OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN AND JOHN TRAVOLTA – “You’re The One That I Want”
I have never seen Grease. My cultural ignorance is becoming a bit of a theme in these entries, but here at least I had a reason: I hated it. I can’t remember when I started hating Grease, or why exactly – incomprehension and resentment, I’d imagine; it was very much music for kids a few years older than me, and in 1978 it was everywhere. I’m sure some of the five and six year olds of today will have an inchoate loathing of High School Musical, its obvious modern comparison point.
So it’s literally only in the last week that I’ve learned that Grease the musical predates the film by six years – forever in pop terms, especially where revivals are concerned. That the musical might have had sharper edges than the film’s smash singles reveal. That “You’re The One That I Want” comes at the end of the story, even! (Though I could have figured out from the promo clips what the story was – good girls gotta act bad to get bad boys to turn good.)
None of which would have mattered to me: I hated Grease. Even at my most pop-lovin’ it was a marker buoy for me – I will go this far and no further. I once walked off a wedding dancefloor in a drunken rage when the (marvellously shonky) “Grease Megamix” was played. I refused to acknowledge the pleasure it brought people. I turned my back on its craft. I looked down the list of No.1s when I started Popular, saw this one, and relished the thought of really slaughtering it.
And now….? I can’t work out why on earth I didn’t like it. It has the slight misfortune to boss the charts in the middle of a remarkable era for pop, but I was completely unaware of that when my distaste for the song formed. “You’re The One” is superbly put-together bubblegum which makes the best use it can of its leads’ varied talents – Newton-John’s finger-wagging briskness and Travolta’s ridiculous cartoon yelp. Marshalled by a bassline of unquenchable jauntiness and enough backing vocals to keep anyone happy, this is very much a song to join in with (it’s not as if Travolta’s raising the bar that high!). I may never be able to fully come around on it – even irrational hate sinks its hooks deep – but I can enjoy it now and I’m all the better for it: this is populism at its well-turned best.
6
Dogs, yes, their great lost single. I’m guessing its low profile on comps is because Pete Townshend is somehow embarrassed by it – maybe he thinks it lacks the gravitas of what followed (Tommy, Who’s Next)? Can’t think of another hit song that includes the word ‘buttocks’, either.
Wasn’t it blue-suited brief Bright New Future of Power Pop merchants The Pleasers who covered “The Kids Are Alright” in ’78?
Dogs? Blimey – not one of Townshend’s monuments for sure. The one truly bloody awful thing The Who ever did. All true geniuses, even tortured ones like Townshend, produce the odd turkey and Dogs was a Bernard Matthews Twizzler of a track. A real dog, in fact. I’m sure Pete and Roger have enough money between them to ensure that they never have to endure it ever again!
the who went through a particularly debilitating change-of-label shenanigans, didn’t they? hence the somewhat random nature of what constituted a best (“best we can get hold of”) and the re-recording stuff (which i’d forgotten but explains an argument i had with tim ellison on ilx abt the VERY variable qualoty of early who reecordings)
(can you say “a shenanigans”?)
Never trusted Meaty, Beaty, Big And Bouncy since most of the early songs there were Re-Recorded For Legal Reasons.
Forgive my scepticism DJP, but are you sure about this? (Google is not coming up with any supporting evidence.) Apart from the 7″ of “Squeeze Box”, MBB&B is the only Who record in my collection (I bought it around 75/76), and I’ve always taken the songs contained therein to be the definitive versions.
hence the somewhat random nature of what constituted a best (”best we can get hold of”)
Butbutbut! 12 of the 14 tracks were hit singles, the only additions being “Boris The Spider” and “The Kids Are Alright”… and “Dogs” is the only single to be omitted from the album.
No, it’s “a shenanigan” singular.
They had to re-record the early material because of long-standing disputes with Shel Talmy (which is also why the My Generation album only got a proper CD release a few years ago) but “Dogs” is essentially their “Popscene” except they’d like to forget it rather than punish the public for not buying it at the time.
i was hoping it work like “a shambles”
yeah i’m probably overstating it mike — my memory is that this late-70s double Gst Hits my sister had, which i think was released to accord with quadrophenia and was quite a big deal (gatefold with a bound-in booklet of memoriabilia and everything) didn’t overlap as much as you’d expect with MMB&B… but i may well be expanding the lack of overlap in my head (ie it may just have been that “kids” wasn’t on it) (“dogs” not on either): she cleared it out long ago
my mum was a who fan, rather unexpectedly (well, “fan” — she liked em, but she didn’t do anything like going to buy their records and such)
Re. MBBB: no, Townshend confirmed this in interviews at the time. The Who had to re-record “My Generation” etc. and tried to keep as close to the originals as possible but there are differences, not least caused by the half decade of experience that had gone in between.
Wow. This comes as such a shock, when you’ve spent 30+ years assuming that the re-recorded versions were the original versions.
