Olivia Records
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Olivia Records was a collective founded in 1973 to record and market women's music. Olivia, named for the heroine in a pulp novel who fell in love with her headmistress at French boarding school, was the brainchild of ten radical feminists (the Furies Collective and Radicalesbians) living in Washington, DC who wanted to create a feminist organization with an economic base.
Olivia was co-founded by Judy Dlugacz.
In 1973, the collective put out a 45 with Meg Christian on one side and Cris Williamson on the other. Yoko Ono responded and said that she wanted to do a side project with Olivia, but the collective lovingly declined. Without hooking up with anyone high-profile, they made $12,000 with that 45, enough to put out singer Meg Christian's first record, and soon after, Williamson's groundbreaking album The Changer and the Changed.
Singer-songwriter Tret Fure was also closely associated with the label, as the label's first staff producer and sound engineer.
Olivia moved to Los Angeles to be to stay on top of the burgeoning music scene and then to Oakland. The remaining five women of the collective, who had been pooling their money and even living together for the past seven years, began to disperse. Olivia stopped putting out new records and instead performed a series of 15th anniversary concerts in 1988. The two concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York were the largest grossing concerts at that venue in its history. Yet, The New York Times barely mentioned the show.
Even though Olivia put out world music and salsa records, they were most successful with acoustic solo acts. Unable to reinvent themselves for the changing musical landscape for women, from riot grrl to Lillith Fair to Ani Difranco, Olivia could no longer sustain itself.
Olivia Records became Olivia, the lesbian cruise line, in 1988.
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