SOUNDTRACK: 'Dirty Dancing' With Joanna Robinson

Joanna Robinson joins Yasi to break down one of the defining soundtracks of the ’80s: 'Dirty Dancing.' They get into the real-life tension between Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze that became undeniable on-screen chemistry, the soundtrack’s seamless blend of ’60s nostalgia and ’80s pop hits, Swayze’s surprise turn as a recording artist with the hit song ‘She’s Like the Wind,’ and how the music helped transform a modestly budgeted film into a full-blown cultural phenomenon. CREDITS:Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalekGuest: Joanna Robinson @jowrotethisProducer: Rob SundermannEditor: Adrian BridgesAdditional Production Supervision: Justin SaylesTheme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  For decades, a shadowy organization called The Lemonati has kept lemon on top and lime in the shadows. Look around, lemon-forward sodas, even lemon-forward songs. We ran the tracks, slowed them down, reversed them, and squeezed out the truth.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  That's lemon propaganda right there. But now, 7-Up is fighting back with their new Lime Lemon Soda. Join the 7-Uprising. Flip the sip.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  What's with this band, anyway? I don't get it, can you please explain? Wait, like, "Bandplain"? Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. I really hate this band! Whatever, I'm their biggest fan. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. Bandplain!

• 1:45Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bandplain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain, usually, a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode, we're doing 80's soundtracks, babe. And we are talking... We're talking about Dirty Dancing. Joining me today, I'm thrilled. Nobody puts Joanna Robinson in the corner. Welcome to the show, Joanna.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. What a thrill, what an honor, what a joy.

• 2:10Yasi Salek?

  We've not podcasted together. Is that true? Did I make that up?

• 2:13Speaker 04

  No, I think that's true. It's just like-

• 2:15Yasi Salek?

  Which seems crazy.

• 2:15Speaker 04

  We just like to talk to each other off microphone, but now can people see what it's like.

• 2:19Yasi Salek?

  And if only we could monetize that.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  It's true. Usually, we do have cameras on, just no microphones.

• 2:24Yasi Salek?

  Right, exactly. We just like to film ourselves for posterity.

• 2:27Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 2:28Yasi Salek?

  Um, so Joanna, before we really dive in, before we take the swan dive to the, to the peak of Dirty Dancing, I asked you one day, I said, what is your favorite 80s film soundtrack? And I think you didn't hesitate, you didn't take a beat. You were like, it's Dirty Dancing.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  Did you say favorite? I don't know about favorite.

• 2:49Yasi Salek?

  Did I say best?

• 2:50Speaker 04

  Best, I think.

• 2:51Yasi Salek?

  To me, those are interchangeable because I do not believe in objective bests. This is sort of like a hill I'll die on.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  I think my brain, when someone says best, goes to sort of impactful.

• 3:03Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 3:03Speaker 04

  And so is this the number one soundtrack that I personally would put on from the 80s if I needed a mood boost or something like that? Not necessarily. Does this feel like the 80s soundtrack to me? Yes, it does.

• 3:17Yasi Salek?

  Out of curiosity, and perhaps for a future episode, what is your favorite?

• 3:20Speaker 04

  It's a great question. I need to think about it. I need to think about that a little more.

• 3:23Yasi Salek?

  Take your time. Take your time.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  But that's why my answer was so quick, because I was just sort of like, it's Dirty Dancing.

• 3:28Yasi Salek?

  It's Dirty Dancing.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:31Yasi Salek?

  I was really happy you said that. We did, I think, here's the thing. I'm ungovernable. Okay?

• 3:38Speaker 04

  That's a fact.

• 3:39Yasi Salek?

  And we did do an 80s soundtrack Hall of Fame with Chris Ryan and Sean Finacy.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  I've heard of them.

• 3:45Yasi Salek?

  And it, yes, those two men, they work here. And it was a, it was a-

• 3:53Yasi Salek?

  It was a Wild West kind of episode where I was sort of trying to establish that I wanted soundtracks that were of their time in a way that like spoke to the music of the time.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 4:06Yasi Salek?

  And then I completely threw all that out the window and decided I just wanted to do good soundtracks. So they had to suffer my bizarre set rubric that they were like trying to get around. And then now we're just doing whatever we want.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  But you did have this question where you where you were sort of like Dirty Dancing, okay, is that really an 80s soundtrack when there are songs from multiple decades on this soundtrack and it is a heavy nostalgia playlist?

