Song #2 - "Dancin Shoes" by Nigel Olsson

 

One Song a Day #2: Nigel Olsson — “Dancin' Shoes”

🎵 Today's Song

Nigel Olsson — “Dancin' Shoes”

1978/1979

Chart performance

• Overall pop peak: #18

• Billboard Hot 100: #18 — 2 weeks

• Billboard Adult Contemporary: #8

• Billboard year-end rank: #96 for 1979

• Australia: #62

• Weeks charted: 16

• Weeks Top 20: 4

• Weeks Top 10: 0

• Weeks at peak: 2

Nigel Olsson at this point

• Charting record: 2nd of 3

• Top-20 hit: 1st of 1

• Top-10 hit: 0 of 0

• #1 pop hit: 0 of 0

• Previous Top-20: None

• Next Top-20: None

• Previous charting record: “Only One Woman” — #91

• Next charting record: “Little Bit of Soap” — #34

Retrospective standing

• GOAT overall: #6,330

• Among Nigel Olsson songs: #1 of 3

• Among Nigel Olsson Top-20 hits: #1 of 1

• GOAT points: 124,032

• Hot 100 portion of chart run: #18 peak — 16 weeks

Record details

• Entered chart: December 16, 1978

• Released: Late 1978

• Single: “Dancin' Shoes” / “Living in a Fantasy”

• Album: Nigel (1979)

• Songwriter: Carl Storie

• Producer: Paul Davis

• Running time: approximately 3:45–3:55

• Label: Bang

• Catalog number: Bang B-740

• Recording: Original 1978 Nigel Olsson/Bang recording produced by Paul Davis

Versions & title history

• Original or cover: Cover

• Faith Band (1978): #54 Hot 100 — original recording

• Nigel Olsson (1978): #18 — today's version

• Hughie Thomasson later recorded the song for his 1999 album So Low

Final rating: 28/100

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Sometimes the most interesting songs in a project like this aren't the great ones. They're the songs that make you wonder: How did this become a hit, and whatever happened to the people involved?

Nigel Olsson's “Dancin' Shoes” turned out to be one of those.

I was alive when this song was a hit, and I have almost no memory of it existing. When it came up as my second random selection, I immediately made another assumption that turned out to be completely wrong. A song called “Dancin' Shoes,” released at the height of the disco era? Surely this was going to sound something like KC & the Sunshine Band.

It is a ballad.

And a pretty slow one at that.

Wait, these are the dancin' shoes?

My first reaction wasn't particularly positive. The biggest thing that jumped out at me was Nigel Olsson's voice. It's not terrible, but it's not particularly strong, either. There isn't much range or personality to it.

Then I discovered who Nigel Olsson was.

He was Elton John's drummer.

Suddenly I could believe it.

Olsson wasn't just some anonymous drummer, though. He was a major part of Elton John's classic band, and his high voice was part of the backing-vocal blend with Dee Murray and Davey Johnstone heard on records like “Rocket Man,” “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” Olsson even came up with the famous wordless backing-vocal part on “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

That helped clarify something about his singing. He may have been a very good harmony singer without being a particularly compelling lead singer. Those are two different jobs.

And on “Dancin' Shoes,” there isn't much hiding the lead singer.

So what is this song actually about?

Reading the lyrics made the record stranger.

The first verse seems to describe someone who's depressed or down, only for a song to come along and temporarily take him away from everything. The next verse continues the general idea of music and dancing providing escape.

Then the third verse becomes much more concrete. He sees a girl and hopes to get her to dance with him.

The overall idea seems to be something like:

I'm feeling low → music provides an escape → dancing provides connection → maybe this girl will dance with me.

That's not an unusual theme. What's unusual is the music accompanying it.

Songs about dancing your troubles away usually provide the music that would theoretically allow you to do exactly that. They're fast. They're energetic. The record itself demonstrates the escape.

“Dancin' Shoes” doesn't.

I had a hard time imagining somebody having a terrible week at work, heading to a bar on Friday night, hearing this song and suddenly thinking, That's it. I'm hitting the dance floor.

Then another setting occurred to me.

A high-school gym.

And suddenly the song made considerably more sense.

The last slow dance in the gym

Imagine a late-'70s high-school dance. Basketball hoops folded away. Decorations hanging from the walls. Kids standing around the perimeter of the gym. Then the DJ puts on a slow song.

Now some nervous teenage boy has to decide whether he's going to cross the floor and ask the girl he's been watching to dance.

That feels like “Dancin' Shoes.”

In that context, the slow tempo isn't fighting against the lyrics anymore. The dancing isn't really about movement or partying. It's about getting close to somebody.

Even Olsson's somewhat tentative vocal works better in that setting. He doesn't sound like an especially charismatic guy confidently sweeping someone onto the dance floor. He sounds more like someone hoping he'll get the nerve to ask.

Thinking about the song this way made me appreciate it more.

