Kick off your Sunday shoes

Sunday musical excursion #34

Kevin Bacon was 25 or 26 when he played the teenage schoolboy Ren McCormack in the film Footloose, in 1983-84. During the 80s, I had a lot of contact with American youth, working as I did in the European tourist industry as a coach tour guide. Most of our clients were American high school students. Of course, this kind of film was popular amongst them and, in 1984, I was somewhere between Bacon’s real age and the age of those youngsters.

We came into conversation about the movie and I probably said I’d enjoyed it, which I probably had. But I opined that the film’s premise was somewhat far-fetched: a ban on dancing anywhere in an entire town. My scepticism was met with frowns: not a bit of it, came the reply. There were indeed, it was reported, towns in the United States where dancing was prohibited. Somehow that didn’t assuage the feeling that the story was somewhat far-fetched, but one has to acquiesce in the facts, such as they are stated.

Kevin Bacon’s character comes to this small town, where religion has banned dancing (on the grounds that the physical contact between male and female that is thus necessitated leads to other, more intimate, contact between the sexes), from the big city of Chicago, with his recently divorced mother. They have to find their place and the incredulity expressed by me to these real US high school students about the premise of the story is precisely the incredulity that McCormack expresses to his new home’s school students upon learning of the prohibition. Y’see, as it turns out, Mr Bacon is a dab hand at some quite acrobatic dance moves. What’s more, he’s spotted a girl he’d like to try them out with, no less than the pastor’s daughter. Settle back for a hour and three-quarters of somewhat toe-cringing, corny but musically pleasing entertainment.

The reason I want, Ralph McTell-like, to take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of small-town America today is because of the scene depicted in the clip below, which is edited to the accompaniment of the title track from the film, Footloose, by Kenny Loggins. In the film itself, the scene is played to the track Never by Moving Pictures, and it’s interesting how the choreography fits both of these numbers. Be that as it may, the music itself is less important to us today than the choreography, which was danced solo not just by Mr Bacon but by three other stand-ins, who performed some of the more adventurous acrobatics.

Faded-blue jeans were the look of the 80s, probably partly due to Mr Bacon’s lithe moves in this particular pair. It was an era where, besides working the summers as a guide, I also worked nights at a filling station near Anniesland Cross in Glasgow, the BP station just at the railway bridge; and not infrequently a broom would be thrust into my hand to sweep the dust and rubbish that accumulated on the shop floor. It was an era of zick-zack credit card machines, we smoked in the shop and we sneaked our cars into the car wash during the quiet hours of the night. One colleague once took me for a ride on his moped round the forecourt and scared the bejesus out of me. They were happy, if reckless times. All in faded blue jeans: the broom was too much of a temptation, and I’d sing One man, one goal, one mission as my not-bad-really impersonation of Freddie Mercury (yes, I sported a moustache in those days). He wore faded blue jeans on occasion, as well.

It was a joyful era, so much so that I look back at this clip now and for perhaps the first time feel the frustration of Ren McCormack. How the ebullience of youth can be bottled up by an unreasonable administration that forbids perfectly normal things at a whim. Dancing: who would forbid dancing?

The film is inspired by the story of Elmore City, Oklahoma. That’s where, according to the musical, the wind comes sweeping down the plain. But it brings mixed emotions with it as it sweeps.

From Wikipedia:

The town had banned dancing since its founding in 1898 in an attempt to decrease the amount of heavy drinking. One advocate of the dancing ban was the Reverend from the nearby town of Hennepin, F. R. Johnson. He said, “No good has ever come from a dance. If you have a dance somebody will crash it and they’ll be looking for only two things—women and booze. When boys and girls hold each other, they get sexually aroused. You can believe what you want, but one thing leads to another.” Because of the ban on dancing, the town never held a prom. In February 1980, the junior class of Elmore City’s high school made national news when they requested permission to hold a junior prom and it was granted. The request to overturn the ban to hold the prom was met with a 2–2 decision from the school board when school board president Raymond Lee broke the tie with the words, “Let ’em dance.”

Well, stunt doubles and all, the clip is a release of pent-up frustration on the character McCormack’s part, the tune is a foot-tapper, say what you will, and the clip is an excursion to a time when the only option to escape authority’s oppression was to do acrobatics in an abandoned warehouse. I wonder how many folk are doing precisely that in modern America today.

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Footloose

Written by Kenny Loggins and Dean Pitchford

Performed by Kenny Loggins

From the 1984 album Footloose: Original Soundtrack of the Paramount Motion Picture