• 4:33Yasi Salek?

  But I feel like, and poor Sean and Krista tried to make this point and I just bulldozed over them, but I'll now say I was wrong. You can go ahead and play that in your house.

• 4:43Speaker 04

  Make it your ringtone.

• 4:44Yasi Salek?

  Make it your ringtone, whatever you need. Kind of a hallmark of the 80s was the nostalgia for the 50s and 60s.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 4:55Yasi Salek?

  So it does kind of make sense to cover a soundtrack. But I would make the argument that this soundtrack also has some extremely 80s moments.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  It does. So can I talk about why this is?

• 5:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Let me just say, when I think Dirty Dancing soundtrack.

• 5:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  I think the two cassettes, because my sister had the original and more Dirty Dancing.

• 5:18Yasi Salek?

  Well, because it's actually, we'll talk, we'll get into it later, but it's crazy what they did leave off of the original one where I was like, why did you not put this on?

• 5:23Speaker 04

  I know. Was it a money thing? I don't, I don't know.

• 5:25Yasi Salek?

  I think it might have been a disc length thing.

• 5:27Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 5:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  Cassette length.

• 5:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, cassette length, totally.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  Um, but the two cassettes, Dirty Dancing, more Dirty Dancing. And like, I, I, I love listening to people talk about, you know, I was talking to people here in the studio about like their relationship with Dirty Dancing. And it's always like, oh, my mom, oh, my sister, oh, my whatever, you know, or, or myself. And it's the ultimate sleepover movie, right? And if people have watched Dirty Dancing in the 80s, they watched it 1 million times.

• 5:57Yasi Salek?

  I've seen it 100,000 times.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  You know, and it's, to me, the ultimate, like, big. Sister movie like, you know, I was definitely like the right age to be into Dirty Dancing, but it was definitely like my older sister was really into Dirty Dancing. And so then I by proxy was, and when I think about the eighties, I do think about like sixties and fifties music like it's, it was just so, we listened to a ton of that growing up in my house. And so, cause it's my parents' music and that's what we listened to. So.

• 6:24Yasi Salek?

  What's so mind blowing to me, and I bring this up every like third band's land because I can't deal with it is that, so that's like thirty, twenty to thirty years. Going back, we are now in a place.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  I don't want to talk about it.

• 6:41Yasi Salek?

  Where Nirvana.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:42Yasi Salek?

  Is almost older.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:45Yasi Salek?

  Than thirty years. It not almost is older than thirty years.

• 6:49Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 6:50Yasi Salek?

  So like, that would be like what Be My Baby was in the eighties. Much newer than what Nirvana is to us now.

• 7:00Speaker 04

  It's really depressing that that Back to the Future math happens all the time where you're just sort of like, we did Back to the Future now. And then you feel like dust in your bones or whatever. But, um.

• 7:08Yasi Salek?

  My joints.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  But like, do you, and you're the expert, uh, I am not on, on all things music, but like, don't you think our culture works a little differently than it did in the eighties in terms of like the nostalgia blur? It's a little less like this is my parents' music and more because of the way we find music now or stream music now, people have less of an idea of when it came from. You know, and it's just sort of like a great song. Oh, that's an old song. I didn't even realize, you know?

• 7:39Yasi Salek?

  I have to say, I feel proud that I've Kaiser Sose'd the world into thinking that I'm an expert on music or anything.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  You are.

• 7:47Yasi Salek?

  But I'll take it. Yeah. Well, like one of my, one of my theories is always that like the time stopped in a sense when the internet happened.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:55Yasi Salek?

  When, especially when the internet became common usage, like in every home. Because. Things stopped progressing as quickly, I think, because there's so much referen- referencing.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:08Yasi Salek?

  Like, if you think about punk coming around in like the, you know, mid seventies, that was such a bleep from what had come before.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:16Yasi Salek?

  And now we've kind of done so much of everything. It's so rare to be like, wow, did you hear that? Like, complete, like, genre-breaking thing. And to your point, yeah, people just listen to music and like, don't place it in context as much, because they can just grab it from the internet or it's served to them in a TikTok, and they don't really think to be like, did that come out in 1992 or last year?

