Condoms are for Quitters: XANADU (1980) and the Death of the Naked Rock Musical

 

Once a proud and shirtless beast, the rock musical has all but vanished from the landscape. Fringe events like REPO: THE GENETIC OPERA or DR. HORRIBLE or 'jukebox' fare like ROCK OF AGES and MAMA MIA do not count. The first are freak, fringe events, the latter incorporate only tried and tested tunes written long before their Broadway shows.  CHICAGO, LES MISERABLES or PHANTOM don't count either. But there was a time when the rock musical soared on wings of brilliance. I'm talking of course of the late 60s-early 70s -the age when impassioned singing met electric guitars and funky bass, and bi-curious guys in silver make-up and long hair strutted shirtless, and God was not ignored.

This was the era of Vietnam, and Times Square was not a place to bring the kids, at least not at night.  Grindhouses, adult bookstores, prostitutes and flashy pimps, bums, hippies, sadomasochists, junkies and--most shocking of all to our Anita Bryant-poisoned minds--queers. When their later film versions came around, JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (1973), GODSPELL (1973), and HAIR (1979) had to be toned down, the nudity dropped if there was any. But meanwhile crazy Brits like Ken Russell gave us TOMMY (1975) the satiric Brit-quivalent, and Broadway was going even farther, showing the all-nude musical revue OH! CALCUTTA! Surrounded by the sleaze of Times Square, Broadway's mere nudity and simulate coupling managed to stay somehow clean and so showed Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public that those scruffy homeless kids on the street might be disguised angels, so treat them right and tip the girls. Books like Erica Jong's Fear of Flying with its ode to the "zipless f-ck," the tawdry glam gossip of Rona Barett, and the cute old lady sex specialist, Dr. Ruth (below, right), all created a sense that women were enjoying their new orgasms all across the country and it was as healthy and normal as going to church or making dinner for your family, and the world was just a little less uptight and it was healthy, and we kids were listening in, soaking up the loose prana with our hungry spinal snake-sponges.

But in the midst of all this came the arrival of my least favorite drug, cocaine, and with it disco, single's bars, and tawdriness. With its dance-friendly music and glittery fashion, disco was crossing boundaries the Christian-pagan neo-decadent arias of Broadway and the best-seller list never could, for children of all ages could revel in disco too. The homosexual and coke aspects were sublimated deep by the time it all got to TV, and we kids loved the costumes and were dancing to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack at each others' birthday parties (we learned disco moves in gym class).  And whatever 'free love' had represented before the mid-70s was being swallowed up into blue collar triumphs (ROCKY in 1977) and old school nostalgia. Hordes of films set in the 20s, 30s, and 40s saturated the theaters. THE STING won best picture in 1973, and set the tone (see my piece The Period Piece Period), as if America was waking up after Studio 54 coke binge and trying to escape their hangover and the stranger in their bed by rummaging back into the past, to before disco or rock or the summer of love ever happened.

But then in 1980 disco tried to go back into the past itself, and it had a heart attack right on the dance floor --which had already been converted into a roller rink -- and how did it do that, you ask?

XANADU (1980)!

Little newborn disco wasn't without parents and grandparents; it was of course the glitzy empty shell throwback to the 30s-40s dance music scene, the swing and sweet, as it was called. Swing was the 40s version of rock, cooked up by Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman (at least for mainstream white America), and sweet was sappy ballads by radio tenors, meant to lull nervous brides waiting for the men to come home from WW2, and ease the worry of 19th century-born parents that their children's generation was going to hell. It was only natural then that the re-emergence of cocaine, the drug of choice for turn-of-the-century soda fountain barflies, would lead to re-emergence of the sweet/swing emptiness of pure 'dance' music. Donna Summer and the Bee-Gees replaced the Byrds and the Eagles at the top of the rock charts, and we disco balled our way back into this sexless yet tightly-trousered sweet/swing dichotomy. Rock vs. disco, you had to pick a side.
 
We kids had long pondered the electric strangeness of the Hair album cover in our parent's record collection (though not as nightmarish as Sgt. Pepper's), but we loved John Travolta from Welcome Back, Kotter, so seeing him on the Saturday Night Fever cover made everything all right. He had the working class Italian vibe we were now familiar with via ROCKY, and the Fonz (and Cha-Chi, and Carmine) but he could also sing and act stupid with a winning smile that let you know he was far smarter than he'd ever let on. As long as he was connected to it, disco could cross over to suburbia, where, as I've said before, we loved The Village People because they were dressed like all our favorite icons as kids - cowboys, Native Americans, motorcycle cops - and not one of us ever imagine they were, you know... not straight.

