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

The rock musical has seemingly vanished from the landscape, not counting fringe events like REPO: THE GENETIC OPERA or DR. HORRIBLE or 'jukebox' fare like ROCK OF AGES and MAMA MIA. I do not count them - the former type since they are freak, fringe event; the latter incorporate only tried and tested tunes written long before their Broadway shows began. And try as you might you can't count stuff like CHICAGO, LES MISERABLES or PHANTOM as rock. In fact, original mainstream rock is almost gone from out the musical landscape, replaced by genres aimed at each micro-demographic: bright, brash Disney pop for the tweens, snotty emo for the teens, 'cock rock' for the blue collar guys on their way to work, 'classic rock' for when they drive home. 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.


Broadway was always a little ahead of the curve, for you must remember that Times Square at this point in history was riddled with grindhouses, adult bookstores, prostitutes and flashy pimps, bums, drugs and--most shocking of all to our Agent Anita-poisoned minds, flagrant homosexuality (ala MIDNIGHT COWBOY). When film versions of JESUS CHRIST, SUPERSTAR (1973), GODSPELL (1973), and HAIR (1979) were presenting midnight cinema audiences with mixed-race cliques of dancing counterculture youth singing about Jesus, Broadway was showing the all-nude musical revue OH! CALCUTTA! HAIR was clothed on film but originally rife with nudity. 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 later, even the ingenious cute old lady delivery system of healthy sexual advice, ex-Israeli sniper Dr. Ruth (below, right), all created a sense that women were enjoying their new orgasms and the world was just a little less uptight, 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 of all time -- cocaine. And if the hippy love-in zipless f-ck era was winding down, well, there was always the other extreme: disco 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, the homosexual and coke aspects were sublimated deep by the time it all got to TV, and we kids loved the costumes and tinsel. Even if parents wouldn't let us see it because of its R-rating, kids like me were dancing at birthday parties nonstop to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.  And whatever 'free love' had represented before was being swallowed up into blue collar triumphs (ROCKY in 1977) and nostalgia for the earlier decades, before the counterculture's paisley rise, i.e. the 50s-40s MGM era.


But then disco and the disco musical died, 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 by daring to raise their hem lines. 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, so 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.
 
We kids had long pondered the electric strangeness of the Hair album cover in our parent's record collection, but found the electric light cover too disturbing (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 from Laverne & Shirley) but he could also sing, and acted 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 (above left), and Shields and Yarnell very soothing. I recall that towards the end of the 70s 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 that only degenerates would even try. Wet dreams were discussed, in terrified tones, at the playground, but if they happened it was out of our control, so no harm, just foul.  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? So 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). In other words, now disco was almost solely in the realm of children. We inherited all the fads and crazes after the adults had moved on. For example, we were crazy for our "Keep on Streakin'" T-shirts, even though none of us had ever streaked, or seen a streaker.



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, to do for the 40s big band zoot suit sound what GREASE had done for the 50s do wop?


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 put Olivia Newton John in as a muse who inspires him and old duffer Gene Kelly to open a post-modern roller-rink, where time collapses and big band fads like zoot suits and Tommy Dorsey collide like a roller skating accident with ELO, The Tubes, discomania 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?

Just because GREASE worked, though, there was no reason to think you could 'modernize' the 40s as easily as the late 50s. The glamor and elegance of the 40s big bands are forced to collide in one particularly painful number, with the raw energy of the Tubes, signifying the emerging hair metal scene, and everyone, old Gene Kelly included, end up on roller skates. 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!" The rockers do all right belting "Won't take backseat / tonight!", but this aint no marriage made in heaven. In fact it's a disaster, 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 a tie-in of sorts with the expected blockbuster success of Spielberg's zoot suit-encrusted mega-shrillfest 1941which 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.

So without long hair and sleaze to produce hand-me-down pop culture iconocgraphy the decadence was inhaled up nostalgia's porous straw. By the time it got to us, it was as safe as B-12 can be, 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. Among other things, the 80s 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 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 VHS was universal. In the 70s we had forgotten to be ashamed of our bodies and 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, and everyone was invited to the roller rink, so we dutifully trudged as massive multple family packs to see it. And then fell asleep trying to make it to the big finale. 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, half-asleep, dizzy from the round and round roller rink musical scenes, sick from popcorn and Olivia Newton John treacle, we found the world had changed. Disco was dead, crushed in the roller rink stampede. The concrurrent 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 began to implode. 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 Perine 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 dancers 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 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. 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 our first pre-codes.

But on the plus side, we have Turner Classic Movies. So forget about the blues / tonight! And never take condoms from strangers.