• 8:39Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. Like, something like, you know, Running Up The Hill or, you know, the Kate Bush phenomenon. It's like, I think a lot of young people don't know that that's an older song. I don't want to speak for the young people, why would I dare do that? But like, I do think that, like, if you get served a song on TikTok, and you're like, this sounds great, and I have no context for when it came from, and then you just search it on, like, search it on Spotify, and Spotify isn't like, throwing the date in your face, and then you just don't really know necessarily. Or like, in terms of studying pop culture from before, because we have access to everything, when we were growing up, we had to have like, Behind The Music, or I Love The Eighties, or all these other things to sort of-

• 9:17Yasi Salek?

  A book.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  Or a book, a dusty book, or microfiche, to like, understand what came before. And now it's just sort of like, always there, and it just becomes stupier and more amorphous, in positive ways and negative ways.

• 9:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. No, I think that's really true. I'm interested in talking about this soundtrack as like, a time capsule of the eighties, and also just like, I wanted an excuse to talk about the film.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  Why not?

• 9:44Yasi Salek?

  Because I love it. It's not a film podcast, but it's a music film.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  Well, you're doing soundtrack, so it'll be kind of a film podcast for a little bit, right?

• 9:52Yasi Salek?

  And I think, I don't know if this is like, true of all of the ones we're gonna do, but it feels true of most of them. Like, a lot of movies maybe have a soundtrack, and you wouldn't think of it or don't care about it, because that movie doesn't make music one of the main characters. But most of the best soundtrack movies do feature music as one of the main characters, and I think that's, that's probably the best rubric for this.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:16Yasi Salek?

  And this one obviously does.

• 10:17Speaker 04

  Clearly.

• 10:18Yasi Salek?

  Thank God it wasn't a musical, though I would not be having this conversation with you right now. Because that I could not abide. That was the summer of 1963, Joanna, before President Kennedy was assassinated and everybody still believed that things were good. I was 17 then. Now, of course, everything's different. The first lines of the movie, well technically the first lines of the radio announcer, but...

• 10:40Speaker 04

  What would be wrong with, "I was 18"? Wouldn't it be great if she just said, "I was 18"?

• 10:46Yasi Salek?

  Listen...

• 10:46Speaker 04

  She's about to go to college.

• 10:47Yasi Salek?

  The legal age of consent is 17. And, and it was not even really that different of a time.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  It's true. I'm not really sure how old Patrick Swayze's character is supposed to be, at 22? 23. That's so normal. Either 23 or 25. Yeah, no, no, I mean, like, it's not outrageous. I just know that now, people sort of like to clutch pearls around, "She's a teenager and he's in his twenties." And I'm like, "Yeah, if they had just said 18." I don't know why that makes any kind of difference to me, but it slightly does.

• 11:17Yasi Salek?

  Because she could vote.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  But she's, but she's, she's about to go to college.

• 11:21Yasi Salek?

  It's definitely a coming of age story.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And, you know, I, I know because you do way more research than I do, that like, this is, Eleanor Bernstein, who wrote this film, it's based on her life and her experiences.

• 11:34Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Either romanticized, I don't know if her dance instructor at, at the, in the Catskills was as hot as Patrick Swayze, but like, you know?

• 11:41Yasi Salek?

  I hope so for her.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  I hope that as well. I hope that for all of us.

• 11:43Yasi Salek?

  A, yeah, so she, I'm sure she's at the age, and that might have been her age.

• 11:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:48Yasi Salek?

  And hashtag, "Believe women."

• 11:51Yasi Salek?

  But I do know that she was actually, she's, she used like, her background a little bit, but she was actually a very accomplished dancer.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  Right. And became like, a professional dancer.

• 12:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  But she did, she never like, moved her hips as awkwardly as Jennifer Grey does in the beginning of this movie, when she's like, "What's a shimmy?"

• 12:10Yasi Salek?

  Well, she's incredible acting, given that Jennifer Grey is also a professional dancer.

• 12:13Speaker 04

  Great stuff.

• 12:14Yasi Salek?

  Amazing stuff.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  Winner of Dancing with the Stars, Jennifer Grey.

• 12:17Yasi Salek?

