Fact #158487

Kenny Loggins : That song was a lucky accident. Dean Pitchford, the author of the screenplay, was a good friend of mine. He and I had written a couple of songs together, and he came to me with the screenplay and asked if I would help him write a couple of tunes which would help him place the screenplay with a movie company. I liked the screenplay well enough, and he was a buddy, so we sat down and wrote a couple tunes based on the actions in the screenplay.

Dean Pitchford : He’d make notes and we’d talk about the characters … he was very much around when the whole thing was coming together.

Kenny Loggins : I remember him visiting me backstage somewhere, I think it was Lake Tahoe, when my ribs were cracked. I had broken them in Salt Lake City, Utah, just as I was going on stage. It was a dark hall, about ten thousand people, and as I was going on from stage left, in the wings, back of the amps, onto the stage, I took one step too many in the dark, and walked off the edge, fell about ten feet onto some packing cases, and then I was laid there in the dark and nobody knew where I was. I kept yelling for somebody to come and help me, but the audience was screaming so no-one could hear me. I was there for about ten minutes.

So anyway, we ended up writing the song in Lake Tahoe. I was in extreme pain from my ribs, but I didn’t realise right away that Dean was also in pretty bad shape, with a serious infection.

Dean Pitchford : I couldn’t let Kenny know, because I didn’t want him to say, ‘Whoa! He’s got strep throat, and I’ve got a show to do.’ So it was a very funny scene, because Kenny would come to my hotel room and he’d sit there, and I was sitting in the corner, trying desperately not to look like I was running a temperature.

Kenny Loggins : The ideas emerged after Dean showed me the screenplay. I was trying to capture the spark, the joy of rock’n’roll as I grew up with it and also what it was intended to be for that moment in the screenplay. We initially saw the song as an opening credit, it was only later that it was moved into a dance scene. Actually, I think we wrote it originally for the bar-room scene.

It was a melody that I came up with backstage one night while I was waiting to go on. I used to carry a little hand-held tape recorder everywhere with me in those days to capture every idea I had.

Dean Pitchford : Somehow, we wrote Footloose in four days in this unbelievable pain.

Kenny Loggins : There was nothing in production when we wrote the songs but I guess it did indeed help him, because the next thing I knew, about a year later, it was being made into a movie, and then it was the biggest movie of that summer. I think the song helped the film to start with, but then that reversed and it got to where the film was helping the song.

It was Footloose that really established my solo career. Loggins And Messina was my first career, really, and we had Mama Don’t Dance, and about six years of success. Then I went solo and started over, as an opening act for Fleetwood Mac, and my duet with Stevie Nicks, Whenever I Call You Friend, helped tremendously.

Footloose itself did not overshadow my earlier work but, looking back on it, the subsequent movie songs did come to overshadow my earlier work, things like Danger Zone, Meet Me Half Way, For The First Time … I had a string of movie hits which seemed to present the image to radio that I was a hit-driven act, rather than an albums act, which was how I saw myself. So when the hits stopped coming, suddenly my albums stopped selling. Before I had the hits, my albums sold well. That became a difficult stigma to overcome.

There’s a sort of unspoken contract with your audience to not become wildly successful. It’s a syndrome you see very clearly in jazz, that as long as you’re struggling and poor, you’re cool, but as soon as you become successful, you’re not interesting any more.

All artists come to a time of reckoning where they have to, sooner or later, define themselves by what they do rather than by how they are perceived. It’s a big jump for pop artists, meaning artists who get into music because they want to become popular – the epitome of that would be someone like Michael Jackson, who is obviously driven by popularity. It’s ironic the way we look to pop acts now for any kind of spiritual leadership because most of the really fucked-up people I know are artists. Performers are basically insecure people because – why do you become a performer? – you do it to get the entire world to applaud for you. Anybody who needs the world to applaud for them is not particularly secure.

So, sooner or later you have to come to a place where your definition of yourself is not based on your sales …
(Source : not known)