The song that changed Kevin Bacon’s life: “It’s important for me”
Long before he was that guy who was connected to everybody or the face of a phone company, Kevin Bacon was probably best known as the star of a hit movie musical.
In 1984, he played Ren McCormack in the film Footloose. A rebellious young teenager who loves to boogie, Ren comes to blows with a small-town minister, played by John Lithgow, who has outlawed dancing since the death of his son. The film was a major success, spawning two hit songs: Deniece Williams’ ‘Let’s Hear It for the Boy’ and the title track performed by Kenny Loggins that turned Bacon into a teen idol forevermore.
The Apollo 13 star’s musical interests aren’t solely limited to this one role. He’s a musician in real life, forming the band The Bacon Brothers in 1995 with his actual brother Michael. The group have released eight studio albums together. He’s spoken about his love of all kinds of music in the past, but there is one specific song that will always hold a special place in his heart.
When interviewed about his musical preferences by NME, Bacon was asked for the one song that “changed his life”. He chose the classic piece of wistful Americana ‘Everybody’s Talkin’, originally recorded by Fred Neil in 1968. You may know the song by a different artist, and that’s the one that Bacon holds in such high regard.
“I associate this with a scene in the movie Midnight Cowboy,” he explained. “It’s important for me because I saw these two actors who I knew were actors, but they were so convincing as a cowboy and a homeless guy. I thought to myself, ‘That’s what being an actor is’. It was the moment that I realised what I wanted to do—definitely life-changing.”
The version of the song Bacon is referring to is by Harry Nilsson. It features right at the start of the film, in which Jon Voight’s character Joe Buck quits a meagre dishwashing job to start a new life in the big city as a sex worker. Nilsson was originally asked to provide a new song for the film, which turned into ‘I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City’, and director John Schlesinger preferred his take on Neil’s original. Other songs considered to serve as the movie’s theme included Randy Newman’s ‘Cowboy’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Lay Lady Lay’, which he wrote believing it would make the soundtrack.
The version included in the film is slightly different from the first one Nilsson laid down for his album Aerial Ballet. Both of his takes are very different from Neil’s, which is much slower, more downbeat, and firmly within the parameters of country. Nilsson offers a more reflective take on the piece, his rambling finger-picking mimicking the never-ending wandering of a nomadic character, just like Joe Buck. It is a perfect fit for Midnight Cowboy, and the song and the film are now irrepressibly linked.
Bacon has gone on record about how Midnight Cowboy convinced him to become an actor, so, in a way, ‘Everybody’s Talkin’ really did change his life. Without the song, we wouldn’t have so many of his wonderful films. However, we would have also been spared the horrors of RIPD; maybe Harry Nilsson isn’t so great after all…