It didn't make me particularly like it, but at least I could finally understand the emotional space where it belonged.

And then Paul Davis showed up

Another clue to the record's sound was sitting right there in the credits.

“Dancin' Shoes” was produced by Paul Davis, the same Paul Davis responsible for “I Go Crazy” and later “Cool Night.”

Once I knew that, I couldn't unhear it.

“Dancin' Shoes” sounds like it could have come from the same general world as “I Go Crazy”: extremely polished, restrained late-'70s soft rock, with none of the musical aggression you might expect from its title.

There was clearly an appetite for this kind of record. Acts such as Ambrosia, Player and England Dan & John Ford Coley were working in neighboring territory, while Davis himself was extremely successful with it.

The problem for Olsson is that I think virtually all of those acts did it better.

“Dancin' Shoes” is pleasant enough, but it doesn't have an especially memorable lead vocal, arrangement or hook. Its #18 peak feels about right: successful enough to be heard all over the country for a while, but not distinctive enough to become a permanent part of the era's musical memory.

Its modern footprint reflects that. I checked Spotify and found about 2.35 million streams for Olsson's recording. That's not nothing, but it's remarkably modest for a former national Top-20 hit.

Then I discovered that Nigel Olsson wasn't even the first person to record it.

Faith Band wore the shoes first

“Dancin' Shoes” was written by Carl Storie, lead singer of an Indianapolis group called Faith Band. Faith Band recorded the song first and took their own version to #54 on the Hot 100.

For a brief period, the two versions were actually climbing the chart simultaneously.

Olsson won decisively: #18 versus #54.

History has been even less kind to Faith Band. When I checked Spotify, Olsson's recording had 2,350,468 streams. Faith Band's had only 57,989.

That's roughly a 40-to-1 advantage for Olsson.

So naturally I listened to Faith Band's version.

And I think it's better.

There's more happening musically, and Carl Storie is a considerably more interesting singer. He has more range and more personality in his voice. Olsson's version is probably slicker and may have been more compatible with adult-contemporary radio, but Faith Band's version sounds more alive to me.

At least Storie had one consolation when another artist turned his song into the bigger hit: he wrote it. Olsson's success therefore generated songwriting and publishing royalties for Storie even while Faith Band lost the battle over which recording became famous.

Nigel Olsson's strange solo career

By this point, the song itself had become almost secondary to the story surrounding it.

Olsson hadn't simply decided one day that Elton John's drummer ought to make an album. He had actually started out as a singer before becoming a drummer, and he'd been attempting a solo career for years.

He released his first solo album in 1971. He recorded “Only One Woman” during downtime while working with Elton John, and that became a minor #91 hit. He made additional solo records, including one through Elton's Rocket Record Company.

Then Elton fired Olsson and bassist Dee Murray from his band in 1975.

Suddenly the solo career mattered a lot more.

Eventually Olsson landed with Bang Records and Paul Davis, and Nigel finally gave him genuine solo success. “Dancin' Shoes” reached #18, and the follow-up “Little Bit of Soap” reached #34. The album itself made the Billboard 200.

He followed it with another album, Changing Tides, in 1980.

And then something revealing happened.

Elton John invited Olsson and Dee Murray back.

Olsson later said that the success of his solo records had actually freaked him out. Dee Murray wanted to tour with him, but Olsson didn't particularly want to be the frontman.

Apparently my reaction to his singing wasn't entirely disconnected from Olsson's own sense of where he belonged.

He went back behind Elton's drums.

Olsson's broader career turned out to be remarkably interesting. Before Elton, he'd played with Plastic Penny, the Spencer Davis Group and even on part of Uriah Heep's debut album. After his solo period, he returned to Elton repeatedly and ultimately played thousands of concerts with him.

It's a strange career arc:

Singer → drummer → drummer for one of the biggest stars in the world → aspiring solo singer → genuine Top-20 solo artist → guy who realizes he'd rather be the drummer → decades more with Elton John.

And “Dancin' Shoes” was the one moment when his solo career really broke through.

Final verdict

Talking through “Dancin' Shoes” made me appreciate it more than I did when I first heard it.

Initially, I mostly heard a weak lead vocal attached to a surprisingly slow song with a title that made me expect disco. Thinking of it as a high-school slow-dance song helped considerably. In that setting, the lyrics, title and tempo finally seem to belong together.

But understanding a song better isn't the same thing as liking it.

I still find Olsson's vocal weak, the arrangement fairly anodyne, and the song itself less interesting than many of the soft-rock records competing for radio attention at the time. Hearing Faith Band's original didn't help Olsson's case, because I prefer both Carl Storie's singing and the more active arrangement.

So while the story surrounding “Dancin' Shoes” turned out to be surprisingly fascinating, the record itself remains something I don't particularly care for.

Rating: 28/100.

For a largely forgotten mid-level pop hit that I barely remembered existed, though, it gave me an awful lot to talk about.

And that's exactly what I was hoping this project would uncover.