  I didn't watch that season or any of it.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  Oh, any of them, yeah, I would guess.

• 12:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And not, nothing against it.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  I just found that out this morning, literally.

• 12:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, when you were doing a cursory brush-up of Jennifer Grey. What I had to do, and not to, this is not for anything, but I was like... Trying to remember if she did eventually get that nose job and she did. And it was like a big scandal. I was like, I couldn't, I like memory hold it, you know?

• 12:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, she sure did. It was, it's a bummer because she's like, did not look like herself anymore. I support women.

• 12:44Yasi Salek?

  I support women.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  You know, and all of their choices, but it, you know.

• 12:47Yasi Salek?

  We all support women and we didn't create the beauty standard and so we should not be punished for,

• 12:52Speaker 04

  We did not.

• 12:52Yasi Salek?

  Um, you know, capitulating to it, but I did love her oldness.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  It's true.

• 12:57Yasi Salek?

  Um, okay. Yeah. So you mentioned, written by Eleanor Bernstein, produced by Linda Gottlieb, and directed by Emile Ardalino, who had never directed a feature film.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  Did a documentary, right?

• 13:09Yasi Salek?

  About dancing.

• 13:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It's actually, this, the story of this film is so fun because it's really an against all odds.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  It's amazing.

• 13:17Yasi Salek?

  How did this happen?

• 13:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:18Yasi Salek?

  Situation. It was the 11th highest grossing film, I believe, of 1987. It just barely didn't break the top 10. Number 10 was Witches of Eastwick. This, do you want to hear this list?

• 13:28Speaker 04

  I would love to hear the list.

• 13:30Yasi Salek?

  Three Men and a Baby was number one.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  Iconic.

• 13:32Yasi Salek?

  Fucking god tier movie.

• 13:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:33Yasi Salek?

  Fatal Attraction.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  Obviously.

• 13:35Yasi Salek?

  Beverly Hills Cop 2, a wonderful film.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 13:38Yasi Salek?

  Axel, babe, because he's hilarious. Um, Good Morning Vietnam.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  Incredible.

• 13:43Yasi Salek?

  Oh.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Talk about nostalgia soundtrack.

• 13:45Yasi Salek?

  Moonstruck, maybe one of my favorite movies of all time.

• 13:48Speaker 04

  You are a real Moonstruck girl.

• 13:50Yasi Salek?

  I love Moonstruck.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:52Yasi Salek?

  What's Not to Love? Cher, Nicolas Cage's Old Teeth.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:56Yasi Salek?

  Like romance, opera, like it's so beautiful.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:00Yasi Salek?

  Do they go to the opera? I can't remember if it's a ballet.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Baking?

• 14:02Yasi Salek?

  Baking.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  It's definitely the opera.

• 14:04Yasi Salek?

  Um, you know.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  Makeovers?

• 14:06Yasi Salek?

  Too close of a family that's controlling.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  I lost my hand.

• 14:10Yasi Salek?

  I lost, I lost my hand.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:12Yasi Salek?

  Oh my God, it's, it's so good and weird. It's such a good and weird movie.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  An all time film slap.

• 14:18Yasi Salek?

  I once.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:19Yasi Salek?

  Took a screenwriting class at UCLA and the teacher was like, I'm going to present you with like several perfect films to watch so you understand what a perfect film is. And he put Moonstruck on.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  Obviously.

• 14:32Yasi Salek?

  And he was right. Um, The Untouchables, I have not seen it.

• 14:35Speaker 04

  I've also never seen The Untouchables.

• 14:36Yasi Salek?

  Don't Touch on Fantasy. The male is both a DVD, Blu-ray. Um, The Secret of My Success, sounds familiar, probably have seen it, don't remember.

• 14:44Speaker 04

  I've seen it, yeah.

• 14:46Yasi Salek?

  Stakeout?

• 14:46Speaker 04

  Hmm?

• 14:48Yasi Salek?

  Emilio Estevez and Richard Dreyfuss.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  Of course, obviously.

• 14:52Yasi Salek?

  Um, and then, yeah, Lethal Weapon and The Witches of Eastwick.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  Witches of Eastwick. And another incredible film.

• 14:58Yasi Salek?

  Fucking banger.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  Also, were we not living in the eighties, eighty-seven? What an iconic list.

