Happy 45th Anniversary to the Grease Soundtrack, originally released April 14, 1978.
It was one o’clock in the morning, it was 1970, and Jim Jacobs, a part-time actor, was lounging around his Chicago apartment post-party, surrounded by potheads passed out on his floor. He was tired of listening to Zeppelin, and so he unearthed some of his old 45s. They were the tunes he’d dug back in high school in the ’50s. His friend Warren Casey was awake, and so Jacobs nudged him and asked, “Wouldn’t it be great, man, if there was a Broadway show with this kind of music instead of all that Oklahoma where-the-wind-comes-sweeping-down-the-plain sound that we’ve always heard in musicals?”
Jacobs imagined, just for a minute, that the play could be about the greasers he hung out with in the late ’50s—the golden age of rock & roll—as a student at Taft High School in Chicago. Neither Jacobs nor Casey took the conversation too seriously, but a few weeks later Casey lost his job and used some of the idle time to write what would become the famous pajama-party scene in Grease. He showed it to Jacobs, and they began crafting their musical in earnest. Both men had limited musical know-how (they knew basic guitar, and Casey could read music), which makes Grease possibly the first and only Broadway musical written solely on guitar.
The play was indeed based on Jacobs’ actual friends, back when he was a juvenile delinquent with a ducktail hairstyle. (“The names were slightly changed to protect the innocent,” he says. “And there’s a little bit of me in all those characters.”) The group of guys that would come to be known as the T-Birds were based on a gang that hung out at a pizza place called Kennedy’s, while the Pink Ladies were styled after a pack of girls who sported pink jackets with cocktail-glass decals on the back. “They were tough chicks, man,” Jacobs recalled. “They had razorblades and beehive hairdos. Plus, they carried the guys’ weapons in their purses, because the cops couldn’t frisk girls.” He added later, “The real Rizzo, believe me, she’s sweet in the stage version compared to the real thing.”
The original production of Grease, staged in Chicago’s Kingston Mines Theatre, an old trolley barn, was much more rough-around-the-edges than the one that would eventually open in New York, and then go on to grace the big screen. “By the standards of 1971, this would be the raunchiest, dirtiest, most politically-incorrect show, lacking all family values,” Jacobs said. Still, it became a massive hit, and soon it was hard to get seats on any given weekend, in large part due to the play’s authenticity. “We kind of made a documentary on teenagers, or teenage gangs, in the late ’50s with sort of incidental rock & roll music to it,” Jacobs said in a 1978 PBS interview. In fact, its authenticity and “semi-documentary approach” were what hooked New York producers Kenneth Waissman and Maxine Fox.
Once the play hit New York a year later, the show had changed—it went from three-fourths script and one-fourth music, to majority music. Some songs written for the Chicago show remained, but others were cut and replaced by new numbers. A lot of the references to Chicago were written out, too, making Grease’s backdrop more generic. And the characters were toned down, making them less razor blade-wielding and more family-friendly. In February 1972, the revised version of Grease had its official opening at the Eden Theater on the Lower East Side. By June of that year, it had moved uptown for its Broadway debut.
Once the play hit Broadway, Grease’s producers Waissman and Fox began getting offers from Hollywood for the movie rights. One was from Paramount, and the film would be produced at lightning speed for a Christmas 1974 release. Waissman and Fox urged Jacobs and Casey to turn it down. If the movie came out while Grease was still running, it would kill the play, Waissman surmised. Then, they got another offer from producer Steven Krantz and animator Ralph Bakshi, known for their X-rated cartoons Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic. At first Jacobs and Casey accepted, thinking that a cartoon version of Grease, released in 1975, wouldn’t damage the show. But then Krantz and Bakshi parted ways with each other, and the rights to Grease were once again up for grabs.
Waissman and Fox were at lunch at Sardi’s one afternoon when they were approached by producer Allan Carr, who asked them how the movie version was going. They informed him that, actually, the rights were available. Carr was a Hollywood mover-and-shaker who worked for British producer Robert Stigwood, who had recruited him to promote Tommy, the rock opera, as well as Saturday Night Fever. Although Grease was a long-standing Broadway play by that point, it didn’t have the prestige of some of the more sophisticated musicals, and so Carr offered $200,000, with a promise that the movie wouldn’t be released until 1978. Instead of settling for a large sum up front, Casey and Jacobs smartly decided to receive a percentage of the gross receipts. Grease was going to the movies.
To craft the screenplay, Carr hired a young writer named Bronte Woodard, but Carr wound up adapting Woodard’s work significantly, basing his changes on his own suburban high-school experience in Chicago—in hopes of making Grease more relatable, or aspirational, to a wider audience. “I wanted to make everyone feel this is the school they wish they had gone to,” he said. To cut down on costs, the setting also moved to sunny California.