(It’s surely the same “Substitute”, though? My parents had the original 7″, which I nicked and played to death in 75/76 – simultaneously with the album – and I never spotted any differences.)
It’s the same “Substitute” but everything before that, i.e. “I Can’t Explain,” “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere” etc. are remakes.
Anyway, ’78 was a key year for the Who; Keith checked out, Who Are You? was released and so was All Mod Cons… ;-)
I presume that double compilation would be The Story Of The Who. Which is a pretty weird selection, if this website is to be believed:
http://991.com/buy/productinformation.aspx?StockNumber=136401
My Mum had Meaty, Beaty etc. I used to walk past the hotel on that inner sleeve quite often, until it burned down.
The Story Of The Who, the one with the exploding pinball machine on the cover, featured longer versions of Magic Bus and I’m A Boy, very different to the single versions but probably recorded in the late 60s (anyone know?). Pretty sure MBB&B was deleted by the time it came out, or I’d probably have opted for the single disc with more hits…
Popscene bombed because it was all (willful, overplayed) attitude and no tune. The Who were already on a losing streak with I Can See For Miles only peaking at 10 (a relative failure) and The Who Sell Out doing very little business compared to their first 2 albums. So, Dogs and Magic Bus, their 2 ’68 singles, both made the Top 30 but did no more. Maybe wunnerful Radio One punished them after the openly pirate-worshipping Sell Out.
Also, Call Me Lightning was released as an early ’68 single in the rest of Europe, where Dogs would presumably have made little sense (and once Walthamstow goes it’ll sound like a relic here, too). Maybe that’s why it’s been skipped on so many comps?
“There was nothing in my life bigger than beer, ‘ceptin’ you little darlin’”
A tragicomic knees-up, Dogs deserves a better afterlife. Rosie, you’re too hard on it. So many hooks. There’s the melancholy (Townshend sung?) section that builds up to “we’re a happy couple you and me, with a greyhound on either knee”, the rickety singalong intro, and the climactic choral, minor chord cymbal-splash finale is heart-twisting stuff (“yes it’s yoooou, little darlin’!”).
Of course, if a cross between Heroes & Villains and The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery sounds bad on paper then it won’t tickle your fancy. But it’s much warmer, genuinely affectionate, and more loveable than Lazy Sunday. Or Popscene, for that matter.
Sorry for coming into this (compelling) thread so late. Here, for what it’s worth, are some thoughts.
#7 If you think “Grease hankers for a watered down fifties aesthetic which makes Happy Days look edgy” you should try being an empathetic parent to children who worship at the altar of High School Musical. My two girls like both HSM and Grease (which, I guess is better than them just liking the former) but there’s more musical meat on the bones of YTOTIW (one of the weaker songs on Grease, I reckon) than the mechanically-recovered autotuned dreck of HSM. (Also, don’t get me started on the latter film’s excess of self-obsessed “I-just-need-to-work-out-who-I-am” soliloquies – a far cry from the Grease teens who are actually Out There getting their hands dirty, rather than rehearsing what they’ll go on to say to their therapists when they’re old enough to have them).
Furthermore, I have to confess that the mere presence of this song in a film that was set in the late 50s/early 60s blinded me to the implausible genre-shift it represented. It only occurred to me a few years ago that it was a far more polished, muscular piece of pop than anything that could have appeared at the time. But because that didn’t bother me for so many years, it doesn’t particularly bother me now. It’s interesting (well, at least it is to me) that John Farrar, having written the song which transformed ONJ into a plausible object of desire, continued to write several ensuing hits which also fell into line with that perception.
From the Physical album, he penned (Landslide and Make A Move On Me). But the best song he wrote for her was A Little More Love, which – if I remember correctly – she premiered on Parkinson, and was eagerly awaited as her first post-Grease hit. Brilliant predatory guitar motif on the verses which comes back in halfway through the chorus – all the better for the fact that it’s slightly at odds with the desperation of the lyric and the urgency with which she sings it. Always thought that when RCA were vainly searching around for a song that Natalie Imbruglia could do – one that might possibly revive her flagging career after Torn – then this would have done the job. After a 20+ year gap, it was certainly “forgotten” enough for her to make it her own.
Finally, YTOTIW might not be a better song than, say, What Do I Get (and far worse than Teenage Kicks) but it effectively had a fantastic video and the promise of an hotly-anticipated film to support it – which must help account for its greater success at the time?
Of course, with the exception of the actual musical at the heart of High School Musical, Grease and HSM have pretty much the same set up (mystery couple meet on holiday, turn out to be at the same school and then school society forces upon them a reason why they should not be together). The difference is that both Sandy and Danny have to change for each other to be acceptable, whereas Gabriella and Troy have to convince other people of who they actually are. But it is fundamentally the same plot!
