Cutting Loose

...thoughts on memories, dreams and time.

Simple crystal radio schematic. Photo Cliff Scholz

I’ll always remember the first time I heard Kenny Loggins singing his smash hit song, “Footloose” through the single earphone of my homemade crystal radio. I was in high school. I’ve thought about it for decades.

The problem is, near as I can tell, it never happened.

It couldn’t have happened.

Still, the scene as I remember it remains iconic. The very idea of being entranced by music coming through a primitive AM radio receiver registers with me today like the story my grandfather told about making ice deliveries by horse-drawn wagon, or when my dad shared about roller skating to movie theaters with friends down the sidewalks lining big avenues of 1920s and 30s Detroit. I know how positively outlandish it sounds.

Here’s a little backstory, the details of which I’m pretty confident of. As one of my projects for Electricity class out at Chelsea High School, I cannibalized some junked components from a previous student’s project and built myself a little AM radio. I used a toilet paper roll for the coil, winding the thin, enamel-coated wire around it and eventually holding the wire in place with a coating of greenish-yellow paint or lacquer that I found in our basement at home. Somehow, I obtained a germanium diode, possibly at Radio Shack. That was the “crystal” of the crystal set. It looked like a clear bead of plastic about the size of a grain of rice with wires sticking out both ends.

A previous student had already mounted a variable capacitor with a tuning knob onto a piece of metal tacked onto a five-by-six-inch piece of heavy plywood, which furnished a platform for the other components. From that I strung two longer wires, one leading out the window as an antenna, the other being a ground wire with an alligator clip on it that I attached to a metal heat vent in my bedroom.

So one day I set the radio up within reach of the window and the nearby heat vent. I put a triangle shaped cushion on the window seat so I could lean back on it and tuned to the best signal I could find, which was WJR, AM760. It was the only radio station I could clearly hear, but since I was basically listening to music and news through a toilet paper tube with no batteries or further amplification, I couldn’t afford to be picky.

Crystal radios are an analog technology. They are about as primitive as you can get and still call a device “electronic.” My dad told me back then that older sets used a piece of galena as the crystal or signal detector, and looking back I’m sort of surprised I didn’t try using galena instead of the commercially made diode. I’m pretty sure I had a small piece of it somewhere.

Anyhow, with a radio set this primitive, it seemed pretty cool to even be able to gather signals from the airwaves to get a weather report or listen to Ernie Harwell call a Tigers game. WJR, known as “The Great Voice of the Great Lakes” has a 50,000 watt transmitter that covers the region, and at night its signal can reach listeners all over the country. And for context, when I was in high school, WJR was about as “Middle America” as you could get.

So there I was curled up on the window seat with my little bare-bones plywood-mounted radio. Then, in my recollection, on comes Kenny Loggins singing his hit song, “Footloose.” I recall loving the upbeat message of the lyrics, the driving beat, the raucous twanging lead guitar, and the huge, full sound of the recorded instrumentation and backup vocals. Maybe especially because I was listening to WJR, it kinda surprised me.

It should have surprised me. Near as I can figure, that entire scenario would have taken place in about 1977, and the song I’m describing wasn’t released until about seven years later, in 1984. By that time I was living in Ypsilanti, Michigan. By then my parents had sold that house and moved to Windsor, Ontario. There’s simply no way I was listening to that song in that place on my little homemade radio.

Of course there are a number of explanations for the discrepancy, the simplest and therefore most likely being that somehow I just got mixed up: It wasn’t “Footloose” I heard, it was some other song. True, there aren’t a ton of songs of that era I can think of that would easily be confused with “Footloose.” Still, the fact remains: the song was released years after I had graduated high school and moved out of that house.

But the confusing thing is, while my memory isn’t perfect, I’m usually pretty good at this kind of recollection, and I remember so many details about all this. For example, regarding the radio project itself I recall my clumsy soldering of the earphone jack, and the challenge of winding the coil on the toilet paper tube with it trying to unravel. I remember the specific type of brass clips I used for attaching the ground and antenna wires. In my mind’s eye I can still see the multi-fin capacitor on the lefthand side of the rudimentary control panel.

All that, I am confident of. Thing is, I was also confident about the song I’d heard. How did I get it completely wrong?

Is it possible I just created this recollection in my mind? Then again, it might have been a dream. Because come to think, geez Louise, this was around the same time period in high school when I kept a dream journal and I recorded a dream featuring a song called “Big Country.” Thing was, I just looked it up and again, the song “Big Country” by the Scottish band of the same name was not to hit the U.S. charts until late 1983. The dream really stuck with me, because in it I was looking at the sheet music and somehow the notes on the page graphically depicted the mountains and landscapes of the big country they were singing about. So I remember feeling a little confused about it when the song came out and was a big transatlantic hit. When I first heard it I was like: “Uh…wait a second here.” And the song was right: Dreams really do stay with you. So, something along these lines may have been in play with Kenny Loggins’ song, too. I really don’t know.

And taking this one level deeper, as I write this today I find myself wondering why I might pick this song in particular to mis-remember, and having just re-listened to it after many years, what I notice is that it comes across as a kind of an emancipation proclamation, encouraging listeners to liberate ourselves from the confinement of conventionality and stultifying routine.

Bottom line here: I could have picked a worse song to mis-remember, and now that I’ve shared all this, seems my mis-remembering may have resulted in something memorable in itself.

Maybe it’s a sign I should make “Footloose” my personal anthem for 2026. As songs go, it wouldn’t be a bad one. And yeah, I don’t even know a Louise, but I’d be willing to get off my knees, lose my blues, kick off my Sunday shoes, and all the rest. Anyone else in?