Meanwhile we kids also found the sudden relative sexlessness of, say, variety shows like The Captain and Tenille, Donny and Marie, and Shields and Yarnell very soothing. I recall that towards the end of the 70s, when I was 12-13, sex was starting to get on my nerves. I had a lot of 'pent-up' energy by then. Not that anyone molested me, on the contrary - I molested two babysitters, my dad's secretary, two of my mom's friends, and one very nubile young daughter of one of said friends, all before I was ten years-old. And in the malls I would sneak into Spencer's Gifts and marvel at the dirty novelties and thumb though Fear of Flying and get massive 10 year-old boy hormonal surges.

And mind you I had no orgasms during this stretch -- I had been led to think that the orgasm discharge was a gush of blood, and thus I was terrified to even try. Masturbation was considered a deranged, sad act. Wet dreams were discussed, in terrified tones, at the playground, but if they happened it was out of our control. It was only natural with all that stored venom that when the right bad influence friend came along I would give up girls and turn my attention to WW2, and with war arose the need for 'clean' home front entertainment, the sort that wouldn't make my 'situation' any more painful than it needed to be. And so.... XANADU did a stately 80s pleasure-free dome decree.

Sandahl Bergman at far right

By 1979, GREASE had broken the mold on 'the past' (it played in theaters for years) and Happy Days were here again. And you know what else was a hit on the charts? Some piece of crap called "Disco Duck" - the guy who 'sang' it (Rick Dees) wondered what to do for a follow-up. He came out with "Disco Gorilla" - i.e. "Discor-illa" (It's so cheesy I can't even post it but you can check it out here). Disco was almost solely in the realm of children. And even we sneered at the Disco-rilla. We inherited all the fads and crazes after the adults had moved on but this was going too far.



GREASE (1978) and its late 50s greaser milieu helped kill disco and was helped by the enormous popularity of Happy Days. Henry Winkler aka Arthur Fonzarelli was wanted to play the part that later went to Vinne Barbarino aka John Travolta. Some angel was looking out for Travolta, because he made a vast fortune just from appearing on the cover of both the Grease and Saturday Night Fever albums! They were beyond huge and sold consistently for years and years, comparable only to Fleetwood Mac's Rumors and Frampton Comes Alive! But while the film of Saturday Night Fever was dingy and depressing in its lower-strata blue collar Bronx-ishness, GREASE was smartly moved to the sunny safety of Burbank, making the greaser haircuts and cigarettes and unwanted pregnancies little more than rich kid slumming. Fine with us, we in the suburbs didn't know the difference, only that the environment of GREASE didn't make us want to kill ourselves from depression over graffiti and urban blight.

Cleaned Travota on Captain and Tenille

Anyway, it was a monster hit. And so why not merge the GREASE with the NIGHT and add the then emerging roller disco craze? Throw in a fantasy element and an old duffer or two, and whammo! You do for the 40s big band zoot suit sound what GREASE had done for the 50s do wop.

That was the plan.

However, 1980 was not 1978. And while great as Swan (from THE WARRIORS), Michael Beck was no Travolta. They made him a frustrated artist forced to reproduce album covers for a living (ala Travolta's frustrated dancer forced to tote paint cans in FEVER) and cast Olivia Newton John as the literal muse who inspires him and old duffer Gene Kelly to join forces and open up a post-modern roller-rink, where time collapses and wartime big band sound collides in a roller skating accident with ELO, The Tubes, and lots of static long shots where you can see the edges of the sets and the studio darkness all around the backdrop.

Just compare the two stills below - top from DOWN TO EARTH, a 1947 comedy musical that XANADU more or less remade. In EARTH, Rita Hayworth is Terpsichore, a muse who comes down from Olympus when she learns a Broadway show is mocking the old gods. 

Xanadu - What were you, blocked in a barn?

You can smell the weird blend of child-friendliness, coded homosexuality, old character actors, nearly empty sets, and cocaine that made these sorts of musicals uniquely ahead of and behind their time, literally here as ELO and The Tubes jam unsuccessfully with a Glenn Miller-style ghost ensemble and Olivia sings "Forget about the blues / tonight!" --it's like a remote control fight between your older brother and grandmother while your mom's off at a bridge game.
 

