THE ‘GREASE’ SOUNDTRACK TURNS 45

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.

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