Disneyland, Mormons and Elton John's Drummer

Nigel Olsson - "Dancin' Shoes" (1978)

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!

As I mentioned back when I launched this thing, one of my intentions with Jagged Time Lapse is to share bits of my musical-memoir-in-progress with my paid subscribers, whenever I have a new chapter that feels ready for an audience.

I don’t yet have a working title for the book, but the concept is similar to what my friend and colleague Josh Wilker did with his wonderful Cardboard Gods. Except where Josh used baseball cards from the 1970s as a means to make sense of his past, I’m using 45 rpm singles as a series of windows into my turbulent adolescence — a period of my life which coincided with some of the greatest music ever heard on AM (and FM) radio, as well as some of the absolute worst.

All the previous chapters I’ve completed for the book — like the one about why a Spyro Gyra single makes me think of head lice, or the one about how cheap steak, acid casualties and Silver Convention’s “Fly, Robin, Fly” are irrevocably fused in my memories with The Guns of Navarone, or the one about how the film Grease mirrored my hellish entry to junior high — can be found in the Jagged Time Lapse archive, which also contains a ton of free reads on a wide variety of music-related subjects.

If you’d like to read these posts in full (and also have full access to the JTL archive), just five bucks a month or $50 a year will get you all the written “Dan Epstein content” you can handle, and will support my writing in the process. Sounds like the proverbial “win-win,” right? Plus, a paid JTL subscription gets you full access to the monthly CROSSED CHANNELS music podcast I’m doing with my friend and colleague Tony Fletcher. You can listen to a preview of our sixth episode below — our seventh will be along in June!

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Blondie: America's Finest Pop Band?

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And if you’re already a paid subscriber to this Substack, please accept my sincere thanks from the bottom of my ink-stained, music loving heart. And now, on to the latest chapter…

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If I had to choose one year’s chart hits to listen to in perpetuity at the expense of hits from all other years, I would probably go with 1979. Not that it would be an easy choice — 1966, ‘67 and ‘68 are all pretty mighty contenders — but 1979 produced a bumper crop of AM radio gems ranging from new wave and early synth pop to disco and funk to hard rock and power pop.

Plus, I have a pet theory that analog recording techniques reached their peak around 1979, before the industry started transitioning to digital; and furthermore, there’s the nostalgia factor. I was alive from 1966 on, but I wasn’t aware of the radio until at least age four; in 1979, however, I was absolutely glued to L.A.’s big AM pop stations, and thus was able to hear just about every one of that year’s Top 100 hits in real time.

Which is not to say that all of 1979’s pop hits were anywhere close to pure gold. A brief scan of the US Top 40 Singles for the week ending February 17th reveals the presence of a number of songs that I never, ever need to hear again, including the Top 5 entries by Rod Stewart, Village People and Gloria Gaynor, even if I did enjoy them all to some degree at the time. And then there are the songs that I loathed from the get-go, like the grotesquely maudlin hit ballads by Barry Manilow (“Somewhere in the Night”) and Melissa Manchester (“Don’t Cry Out Loud”) — and the black holes of utter blandness like Chicago’s “No Tell Lover,” Ian Matthews’ “Shake It” and (maybe worst of all) Nigel Olsson’s “Dancin’ Shoes”.

I had no idea at the time who Nigel Olsson was; maybe Casey Kasem had mentioned on his American Top 40 broadcasts that Olsson had been the drummer in Elton John’s band from 1970 to 1975 and had been pursuing a solo career of his own since then, but if so I’d missed it. I also didn’t know that “Dancin’ Shoes” was a cover, or that it had far outsold the simultaneously-released original by Indianapolis’ Faith Band. All I knew was that “Dancin’ Shoes” seemed like an absurdly perverse title for a song this drearily sleepy. “Put on your dancin’ shoes”?!? More like take ‘em off and get comfy, because you’re gonna be sawin’ logs in dreamland well before this song drags itself to its agonizingly modulated conclusion…

“Dancin’ Shoes” always makes me think of Allen, a kid I became friends with shortly after enrolling at L.A.’s John Burroughs Junior High in January ‘79. I’m not sure how we met — we didn’t have any classes together — but by early February we were often hanging out together during lunch break. Allen was a recent arrival as well, from somewhere in Northern California, and like me he didn’t look like an L.A. kid. He wore his sandy blond hair in a tousled, side-parted manner not unlike a less-mushroomy version of Scott Walker’s late-sixties ‘do; and he wore the same light blue zip-up hoodie to school every day, as well as beat-up blue jeans that he had grown a little too tall for and Sears “Winner II” running shoes.

