Today is Olivia day. Let the angels and the muses rejoice in the magic that her voice emanates! As stated the last few days about the last few featured divas, not much else can be said that hasn’t already about my beloved Livvie. Hers is the voice of my childhood, from as small as I can remember up to the tortured, permed-mustachioed teenager into which I eventually groaned. And somewhere between there lay her transformation from country-pop sweetheart to sex-kitten chanteuse. Olivia’s album, Totally Hot, released in 1978, featured songs that were sort of a mirror of her on-screen transformation in the then-hot as fire film Grease in which she starred. Represented on this album, in a more uptempo vibe than was her usual, was the leather-clad bad ass trying to win over her man. Well, she won over this tiny homo. A Little More Love is sultry. There’s something in the air along with her perfect voice, and it’s hard to describe. She’s singing about her disappearing innocence while trampling our emotions with her range. Enter, again, the image of me singing into the hairbrush. Two short years later, but what might have been eons, the gods of everything good gifted us with Xanadu, probably one of the worst films ever made featuring Livvie and a Hollywood icon, Gene Kelly. It had the ingredients for a blockbuster; sadly it was a bomb but for all the music on the soundtrack. One song I’ve already spoken about in my first year was Suddenly, the duet from the film, but today we zero in on Magic. Here we have this literal muse portraying a muse singing about the magic that muses do. In the movie she roller-skates around the forgettable male lead, effortlessly singing this song to inspire him back to art. And on my turntable, I’d crank the volume until there was more noise interference thumping from the woofers than music filling the air, and I would lip synch like I was indeed Kira in human form. It was one of the first 45s I’d ever owned and it certainly got its share of needle grooves. It’s remembering moments like this I often wonder how my mother didn’t know?
From the historical writing archive. Original date: October 29, 2020. Recovered from local source material; editorial review is still in progress.
