving her farewell speech and saying “among you young men there may be a Joe DiMaggio, a President Eisenhower, or even a Vice-President Nixon”. Which character did they cut to when she said “Nixon”?

With you on Rose Royce, Rosie (that’s easier to type than say…)

thevisitor #15 – one couplet that covers a lot of ground, from around this time – The Jam’s “Billy Hunt”: “No-one pushes Billy Hunt around / Well they do, but not for long”.

I think Grease is more palatable as its singles than as a musical. Its ascent to the top (I’d forgotten than C4 poll…) is depressing, when you think that the 1970s was an era where the musical – in the hands of Stephen Sondheim, Kander & Ebb, Michael Bennett, and many others – was at its richest, most innovative, most artistically complex. It was the era after the ‘golden age’ where the musical-as-pleasure-machine was perfected and before the era of the megamusical or musical-as-money-machine; for a brief moment, the musical became one of the most creatively exciting arenas to work, and all the usual criticisms of the musical (that it is formally banal, sexually repressive, socially conservative, structurally predictable and so on) were being disproved every week on Broadway. And plum in the middle of all that experimentation came Grease: starting life as an overblown am dram production, it went off-Broadway in a revised version, and thence to Broadway where it ran for almost eight years. There are affectionately satirical elements and in the book (more than in the numbers) there’s some witty pastiche of the late 50s era, at least through its many mediations on TV. It bought into a moment of 50s nostalgia which included American Graffitti and of course Happy Days.

But it’s terribly thin. Most of the songs miss their genre very badly, or do that unctuous thing of mixing rock with showtunes and so ending up with bastardized versions of both. Most of all, though, in its historical place, it’s thumbing its nose, intentionally or not, to everything else happening in musical theatre. In place of intelligently integrated music, we get dangling loose ends like Freddy My Love. In place of plot, we get winking cliché. In place of characterisation, we have off-the-peg familiars. It’s the BritPop of musical theatre.

The film is better loved than the stage show, not only because it has two hits that aren’t in the theatre piece, but also because it is pretty much the only satisfyingly realized musical film that Hollywood managed to produce between Hello Dolly! – which pretty much ended the classic run of golden age film musicals in 1969 – and, well take your pick… Chicago? 23 years later? The performances hit that level of unreality and archness quite well; has John Travolta ever done anything more roguishly camp – on screen, anyway – than the Greased Lightning sequence from the movie? But I think the film occupies a beloved place because it was defiantly un-smart at a time when the musical was getting the smarts bigtime. There was never a movie of Company, or Follies, alas, and if they’d pulled either of those off, things might have been different. But then, it’s hard to compete with cliché: as Sondheim once said, if the audience walks out whistling the tunes, they could have walked in whistling the tunes. Everything about Grease is predictable; that’s its charm, but that’s why I find it very hard to love.

Compare it with its British near-contemporary, the Rocky Horror Show, which is superficially doing some of the same things as Grease: but it does so with so much more wit, daring, bravado, and does genuinely clever and witty things with the music that makes anything from Grease seem lumpen and heavy-handed by comparison.

I’m aware that this sounds very snooty and mealy-mouthed, and I actually like this and the last single from the movie, but as a whole the Grease phenomenon seems to me to stand for defiant uninventiveness.

Thanks Pete, you make realy interesting points. You’re right, of course, that Grease is one of the few gateway musicals (it’s the free wrap of heroin at the school gates) and yes, if it encourages people to explore the range of the musical, well why not? And, of course, Sondheim is certainly not to everyone’s taste (at least, after Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which cleverly manages to be clever and dumb at the same time). You wouldn’t inspire a lifetime of theatregoing by taking an eight-year-old to Pacific Overtures, I fancy.

But it’s a teen-gateway musical partly because musicals never really sought that teenage audience before. There were attempts at rock/musical crossovers in the sixties, and Hair’s the most famous example, but also somewhat worthy efforts like Ooh My Soul (Othello – the soul musical anyone?). Before that the industry didn’t care about or notice teenagers, because well almost no one did. So the way of getting the kids into theatres is through safe rock-lite musicals. I suppose I still think that Grease is largely liked by people who never cared very much for rock ‘n’ roll. It’s somewhat like the recent-ish wave of Hip Hop musicals (The Bomb-Itty of Errors, Seven, etc.) which I find abhorrent, mainly because they seem to be aimed at an audience who thinks hip hop would be much nicer if only it were performed by well spoken musical theatre graduates.

