Original Movie Soundtrack "Grease"  Rating: 9/10 Groove and meaning. Phew! |
Sandy Does Dallas  Rating: 7/10 Grease: the Twilight Zone years. |
If it doesn't seem like it's been 20 years since John Travolta, Olivia Newton John and the other crazy kids of Rydell High first sang "We go together - like ramma lamma lamma a ding gadi dinga dong," it's because love 'em or hate 'em, those "Grease" tunes are your quintessential rock n' roll party songs. They're fun, throwaway, irresistably catchy bits of fluff that've worked their way into that section of your permanent memory that's marked "nostalgia."
Originals like "Summer Nights" and "Beauty School Drop-Out" are as authentically composed and rendered as the standards that have been throw into the mix ("Blue Moon," "Hound Dog). And while getting comedy-nostalgia act Sha-Na-Na to perform half a dozen of the songs here was perhaps something of a convenient choice, at least having Frankie Valli and Frankie Avalon do a couple of tunes was inspired. Then of course there's John Travolta singing - something he does the way he dances, which is to say suprisingly well for an actor.
The performances in fact so convincingly and effortlessly evoke doo-wop and classic rock n' roll that it's just so much harder in these chronologically-confused days to remember that "Grease" was a late '70s take on the original rock n' roll era, the late '50s. It was retro before retro became hip, and most of these songs still stand up better than anything the neo-hippies and the misbegotten children of loungecore have been able to throw up.
Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, the writers of the original "Grease" in its incarnation as an off-Broadway musical, deserve more credit than they've gotten for penning the bulk of the songs that were used in the movie. Even if they had only one good musical in them, they're still veritable Mozarts compared to someone like Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, who never seems to tire of drawing from the same box of stock melodies and mawkish lyrics. Hollywood is full of ignoble failures, and it's funny to think that anybody who'd seen "Grease" could have thought that "Evita" could have been made into a movie musical. The soundtrack of "Grease" on the other hand, even exists apart from the movie itself as an article of pop genius.
Rating: 9
SANDY DOES DALLAS:
If the dewy-eyed teen-comedy romance that was the movie "Grease" erased the mildly satiric intent of the original stage musical, the people at One Ton Records have in timely fashion released a collection called "Sandy Does Dallas." The cd sleeve reveals a picture of Olivia Newton John as Sandy with a tooth blacked-out and John Travolta as Danny Zuko with a mustache drawn over his face. "You're The One That I Want" is done by a band called Baboon, and Ugly Mus-Tard reprises "Look At Me, I'm Sandra Dee." The objective of this vaguely malign 'tribute' seems to be clear - vandalism.
The number of songs that are given over to the garage-bands-playing-with-weird-rhythmic-modulations are predictably high. Nevertheless, it's a kick to hear Slow Roosevelt's heavy metal surf punk "Greased Lightning", and the Toadies doing "Beauty School Drop-Out" like an enraged, hopped-up Weezer.
While "Sandy Does Dallas" never rises above novelty as a whole, it occasionally takes us to a truly warped, alternate reality version of the world evoked by "Grease." On Spyche's "Hopelessly Devoted To You", you hear the singer get into a car, slam its creaky door shut, drive off and try to tune the radio to no avail. Then she starts singing, her voice registering a loneliness that is only echoed by the fact that she sings to no accompaniment apart from the sound of her car on the road. It can't be mere coincidence that when the song reaches its crescendo, she sounds like a very drunk and disillusioned Patsy Cline.
The collection ends with "We Go Together" the cast encore song, and it almost sounds as though the song was written especially for Doosu's powerchord-driven guitar pop rendition of it. It's straightforward, fun party stuff until the song's closing moments when you hear the singer calling out "Sandy, I love you baby!" and the response come from some surfer yob who says "Dude, stop calling me Sandy, dude... stop drinking my malt, dude!" If "Sandy Does Dallas" was the soundtrack of a "Grease" remake, the movie would almost certainly have to be directed by John Waters.
Rating: 7
Gerald Tan 1998
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