Guess what? Kenny Loggins is having a moment.
You can thank the release of “Top Gun: Maverick" for that.
Once again, the title track Loggins wrote for the original is back on the big screen. You know it: Loggins' hit, "Danger Zone."
“It is strange. And exhilarating. Obviously, I get to talk to you again because of it. And I have a lot to thank Tom for. I met Tom for the first time when I did Jimmy Kimmel about five or six years ago. And we'd never met,” Loggins told me as we sat in his dressing room at Encore.
About that meeting with Cruise, “backstage I said to him, 'So I know you've optioned the new Top Gun. Is 'Danger Zone' gonna be in it?' And he said it wouldn't be Top Gun without 'Danger Zone.' And that's when I really got that the two are totally connected."
Loggins is a '70s and '80s rock icon whose fame and career have endured. We're talking today because he has just released a book called "Still Alright," which chronicles the twists and turns of his life - he was born in 1948....and takes us through the ups and downs of a music career that catapulted him to fame in the '70s. First with Loggins and Messina and then on his own.
Over the course of his career, he amassed 12 platinum albums, a pair of Grammys, and hits on “almost all the Billboard charts”, according to his website.
His body of work also includes some of Hollywood’s most recognizable hits, including “Footloose” and “I’m Alright” from Caddyshack.
“I think at this stage of my life, I felt like now's a good time to look back and see how I got here,” he says.
It was hard work, and good timing and luck. Speaking of luck, there was a time a van with recording equipment got stolen on the way to Loggins’ home in Santa Barbara. In that van were the master tapes of an album he was working on.
Then a miracle happened. Police found the van.
“We got the tapes back. I did about three all-nighters and I drove down to LA,” says Loggins, for an audition that would save his career. Columbia bosses loved it and decided not to fire him. The album became "Leap of Faith."
“And instead of dropping me from the label, it ended up being the only record of my career that had five singles,” he tells me.
Loggins is now 74. He tells me he will enjoy backing away a bit from the music business, but first he’s touring.
“Right now because of 'Top Gun' we plan to tour around this time anyway. No matter what happened to 'Top Gun,' we want to be exploiting the opportunity,” Loggins says.
Loggins appears for one night only Thursday at Wynn’s Encore Theater for an “intimate evening of stories and songs.”