On another kid (like, well, me), Allen’s look might have been an instant ticket to loserdom, but he was so comfortable in his own skin that it didn’t matter. Cute girls flirted with him constantly; and while I was still learning to talk to girls without my tongue involuntarily tying itself into knots, Allen could banter with them with ease, though their attentions never seemed to go to his head.

Allen seemed a little more “mature” than the rest of us; unfailingly polite, he never indulged in any of the shit-talking or one-upmanship that were a regular part of my interactions with other friends, and he would always go out of his way to make sure that other, shyer kids were included in our schoolyard conversations or activities. I’m not sure if Allen had been (or ever became) a camp counselor, but he would have made a great one.

I invited Allen to come over and hang out after school sometime, and one day around the middle of February he did just that, taking the RTD bus with me down Wilshire to the Spanish-style Fairfax District duplex where I lived with my mom, sister and my aunt. As usual, the bus home was filled with rowdy older stoner/skater types; I was usually kind of intimidated by them, but Allen acted completely unfazed by their presence.

It was a rainy afternoon, so we mostly just hung out in my room and chatted while occasionally tossing a Nerf basketball through the small hoop above my bedroom door. My clock radio was tuned to KRLA, which as usual was interspersing oldies (the corniness of Tab Hunter’s “Young Love” cracked us both up) with contemporary pop hits. “Ugh, I hate this song,” I was grumbling as “Dancin’ Shoes” came on, when Aunt Geri poked her head through the door.

“Daniel, there’s an emergency phone call for your friend.”

It was Allen’s mom. I guess she’d tried calling our place, but my aunt had been on the phone; we didn’t have “call waiting” in those days, so Allen’s mom had gotten sick of hearing the busy signal and instructed the operator to place an emergency call. At first I was concerned, but when Allen got off the phone and came back to my room, he reassured me that there was no real emergency; she and his sister returning home earlier than expected from an appointment with a “healer” and wanted to pick him up on the way.

“Healer?”

“Yeah,” he explained. “My sister has cancer, so my mom takes her to a healer who prescribes supplements for her.”

While that sounded a little weird to me, I was actually more preoccupied by the notion that someone with cancer was coming to our house. I had never known anyone with this dread disease, and I didn’t know what to expect or how to behave in their presence. Would she be on the verge of wasting away? Was I supposed to say something about it, or not mention it at all?

As it turned out, I couldn’t have said anything even if I’d wanted to. Allen’s sister was in her late teens, and absolutely the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen up close: Tall and well-formed, with pale skin, long wavy light brown hair and large liquid blue eyes, she practically floated into our apartment like a cloud of ethereal loveliness, and my tongue all but evaporated in my mouth at the sight of her. But even if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise; because from the moment they arrived it was clear that Allen’s mom was a talker.

As I remember her now, Allen’s mom was about six feet tall and towered over both of her not-at-all-short children, though her height may have been artificially inflated by the gigantic size of her personality. Like Minnie Pearl on amphetamines, she talked a mile a minute in a high-pitched country-tinged twang that — combined with her rawboned features, bunned-up hair and unflattering floral dress — made her seem like a pioneer woman completely undaunted by the fact that she’d suddenly found herself in the late 20th century. Practically before we’d even been introduced, she swanned through our entire apartment, giving herself a self-guided tour of the place and talking all the while about the neighborhood, L.A. traffic, her daughter’s appointment, etc. She then proceeded to herd her kids out the door, barely giving Allen a chance to say goodbye — though not before effusively thanking my mom for our hospitality to her son, and inviting me to come with their family to Disneyland the following weekend.

To be honest, I was really more of a Magic Mountain guy at this point. The last time I’d been to Disneyland was the summer of 1974, when my mom and her hippie friends had been aggressively hassled by Disney security. We’d left the park to have lunch — we couldn’t afford the overpriced concessions, so we’d brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with us and left them in the car — and a couple of guards took notice and followed us out to the parking lot, where they brusquely searched our vehicle for “dope”.

That experience had left a pretty bad taste in my mouth as far as “The Happiest Place on Earth” was concerned, but then Allen’s family didn’t exactly seem like the type who’d be profiled by the Mickey Mouse Gestapo. At school the next day, I told him I was in; he said I should stay over at his house on Friday night, as his family liked to get to Disneyland as soon as the gates opened in the morning.

I was more right than I knew about Allen’s family. Within minutes of my mom dropping me off at their house — a dilapidated old craftsman in what would later be designated as the Historic West Adams District — it became clear that they were setting up the place for some kind of church gathering. “Would you test me on my presentation?” Allen asked me. “Uh, sure,” I answered, and spent the next twenty minutes following along on a mimeographed piece of paper as Allen held forth on the meaning of the “Word of Wisdom” that God had supposedly revealed to Joseph Smith. Allen and his family were Mormons.

