Grease Sound Track-Hopelessly Devoted To You

Hopelessly Devoted To You

1978

Olivia Newton John

Ahhh...The Love-Ballad...an integral and necessary part of any love story. No, really it actually was necessary, because Olivia Newton John's management stipulated that she have a solo in Grease. So not only was it necessary...it was contractually necessary...as in, no Solo for Liv, There'd be no Sandy in the movie.

So she and her management were assured that she would indeed have a solo. And the suits sweated as the filming progressed because they couldn't come up with a song for her or figure out where to put it when they did come up with it.

They were literally halfway through the shoot when John Farrar...Olivia's music director...came up with Hopelessly Devoted To You., and when he did come up with it, the movie's director Randal Kleiser wasn't in love with it...or the fact that he'd have to come up with a new scene to set it in. In fact, there was actually nowhere in the movie as written to put the song, so to place it he had to go over the film, rub his chin, consume coffee, rub his chin a bit more, and finally do a little tweaking here, a bit of tweaking there, and film a new scene to drop in between the tweaked bits. This process took long enough that Olivia Newton John's big solo was actually shot after filming for Grease had wrapped. An entire set had to be built for the scene as well, but all that extra effort yielded positive results.

Hopelessly Devoted To You snagged the only Oscar nomination that the film claimed...the nomination for Best Original Song...though they lost out to 'Last Dance' from 'Thank God It's Friday'.Olivia Newton John also performed the song live at the Academy Awards that night. The single also hit the charts in a big way, shooting up to #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Liv's solo, BTW, wasn't just filmed after the movie wrapped...Hopelessly Devoted To You also had the latest release date of any of the other hit singles from the sound track...September 9th

Even though it had a late release date as a single, the Top 40 stations kept it in constant rotation, and Hopelessly Devoted To You became one of The Summer of 78's favorite love songs, at least among the young ladies who had 'teen' suffixed to their age thirty-five years ago. 

Here in the Richmond area, that radio station would have been WRVQ...Q94...which had taken Top 40 duty away from WLEE only a couple of years earlier. Q94's still around, and is still the teen radio dial destination of choice in the Greater Richmond Area. Us refugees From The Seventies listen to 107.3 in Richmond, or 106.9 out of Hampton Roads to hear the oldies. And now and again you'll catch Olivia Newton John singing her solo from Grease on one of them.

So Enjoy!

Hopelessly Devoted To You, by Olivia Newton John.

And as a Bonus...Olivia Newton John's live performance of Hopelessly Devoted To You, from the 51^st Academy Awards on April 9^th, 1979.