The casting of John Travolta as Danny Zuko came naturally. Travolta was a beloved character on the TV comedy Welcome Back Kotter, and he was already working with Grease’s co-producer Robert Stigwood on Saturday Night Fever, which had yet to be released. (He had also played Doody in the traveling production of Grease.) “When I saw John Travolta, I thought, ‘He’s a movie star,’ and I put my money where my mouth was and offered him a three-picture deal,” Stigwood recalls. “And the first one I used him in was Saturday Night Fever. I thought Grease would be an ideal second film.”
Travolta then suggested Olivia Newton-John, who already had several hits on the pop and country music charts, for the part of Sandy. “The reason I wanted Olivia in this was because, at the time, every guy’s dream was to have Olivia Newton-John as their girlfriend,” Travolta said. At first, Newton-John was nervous about playing a high-schooler, as well as playing opposite Travolta—she was 29 to his 23—and so she asked for a screen test (typically it’s the studio, not the star, who makes such a request). When Newton-John told director Randal Kleiser about her worries, he assuaged her concerns over looking ridiculous, or old. “I told her that this was going to be a kind of bigger-than-life, almost surreal high-school,” he said, “and that we were casting actors who were in their twenties.”
Many of the other actors—like Jeff Conaway who plays Kenickie, Jamie Donelly who portrays Jan, and Michael Tucci who plays Sonny—had already been in the Broadway version of the play, and so they knew Grease well. Patricia Birch, the choreographer, had been with the play since its Off-Broadway debut. And others, like Dinah Manoff (Marty) and Stockard Channing (Rizzo), had been in or around Hollywood for years. For the adults in the film—the teachers, the school nurse, the football coach, etc.—casting producer Joel Thurm purposely chose iconic ’50s actors that Boomers would instantly recognize, like Eve Arden from Our Miss Brooks as take-no-shit Principal McGee. Grease would be director Randal Kleiser’s first feature film; he’d been recommended by Travolta after the two worked together on a made-for-TV movie called The Boy In The Plastic Bubble. Overall, it would prove to be a winning combination of cast and crew.
Grease began filming in the summer of 1977, the summer I was born. Even though I wouldn’t watch the movie until years later, I can’t remember a time in my life without it. Almost every weekend, in lieu of Saturday-morning cartoons, my brother and I would push our well-worn copy of Grease into the VCR and delight in the animated opening credits that introduced us yet again to those beloved characters—Danny combing globs of Brylcreem through his hair, Sandy waking up to birds like Cinderella, Rizzo writhing into a hot-pink sweater. I’ve now watched Grease thousands of times, and, still, whenever I get together with my family for the holidays, we watch it all over again. (We’re kind of a Grease family.) In fact, our connection to Grease is so strong that every so often, walking through a mall or whatever, my mom will look over at me and ask, “What did she give him?” And I’ll immediately reply in Marty’s thick Brooklyn accent, “A lock of hair. From her chest.” (It’s our all-time favorite line.)
Watch Clips from the Film:
Grease’s soundtrack kicks off with “Grease,” sung by Frankie Valli (known for hits like “Sherry” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry”), from the movie’s opening credits. Despite Grease’s obvious ’50s theme, the song struts with a ’70s groove—“Grease is the word, is the word that you heard.” The song came about when co-producer Stigwood called up the Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb and asked him to write a song for the movie. When Gibb heard the title, he replied, “Grease? What a word!” and he then proceeded to weave his reaction into the song.
When director Randal Kleiser heard the lyrics “This is a time of illusion, wrapped up in trouble and laced in confusion,” he wasn’t so sure about the song. So he tracked down Gibb. “I explained our movie was a feel-good musical and that th[ose] lyrics … were a bit serious. Could he possibly adjust them?” Kleiser recalls. “He looked at me a moment, then said, ‘Why don’t you shoot a serious scene?’” At first Kleiser thought Gibb was joking, but he wasn’t, and so the lyrics remained.
Next up, “Summer Nights” is the song that sets up Sandy and Danny’s personalities, as well as the conflict to come. While Danny brags about all the raunchy sex he got at the beach, Sandy paints her summer with Danny as sweet and romantic. “We didn’t know it at the time, but ‘Summer Nights’ would go on to be one of the top karaoke songs in the world,” says Kleiser. The way the camera cuts back and forth between the T-Birds and the Pink Ladies to tell two sides of the same story was inspired by “Tonight” in West Side Story.
“Hopelessly Devoted to You” hadn’t been written when production began, and John Farrar (who had written “Have You Never Been Mellow” for Newton-John) came up with it on the spot. The word “devoted” often appears in songs from the ’50s and ’60s, and so he wrote it with that in mind. It went on to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Song, and Newton-John performed it at the 21st annual GRAMMY Awards ceremony in 1979.