And then I wonder, is it much of a gateway musical? Its position, as Billy has reminded us, at the top of C4’s 100 Greatest Musicals suggests it isn’t the gateway but the end of the road for most people.

You’re quite right to pick me up on the BritPop aside. I liked an awful lot of BritPop (more than I’m prepared, now, to admit) but I do also see that there’s a blokeish element that said, all this clever-clever ambient dance music shit is for women and poofs, let’s get guitars back in. And, without perhaps the same overt sexual politics, something of the same is at work in Grease. Historically, only, of course, and I don’t mean to say it currently functions in the same way. When did Sondheim last write a musical? Okay, I’ve just checked and it’s 2003.

Disney, of course, that’s where the musical went, though it killed its musicals with bad animation (Robin Hood is shocking to watch now) and only had its proper creative rebirth late into the eighties.

There are at least six number ones deriving from musicals to come in the next ten years but, ouch, bunny, that really hurt!

Re. Othello The Musical: I think you meant Catch My Soul. It was filmed in ’73 with Richie Havens, Tony Joe White and others and directed by – of all people – Patrick McGoohan, although he’s subsequently disowned it since he says Jack Good took the film out of his hands and “mucked” (sic) it up. I’d still like to see it though.

I haven’t listened to songs from Grease for ages, but is this the one where Travolta makes a very camp sound somewhere between ‘ooh’ and ‘ew’ towards the end? That always amused me, but I can’t place it in the context of a song now.

I never cared much for this for some reasons Pete outlines -the overegged pudding of the contrasts and the backing accents, and that horribly sung last word.

*cough*
See #9 above, para 3!
*cough*

(Wanders off, muttering… tsk, don’t know why I bother…)

“Grease is largely liked by people who never cared very much for rock ‘n’ roll” – thanks Dan, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. At least, this is why I couldn’t ever stomach it. Same as Austin Powers: camp and ill-informed under the guise of loving tribute.

Also, like Austin Powers, Grease is an example of a film whose supporters’ positive spin hardly extends beyond “It’s fun! Come on! Get a life”. The Guardian letters page had a similar reaction to Peter Bradshaw’s very amusing review of Mamma Mia! I’d like to think I’d never get close to using this line. Not even in defence of Mouldy Old Dough.

I agree Pete, Hairspray works better because it really is a loving tribute, which shows that camp isn’t destructive of the past by definition. It also features some cracking songs, contemporary ones, which I’d never heard before (I Wish I Were A Princess, Nothing Takes The Place Of You).

I may be unique for someone of my age and gender in that I have never seen Grease.

Can I just say, therefore, how much I enjoyed the dialogue between Dan and Pete above. Lots to think about there.

(I’m an old fashioned goil. I loved “Hello Dolly!”.

I enjoy this record more now than I did at the time (because of the under the dock/10 o’clock and arcade/lemonade alt testimonies), and like others, I’m surprised by how late in the summer/early autumn this hit the top. I had a long vacation job as a filing clerk in the solicitors’ office where I subsequently qualified, and I have a sort of false memory syndrome that myself and the typists were listening to this at teabreak time all summer. Weird.

Here seems appropriate to say farewell to Jeff Conaway (Kenickie), who died last Friday (27th). Even Scientology couldn’t save him.

Cynics corner here it seems: there’s a reason why so many people voted it #1 in that Channel 4 poll. Because it captures the spirit of youth and colour we all wish we’d had when we were that age.

@#19 – yes, snooty and meal-mouthed, which sums up most of the comments I’m afraid.

Grease was back in cinemas again last year to packed audiences, so it must have done something right.

ABBA “Samir Night City” surely.

So farewell then, Sid Caesar aka Coach Calhoun. Although as Danny Baker tweeted, headlining an obit for Sid Caesar with Grease is a bit like headlining Ringo Starr’s eventual obituary with “Voice of Thomas the Tank Engine dies”. Which no doubt somebody will.