...As far as " The Joker " goes, let me add that I had some substitute lyrics, to wit: " I'm a lover/I'm a hater/I'm a midnight masturbatory " - Wanks a lot! !!!!!!! Bobby Womack and Wilson Pickett were just midnight MOVERS... Also, BTW, note the song's " sample " from " Lovey Dovey " that ended up with Ahmet Eturgun getting co-write credit...
Yes, wasn't it John Farrar that convinced her to do country? Oh well, I enjoy her country-ish songs very much.
Really! I really enjoy a lot of hr later hits, too. I kind of lost interest after 1983's "Twist Of Fate".
Yes. I don’t think Olivia had much control over what she recorded throughout her popular career. She’s too nice to say anything critical, but I get the feeling that she was ‘guided’ more than she would have liked. In the UK, she wasn’t a big star like she was fairly instantly in the US. Here, her bread and butter was getting the odd single hit. Although she recorded albums, they didn’t sell and probably weren’t expected too. Her early singles are all over the place as Farrar tried to find something that would stick. When they did strike gold with the country formula in America they pretty much milked it dry.
...Yo, 1974 was my jam! It's famous among chart buffs as " the year when every #1 45 spent ONLY ONE week at #1 for an incredibly long period ", ya know! SITKOL'76, post: 18556043, member: 49411"]1974 will be hell to get through, eek.[/QUOTE]
Looking back, she didn't stick with the pop-country format very long. Only people who were there recall that phase of her career.
Well, if I were to listen to people that made fun of listeners like me who enjoyed bands like ABBA, the Bee Gees and a lot of top 40 bands in the day along those lines, it sure made you feel like that!
That was the end of the road for me too (actually, I was very turned off by Heartattack and still hate it to this day). But what a run!
Well, I'm sure you would agree that she was guided by a musical genious, imo, who gave his best songs to his artist. Not a bad way to be managed! I'm sure she appreciated it, and she did get out when it was the right time as his material and production style started to stop working. I wish she would have bailed an album sooner but you have to have a few clinkers before you sometimes realize it isn't working anymore. Well, we better stop talking a out ONJ and get back on track!
Yes, a lot of younger people I know think Grease was her launchpad. They’ve never heard of I Honestly Love You, Have You Never Been Mellow etc.
Her original ONJ Greatest Hits album on MCA is a classic, and has one of the best album covers, and it covers the material from 1971-1977. There isn't a single clunker on the album, and here in the U.S., she was omnipresent on the radio. It's that voice! It can make any man melt like butter! Talk about Karen Carpenter - ONJ gives her a run for her money! I love "Heart Attack", "Tied Up", and "Twist Of Fate", but after that, it was all over. I'm not sure if it was burnout of the public, the quality of the songs dropping, or if it was just the changing of the music scene.
I have a kind of love/hate relationship with "The Joker"...when it first came out I was happy it got so much airplay because I liked a lot of Miller's earlier work that I considered "underground"...and now here he was all over the AM top-40. But the song got overplayed so much I got rather sick of it.
We had that Greatest Hits here. Same cover. Slightly different tracklisting. Ours included Banks Of The Ohio and Take Me Home Country Roads in place of Something Better To Do and Come On Over.
The most famous Steve Miller Band alumnus is my man Boz Scaggs - his Slow Dancer album came out in March '74 and didn't produce any hit singles, but come 1976 ...
"Something Better To Do" was a big hit here, and one of my favorites. It's not country, and neither is "Come On Over". I like "Sam", her last single of that era before "Grease". At the time she was filming the movie, she was saying in the press to the effect of how she was tired of country, never intended to be country, and wanted to move to rock, kind of like what Taylor Swift did a few years back. Too bad Swift doesn't have ONJ's voice.
Man! We're jumping all past 1974! I know a few of you can't stand what's to come this year, but I love 1974! It was a stellar year in the 70s, the one year with the most #1s. The second is 1977, and the third is 1976. Don't anyone try to tell me that singles were on the decline in the 70s. The charts prove otherwise, and I lived through it.
Understood. It was the same for me about Bruce Springsteen's "Born To Run" from 1975. I never heard of it until the early 80s, and it sounds very 80s to me, so that's when I thought it came out, as I somehow associate it with the end credits of a hit movie from the time. The album rock guys here are groaning at this, but most rock that wasn't on the top 40 singles chart wasn't part of my musical sphere, and I wouldn't experience FM rock radio until '76. They could say the same about Black music/radio from, too. But, we're all here on this forum to discover what we didn't know, right? At least I hope...and Tommytunes will post that he wasn't aware that such and such a song hit #1.
I'm gonna have a blast discussing '74. Just pointing out that Boz wasn't a hit artist in that year, but would soon get his turn in the pop spotlight like his former bandleader.
Bummer! As far as i'm concerned, he was just as much a part of the 70s, and made a much bigger impact on me than Sesame Street ever could have. I have the "School Rock" boxed set shaped like a binder notebook from Rhino.
Sad to hear that...he was quite a talent. I always associate him with one of my all time favorite records, "I'd Like To Get To Know You" by Spanky and Our Gang.