In contrast, “You’re The One That I Want” was also written by Farrar to showcase Newton-John’s “Bad Sandy” character. Farrar pulled an all-nighter and came back with the electrifying earworm. “I liked the ’70s take on a driving ’50s Eddie Cochran-like rhythm,” Kleiser observes. It’s indeed sexy and bluesy, and full of raucous rock ‘n’ roll piano that makes you want to dance.
Because Newton-John got a solo with “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” a parallel solo was needed for Travolta. “Alone at a Drive-In Movie” was a humorous song from the play, but the producers wanted something much more serious and romantic. So, music producer Louis St. Louis went back to his hotel, pulled out his tape recorder, and sang, “Stranded at the drive-in, branded a fool…” Screamin’ Scott Simon of Sha Na Na came over and helped him write the rest. And thus, “Sandy” was born.
“Beauty School Dropout,” my favorite song from Grease, was one of the originals from the Chicago production, written as a parody of ’50s rock ‘n’ roll. Frankie Avalon, of the early-’60s Beach Party movies, fittingly plays the “teen angel” who advises a pink-haired Frenchy to go back to high-school. After Grease, “Beauty School Dropout” became Avalon’s most-requested song whenever he performed.
Another original from the play, “Look At Me I’m Sandra Dee” provides some much-needed comedy in the face of Sandy’s (sometimes-annoying) perfection. In an eerie twist, the song originally contained lyrics about Sal Mineo, which were replaced with lyrics about Elvis. The scene, where Rizzo sings to a poster of Elvis, was shot on the day Elvis died (August 16, 1977).
The pace picks back up with “Greased Lightnin’,” celebrating the power of a tricked-out ride, while simultaneously showcasing raunchiness that went over my head as a child—“You know that I ain’t braggin,’ she’s a real pussy wagon.” “I’m always shocked when people tell me that their five or six-year-old loves Grease,” says Didi Conn (Frenchy), “because I mean there’s a lot of sexual, you know, things happening in there.”
“It’s Raining On Prom Night,” sung by Cindy Bullens, was one of the Chicago originals. It’s waltzing and gloriously tongue-in-cheek with lyrics like “I don't even have my corsage, oh gee / It fell down a sewer with my sister's ID.” Slow and ballad-y, “Alone At A Drive-In Movie” appears only as an instrumental on the soundtrack.
The next block of songs—“Blue Moon,” “Rock ‘N’ Roll is Here To Stay,” “Those Magic Changes,” “Hound Dog,” “Born To Hand Jive,” and “Tears On My Pillow”—are all performed by Sha Na Na, playing the role of fictitious band Johnny Casino & The Gamblers. Sha Na Na were hugely influential in sparking the ’50s revival in the ’70s, and prior to Grease they even played Woodstock, hitting the stage right before Jimi Hendrix’s National Anthem.
“Mooning,” “Freddy My Love,” and “Rock ‘N’ Roll Party Queen” are a set of songs from the original play that demonstrate just how deftly Jacobs and Casey were able to replicate the ’50s sound and sensibility. “The music of the ’50s was very simple,” Casey said, “and much of it was probably written by people who didn’t know any more than we did when we started. It was all very simple chord structures and very square construction.”
“There Are Worse Things I Could Do” offers us another side of Rizzo, a more vulnerable side. “It’s where you see her being a little insecure—with a bravado to hide her insecurity,” Stockard Channing said. At the 20-year re-release of the film, Kleiser looked over at her during the scene, and she had tears in her eyes.
“Look At Me I’m Sandra Dee” is the reprise Sandy sings at Thunder Road, where she’s contemplating her transformation into Bad Sandy. “We Go Together” is, of course, a banger that everyone thinks of when they think of Grease, the song that encapsulates the movie’s beautiful camaraderie.
“Love Is A Many Splendored Thing” is the instrumental track that plays during Sandy and Danny’s romantic beach date in the beginning. And the album ends, as though in a trippy loop, with the soaring, marching, groovy “Grease” written by Barry Gibb.
The most successful songs from Grease were those written specifically for the movie, including the Billboard No. 1 hits “Grease” and “You’re The One That I Want,” the No. 3 hit “Hopelessly Devoted To You,” and “Summer Nights” which hit No. 5. Grease received an Album of the Year Grammy nod, and it was the No. 2 bestselling album of 1978, coming in close on the heels of Saturday Night Fever. Grease also has the distinction of being one of the bestselling albums of all time, and one of the bestselling soundtracks of all time.
It was a long, winding adventure from a gritty Chicago play to a glitzy Hollywood production, but 45 years later, Grease is still very much the word. And as Susan Buckner, who played goody-goody Patty Simcox, has observed, “I think we’re all really fortunate to have had this moment in time that just hasn’t ended.”
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