03/31/2025
On this 31st day of March 1984 Kenny Loggins' "Footloose" hits #1 in America and #6 in the UK. It's the title song to the soon-to-be-famous film where Kevin Bacon brings dancing to a small town in the South. More details on the Epic Oldies FB page and "GP's 80s Rewind" FB page.
This was the theme from the movie of the same name starring Kevin Bacon in his breakout role; Rob Lowe and Tom Cruise also tried out for the part. He plays a teenager who moves to a small town where dancing is illegal. Dean Pitchford, who wrote the screenplay to the film and the lyrics to all the songs in the movie, got the idea from a 1979 newspaper article about the town of Elmore City, Oklahoma, where a law against dancing was on the books since the 1800s. The 14 high school seniors decided they wanted a prom, and got the town council to overturn the antiquated interdiction so they could dance. Pitchford visited Elmore City to research his screenplay, where he spent a week immersing himself in their culture.
Kenny Loggins was a big star and helped make Caddyshack a huge success with his song "I'm Alright" in 1980. In 1982, he had a hit with "Don't Fight It," which he wrote with Pitchford and Steve Perry, who also sang on the track. Getting Loggins for the title track was huge for Pitchford, who had never written a screenplay before and was trying to sell a movie based around nine songs - not a popular concept at the time. Losing Loggins could have derailed the entire project, and when Kenny broke a rib from a fall he took at a show in Provo, Footloose almost met its doom. Loggins had to take time off to recover, and the only chance for Dean to write with him was during his engagement at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he was performing before heading to Asia. Said Pitchford: "Paramount was chomping at the bit. They wanted to know that Kenny Loggins was going to be doing the title song, and if he wasn't then we had to move on and get somebody else. So it became absolutely vital that as soon as Kenny was back on his feet, I had to go and seal the deal, and the only place that we could seal the deal, he was going to attempt to get himself back on his feet in Tahoe, play one last engagement in the States, and then go off to Asia.
So it was decided that although Kenny lived at the time in the L.A. area, I should fly to Tahoe, and during the days when he was playing a show at night, we would try to at least get the beginning of a song so that I could go back to Paramount and say, 'Look, Kenny Loggins is pregnant, he is on board.' So I flew up to Tahoe in January of 1983, I think. I flew up sick, and I proceeded to get sicker and sicker and sicker while I was there. I had strep throat, as it turned out, but I could not let on to Kenny that I had strep throat, because I didn't want him going, 'Ooo, I can't come to your room, we can't be doing that.' And he was indeed coming to my room, because his wife Eva was there, and they had three kids at the time. I think she had given birth to their third, Isabella, so there were two little boys and a baby in his room. So that was not a place to work. So each day he would come to my room with a guitar and he was still taped up, with gauze and tape around his midriff while his rib was healing. He would show up with a guitar and he would ease himself into a chair, and it was obvious that sitting down was painful - if he was standing he was fine.
A key songwriting device on this one is the use of various names: Louise, Jack, Marie and Milo. Marie was Dean Pitchford's mother; Milo was Loggins' idea because he liked the sound of the vowels. Pitchford explained: "Once I had cracked the back of the song with the 'Oo-wee, Marie, shake it shake it for me,' once we had the idea of using names throughout the chorus and calling out, 'Jack, get back, come on before we crack,' once that had been set up as a convention, he threw out Milo because he liked the way that the words felt in his mouth. And there may have been one or two other lines that he came up with. And he did that on several other songs that we wrote. Like, we did a song for his next album called 'Let There Be Love,' and he gave me a couple of not even lines, at least the ends of lines. The word that he wanted the line to end on, or the word that he wanted the high note to be on. So it was like somebody stepping up to a canvas and putting a couple of strokes of paint on and saying, 'Okay, now go finish the painting,' and you having to figure out how to incorporate the strokes of paint into the ultimate picture."
The single was released a few weeks ahead of the movie, and the video, which used scenes from the film, got a lot of airplay on MTV, building anticipation for the release. By the time the film hit theaters, the song was already in the Top 40, and it went to #1 on March 31, 1984, where it remained for three weeks. MTV played a key role in marketing the film, and movie studios tried to follow this template, enlisting major acts to record a song for their movies and producing slick videos with scenes from the movie, essentially creating a preview.
This was the biggest hit and the only #1 for Loggins. It exposed him to an international audience when the movie did well outside of America. Two years later, Loggins contributed "Danger Zone" to the Top Gun soundtrack. Loggins stated in 2007 that of all his soundtrack hits, this is the one he most likes performing. "It's such a lighthearted tune. It's like doing a Chuck Berry song every night," said Loggins.
Kevin Bacon revealed to Conan O'Brien that he bribes DJ's at weddings with cash so they won't play the song. "I go to the disc jockey and hand him $20 and say, 'Please don't play that song,'" he told the talk show host. "Because, first off, a wedding is really not about me. It's about the bride and groom."
This was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song but lost to "I Just Called To Say I Love You," Stevie Wonder's song for the Gene Wilder movie The Woman In Red.
Here we go with 'Footloose"!
Official Video for ”Footloose” by Kenny LogginsListen to Kenny Loggins: https://KennyLoggins.lnk.to/listen_YDWatch more videos by Kenny Loggins: https://Kenn...