And as I am safe in as much as there have been no HSM number ones yet (HSM3 may change that), I think that there are at least three absolute show-stoppers in HSM, compared to probably just two in Grease (both of which weren’t in the original stage musical!)
This is another one I’ve warmed to in the years since it was all over TOTP week after goddamn week, denying the number 1 spot to records I liked more (and I don’t mean the Smurfs…) – it’s great effervescent pop and the film is deservedly loved. Number 1 during my O-levels, which unfortunately clashed with the World Cup in Argentina. Revision or Scotland v Peru? No contest.
Mike #3 (yes I know it’s a long way upthread but I’ve been away) – I know the style of the song clashes somewhat with the 50s setting, but then it is a fantasy at the end of which they fly up into the air in a car, so they can be as anachronistic as they want by this stage. Might as well criticise the “Camelot” routine in Python’s “Holy Grail” for not being minstrelesque enough. On the other hand, spot on about “Dirty Dancing” – that final “Time Of My Life” routine where they supposedly drop the needle on the Dansette or whatever it is, and out comes an archetypal 80s production which wasn’t technically possible in 1963… now THAT jarred.
I remember a Record Mirror cartoon entitled “If John Travolta was a real person and he went to the Barnsley Mecca”. In which Travolta tries to get into said nightspot in his Grease outfit and is kicked out, then returns in his Saturday Night Fever gear to shouts of “flash git” from the girls and the bouncer saying “You’re not gerrin’ ‘in ‘ere dressed like that you poof”. Moral: even if you’re John Travolta it’s still crap in Barnsley.
I bet that Record Mirror cartoon was drawn by Mark Manning, later known as Zodiac Mindwarp. It wouldn’t have been the only time he put the boot into disco culture, either.
The very same.
I was going to say Bring back J Edward Oliver, but I find he died last year…
Yes, Jack tragically died in May of last year. I had been in correspondence with him regarding one of his lesser-known characters “The Invisible Aardvark”, and he was a true gent. He sent me signed copies of the originals, and used our correspondence as the inspiration for one of his weekly e-mailshots, which he sent almost until he died.
He was one of the main reasons I bought “Disc” originally, in preference to the other three.
I remember that in the later Disc and Music Echo days their singles column was allegedly written by a parrot.
I know March 6th is a little late for a comment here. We newcomers to this excellent website will find our comments pushed to the nether regions of the comments section – probably never to be read as a result. May I recommend that all comments appear in “most recent first order” like many other websites do.
With that off my chest: Surely WTOTIW deserves extra points from you for keeping that bloody smurf song off the top of the charts – we could have had 5 weeks of that! – Oh, I forget – you were 5 years old, so you probably loved it at the time…hehehe
Hi Steve – worry not! Comments appear on a feed on the front page – newest first – and on individual post you get the most recent 30-40 or so, so we make every effort to ensure new comments get noticed. Because so many of the comments are conversations and replies to other ones, putting the most recent first would disrupt that flow.
Wasn’t sure if that would work! Not much to say about this song, except that I had similar feelings to you about the Megamix, Tom.
As for Popular itself, I read all these entries the first time around and enjoyed them. Then recently I ‘acquired’ a collection of mp3s of all the number ones and have been diligently working my way through them with Popular as a guide. The blog – and all the comments – are such an incredible resource! Especially amazing to read comments from people directly involved with some of the earlier hits. Any thoughts of doing a Popular book? Would definitely buy a copy!
Strangely, given that I spent most of my teenage years obsessed with the charts, I never really bothered to investigate what was #1 when I was actually born… For the longest time, I thought it was “Summer Nights”. I bought the Guinness “Top 40 Charts” book (not to be confused with “British Hit Singles”), invaluable in the pre-Internet age, noted with a cursory glance that it was an ONJ/Travolta Grease thing, somehow got it immediately mixed up with “Summer Nights”, thought “Oh, that’s a bit crap”, and left that factoid unchecked in my head until just now.
I hate “Summer Nights” – I don’t think I’ve ever liked it, but I quite vividly remember* a crushingly unfunny parody of it sung by Popeye and Olive Oyl on some variety show which totally sealed the deal, sat with the rest of my family in stony-faced silence, too embarrassed for my dad (who’d put the show on in the first place) to get up or even say anything at all – whereas I’m quite amenable towards this. Having laboured for the longest time under the impression that “my” number one was very poor, nothing to boast about (and sympathising with my younger sister, who got Renee and Renato), I actually feel rather pleased now.
* (Not vividly enough to remember what show it WAS, obviously. A Popeye-themed TOTP spoof, I think – the joke was that Popeye had rigged the charts to keep his version of “Summer Nights” at number one for four years, or something. Google has no idea.)
The first time I heard it I thought it was by the Muppets.
I liked Grease then but don’t now, there was this nostalgia for the fifties like there is now for the seventies, I was 16 back then when I saw the film