prelude: Olivia

Both of my parents loved music. My dad played guitars and sang folk songs while my mom sang at church. I was always fascinated with the record collection that filled the bottom shelf of the behemoth wooden piece of furniture that housed our gigantic record player.




The line in Paul Rudnick's play, Jeffrey about how gay kids grow up with the picture of God as seen on the cover of the original cast album for My Fair Lady is absolutely true in my case.



I would flip through the albums, heavily populated with folk music acts like Peter, Paul and Mary and The Limelighters, featuring a dose of singer/songwriters like John Denver and some 70s AM radio stuff like Bread, Anne Murray and Olivia Newton-John. There was also inexplicably for anyone who has ever known my parents, a couple of Cheech and Chong comedy albums. The Bill Cosby made sense, but the weed-lovin' stoners? Not so much in my house.

The first singer I fell in love with was Olivia Newton-John. I remember the records we'd listen to: Come On Over and Have You Never Been Mellow, but mostly I remember the cassette that was always in the car with us, simply titled Olivia aka Let Me Be There.


We used to take lots of family vacations, the camper hitched to the back of my mom's awesome Camaro or whatever car my dad was driving at the time. We'd get through Florida, which is an interminably long and incredibly boring state to drive through- at least if you're going through the middle of it, and eventually make it to North Georgia and North Carolina and the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. On the way we'd have my dad's tape box, a simple, yet sturdy black case that held Henry Mancini and John Denver and Billy Joel's The Stranger and Olivia. Olivia was always my favorite, and as I write this, listening to her clear, cool vocals, I have to say I love her just as much as I ever did. One song that will always return me to the back seat of the car, smack in the middle of the curving roads of the Blue Ridge Mountains is "Let me be there." Before she got Physical and before she was Sandra Dee, Olivia sang a mixture of pop and country songs, including a great cover of Dolly Parton's "Jolene." "Let me be there" definitely falls into the former category. It's not the pop/country stuff of today, but something that was lyrically and musically simple and really quite lovely.

Here's a video of Olivia performing the song in 1973, the year I was born. Watch it on youtube. I also thought I'd share a link to Amazon.com and three of the Olivia albums I like.