• 15:03Yasi Salek?

  Like.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  And Dirty Dancing being the eleventh highest grossing is insane to me.

• 15:07Yasi Salek?

  We were showered with blessings.

• 15:11Speaker 04

  But it was made for a piece of chewing gum and a string, like, you know?

• 15:15Yasi Salek?

  I know, just like literally a wish and a.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:18Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so Eleanor Bernstein, just to go back to her. So she was the youngest daughter of a Jewish doctor from New York. Did spend summers in the Catskills with her family in, what do they call it? The Borscht Belt?

• 15:28Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:29Yasi Salek?

  Did those competitions, was called baby. Um, but then she was a mambo champion. And she said in an interview, "When my parents hit the golf course, I hit the dance floor. I was a teenage mambo queen, winning all kinds of Dirty Dancing competitions." Her signature step was to put her leg around the neck of the boy she was dancing with.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  So that's in the movie. Did you see the quote where a producer's like, "This is disgusting. Take this move out of the movie. No one will ever respect a girl who does that." And they were all like, "Um, that's Eleanor's signature move, actually."

• 15:58Yasi Salek?

  And she was like.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Awkward.

• 15:59Yasi Salek?

  This does remind you how far we've come. In terms of what's considered risque.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, like, there are shots in this movie of just like pelvises grinding against each other. And you're just like, "Yeah, baby."

• 16:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, great.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, you know, you don't watch it and you go like, yawn, this is not, this, this dancing is not at all dirty.

• 16:22Yasi Salek?

  No, no, no, that's what I'm saying. I'm like, it's, it was, it was really considered risque back then.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 16:29Yasi Salek?

  But it's amazing.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  Oh, it's amazing.

• 16:31Yasi Salek?

  And now we have full frontal, is what I'm saying. And that's.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  I actually.

• 16:34Yasi Salek?

  That seems fine.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  I never remember anyone saying, "Dirty Dancing, you cannot watch it." No one ever said that to me.

• 16:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  Kids watched it at slumber parties. Like, that's what it was. When you look back at it now, it's not the dancing, it's the fact that this is like an abortion movie that I was just like 87 and the parents were 88, the parents were just sort of like, "Go for it babe."

• 16:52Yasi Salek?

  Well, I read apparently 50%, something around 50% of the audience didn't clock it.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 17:00Yasi Salek?

  They did like a thing and they were like, "What abortion subplot?"

• 17:03Speaker 04

  "Oh, she got a root canal and it went badly?" Like what?

• 17:06Yasi Salek?

  It's like so clear as day. I'm like-

• 17:08Speaker 04

  They don't say, they don't say the word abortion.

• 17:11Yasi Salek?

  No, but she's pregnant-

• 17:13Speaker 04

  Back alley-

• 17:13Yasi Salek?

  And she needs to deal with it-

• 17:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:15Yasi Salek?

  And it's a doctor.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, I mean, I agree with you. It's clear as day, but-

• 17:19Yasi Salek?

  Wow, the comprehension level. They were too distracted by the Mambo. And I get it.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  That leg move.

• 17:25Yasi Salek?

  It's incredible. Baby doesn't do that, just the blonde actress.

• 17:28Speaker 04

  Yes. Penny.

• 17:30Yasi Salek?

  Penny.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  Cynthia Rhodes. She's kinda great.

• 17:33Yasi Salek?

  She's incredible.

• 17:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:34Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so Berkstein wrote this screenplay in 1980, not this one, a screenplay for a Michael Douglas film called, "It's My Turn." She had also included a rock dancing in that. Because you write what you know, you know?

• 17:47Speaker 04

  It's in her blood.

• 17:48Yasi Salek?

  It's in her blood. And they cut that right out. And then she was like, "Well, okay, I'm just gonna make a whole story based around that because they didn't let me put it in this It's My Turn movie." And she pitches the idea to MGM and they're like, "Okay, great, let's do this." Johnny is based on a real person, Michael Terrace, who was a dance instructor that she met in the Catskills while she was researching the story. So not from her youth.

• 18:12Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 18:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Michael Santiago Gutierrez, changed his name to Terrace. He was a ballroom dancer and Broadway stage dancer. Sounds great. He was in West Side Story.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 18:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Her script was repeatedly rejected by other studios because MGM basically like had personnel change and then had to go. And she brought it to something called Vestron Pictures. Are you familiar with Vestron Pictures?