Top: New York, New York (1977); 1941 (1979)

It could have been meant to tie-in with the expected blockbuster success of Spielberg's zoot suit-encrusted mega-shrillfest 1941 which came out the year before, and Scorsese's big band ego-fest, NEW YORK NEW YORK (1977). But that was the wrong horse to bet on. While 1941 was not a flop it wasn't a hit either, and neither was NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- and for the first time since he broke big, Spielberg had laid a non-golden egg.

What happened in a sense was America's taste in retro memories was flattening out. The age of three channel TV was ending, and with it the need for 'variety' shows that appealed to children, the elderly, and adults all at the same time. And So without long hair and sleaze to produce rock gravity, the empty glitz of disco was just another toot up nostalgia's porous straw. By the time it got to us, disco had become sexless, leaving us with no choice to find the stuff straight from the source.

And so it was that as children our interest in sex was rekindled with the rise of the VCR.

Among other things it brought a chance for us all--parents and kids alike-- to finally see X-rated movies. As with any huge sea change, the censors and critics need time to catch up and for awhile, freedom reigned and for awhile every child above 12 saw all there was to see, all at once. Censorship had chastened TV for so long we felt protected from anything it could deliver on our invulnerable home screen. The huge backlash against pedophiles and Satanic child molestation rings presumably all over the suburbs was no doubt inspired by seeing just how base our fellow man was now that we could see all those films we'd been afraid to see at the drive-in or inner city theater back in the day. In the 70s we had never been ashamed of our bodies or our desires, perhaps because we just never really saw them so nakedly.

You're dead sons, get yourself buried: Sgt. Peppers, Can't Stop the Music

So that's why now XANADU seems so hopelessy cheesy and antiquated. Old people--as embodied by Gene Kelly--were supposed to now be cool; everyone was invited to the roller rink, ala GREASE, so we dutifully trudged as massive multiple family packs to see it, and then fell asleep. While the older kids were disappearing into midnight showings of THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME (1976) we in the too young for R category had dutifully seen SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (above, 1978) starring the Bee-Gees, but that was at the drive in, so if something sucked you just went off towards the screen and rode on the swings and then fell asleep in the back seat. XANADU we saw in the theater, so there was no escape. When we emerged, sick from popcorn and Olivia Newton John sweetener, we found the world had changed. Disco was dead, crushed in the roller rink stampede. The concurrent style of rock and roll, i.e. the Tubes and ELO, would survive the disaster, to mutate into hair metal with the rise of cable and MTV, but disco was over. Cocaine gives you a terrible hangover... and you can see a little of it in Olivia Newton John's sickly yellow aura and devil eyes below. Surely we could do better... we needed to renounce our sins! We needed to 'phone home...' and ET was summoned.

Meanwhile, Alan Carr--one of the key figures behind the huge hit GREASE (and on Broadway, LA CAGE AU FOLLES), had troubles of his own, namely a huge disco flop centered around the Village People, Bruce Jenner, Nancy "You're soaking in it" Walker, hottie Valerie Perrine and struggling songwriter (and tight white pants enthusiast) Steve Gutenberg, known as CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC (1980). Like XANADU it cost $20 million, but bombed far worse. And in the case of both of them, very little of that money is visible on the screen. Sure there's dancing and glitz but the blocking, pacing, and acting is a mess. Now I'm just speculating, understand, based largely on a book I'm reading about Carr. But cocaine is all over the 1978-80 wave of films and the budget for a decent DP seems to have gone nostrilwards in both.

In short, 'family entertainment' could only make it as far back as the 50s for nostalgia, which our parents remembered and we loved because of the Fonz and was perhaps the first true youth culture anyway ever. Any further back and no one really cared, except old people who got senior citizen discounts anyway so they didn't impact the box office. The days of romancing a past decade with music and glamor were over, at least until the 90s when suddenly the 70s looked like the last great, free unprotected moment America was ever going to have, until of course, Leonard Maltin's 'Forbidden Hollywood' series came out and we saw with agape jaw the racy forward thinking brilliance of the 1931-34 pre-code era.

But on the plus side, we have Turner Classic Movies. So forget about the blues / tonight! 

And never take condoms from strangers.