The rest of the evening was spent in their living room with about a dozen other “elders” and community members. Allen gave his presentation to the group, which was very well-received, and then everyone sat around discussing various LDS Church issues, beliefs and upcoming events involving their local congregation. In the past, I had been to the homes of friends whose families were more religious than mine, but all that usually meant was that they said grace together before dinner. And while I was definitely made to feel welcome on this particular evening, and not at all put on the spot about my own religious beliefs or affiliations, I was simply bored out of my skull. I thought we’d be spending the evening watching The Rockford Files or listening to music, like we usually did on Friday nights at my house, and I kept waiting for Allen to tell me that we could head upstairs and watch TV or play a game or something. But we were stuck in the living room until it was time for bed.

That night, as Allen and I lay in the darkness of his unadorned bedroom, we talked about his noticeably absent dad (he’d died several years earlier) and girls we “liked” at school, but neither of us mentioned the evening that we’d just experienced. I think he felt a little embarrassed for making me sit through it, and I was more than a little annoyed at having been given no warning of what I was in for. But Allen was a good guy, and it was clear that he was quite sincere about his beliefs, so I saw no point in busting his balls about it. What was that line from “Dancin’ Shoes” about “too many long conversations”? I’d had enough for one night, thanks.

Disneyland postcard, 1979.

The next day was a lot more fun. Allen’s mom was super-protective of his sister, so they moved more or less in lockstep, but Allen and I were allowed to run around Disneyland on our own. This was back in the days of Disney ticket books, and Allen’s mom — who apparently took her kids to the Magic Kingdom on a fairly regular basis — had several paper shopping bags full of partially-used ticket books and single tickets that hadn’t been redeemed. Allen and I each grabbed a handful, and whenever we ran out we’d somehow find his mom again and replenish our stash.

The much-prized “E” tickets were few and far between, of course, and at one point Allen and I had a fairly drawn-out argument over which ride we should redeem our last ones for — I wanted to do Space Mountain again, and he wanted to see the Country Bear Jamboree. (I eventually gave in.) It was a grey and drizzly day, so the crowds were fairly sparse for a Saturday, which meant we rarely had to wait long for any of the rides; there were even moments, like when we took a late-afternoon raft over to Tom Sawyer’s Island, where it really felt like the park was our own personal playground.

“Boys! Boys!” It was early evening by this time, and Allen and I were over at the shooting gallery in Frontierland; it had been a few years since I’d won back-to-back air riflery trophies at the Ann Arbor YM/YWCA, and I was pleased to find that my marksman’s eye was still intact. But the unmistakable holler of Allen’s mom interrupted our shooting session.

“Boys! Boys!” she shouted again, running breathlessly up to us. “You’ll never guess who I just met — Chief Dan George!”

Apparently, the Native American actor, author, poet and activist — who’d been nominated for an Academy Award for Little Big Man, which I hadn’t seen yet, but whom I knew from his role with Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales — was visiting Disneyland with his family, and Allen’s mom had just enjoyed a lovely conversation with them. “Oooh, there he is now!” she said, pointing to a man in a wheelchair about 50 yards away. “Come on, boys — I’ll introduce you to him!”

It would have been unsettling enough to meet a famous Native American in the context of Frontierland, a sanitized, fun-for-the-whole-family interpretation of the Old West with few references to indigenous peoples beyond the Indian Trading Post and “Injun Joe’s Cave” on Tom Sawyer’s Island. And knowing what I know now about the extremely complicated history between Native Americans and Mormons, Allen’s mom fussing over Chief Dan George would have been cringey enough in any setting… even if it had actually been Chief Dan George.

But it wasn’t. The small, wizened, white-haired old Native American man in the wheelchair certainly resembled him, but even I could see that that he was far older and far more infirm than the famous actor, who was still making movies at this point. I quickly surmised that Allen’s mother had so thoroughly steamrolled his companions with her enthusiastic gushing that none of them — including the old man himself, who could barely speak — had been able to interrupt her long enough to let her know that she had the wrong guy. At her insistence, I shook the old man’s small and frail hand; “Nice to meet you,” I told him, but I really wanted to say, “I’m sorry.”

All the way home, Allen’s mom talked incessantly about Chief Dan George, crowing about how amazing it had been to meet him. She finally, mercifully dropped me off in front of my family’s place; I bid them goodnight, and told Allen I’d see him at school on Monday. I walked through our front door, and was immediately greeted by the slow, soggy chorus of “Dancin’ Shoes” as it wended its miserable way through the house from the radio in our dining room, where my mom, aunt and sister were playing Yahtzee. I still hated the song; but at that moment, hearing it combined with the clatter of the Yahtzee dice and the laughter of my family felt like the most comforting, welcoming thing in the world.

Allen and I never really hung out again after that.

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