• 18:40Speaker 04

  I am only from doing research for this. Today I learned.

• 18:44Yasi Salek?

  I think it was their first film.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  It's their first not direct to video, to VHS film.

• 18:48Yasi Salek?

  Okay, not direct to VHS.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  So they were a direct to video company.

• 18:51Yasi Salek?

  Great.

• 18:51Speaker 04

  And then they thought, they almost put this, direct to video is what I saw, until they did the first screening.

• 18:56Yasi Salek?

  And people were like-

• 18:57Speaker 04

  And like women tore their clothes off and they were like, "Oh, I guess we'll put it in the theaters."

• 19:00Yasi Salek?

  Patrick Weyser. Yeah, like you said. Made with no money, had to cut the budget in half. Best shot pictures, you know, not really printing money at that time. I'm assuming maybe that's part of the reason they chose Emilio Ardelino as the director, because perhaps a more established director would have wanted a higher fee.

• 19:19Speaker 04

  Possibly.

• 19:20Yasi Salek?

  I mean, also, obviously, he had experience in filming dancing, which is important. He read the script while he was at jury duty. I don't know why.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  Oh, I love that.

• 19:28Yasi Salek?

  To tell you that.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  I love knowing that.

• 19:30Yasi Salek?

  They made it for $5 million.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I read that it like originally was $8 million and then they had to like cut it down to $5 million.

• 19:38Yasi Salek?

  And I guess the average cost of a film at that time was 12. So it's like less than half of what a regular 80s film was costing to make.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  Not to jump the gun on the soundtrack, obviously. But do you know how much of that $5 million budget they spent on Be My Baby?

• 19:54Yasi Salek?

  No, I was gonna ask, that must be so expensive.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  $75,000, almost a fifth of, well, no, do I do math? Anyway.

• 20:03Yasi Salek?

  Just to put it in the film or to get it on the soundtrack?

• 20:06Speaker 04

  To, I mean, I actually don't know the difference.

• 20:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  In terms of like, if you, I'm sure that, yeah, I'm sure there must be a difference between buying the rights to a song.

• 20:14Yasi Salek?

  Well, I think when it goes on the soundtrack, I think maybe it's, I should know this, but I think maybe it works out where they just get royalties.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:21Yasi Salek?

  That's crazy. I mean, thank God.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:25Yasi Salek?

  Couldn't imagine this film without it.

• 20:26Speaker 04

  I also read, and like, what's so interesting about doing research for this film is this film is so popular and people have done so many interviews that like, there are so many conflicting stories.

• 20:35Yasi Salek?

  Which I love.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  And, and also, what I love is like, someone will tell one story and then all of a sudden, someone else is telling that story. Like, I don't know if you saw, like, one of my favorite is, oh, when I first heard about this movie, I was like, oh, no, is this a pornography? I heard, I saw like five different people say that that was their reaction in an interview.

• 20:52Yasi Salek?

  I read the same thing about, like, it was the guy from The Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley said that. Like, some, like, other, some other actors that were floating.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  I feel like they're just like, someone said it, they're like, that's a fun line. And now they, since they've been interviewed 1 million times, they're like recycling other people's anecdotes.

• 21:07Yasi Salek?

  I tried to think, put myself in their shoes, though, and I think because Dirty Dancing is like the word McDonald's to me at this point. I had never really thought about the title of the film. And I was like, that is kind of an insane film title.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 21:19Yasi Salek?

  Dirty Dancing does a little bit sound like a softcore pornography film.

• 21:23Speaker 04

  Absolutely. But what I, what I, one of the anecdotes that I read was that Ellen Berksing told the New York Times, I think in 87, that before there was the movie, there was the music, which sounds very high fidelity, what came first, the music or the misery, that she put on a bunch of records in her living room to her friends. Did you read this? And then like, if they got up and danced, she was like, those songs are in the movie. And the songs came first. And she wrote the story sort of like to follow the songs. And then she's like, I would like all of these songs, please. And they're like, babe, we have

• 21:58Yasi Salek?

  Billion dollars.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  No money. And so at first they were like, for a long time, they, they thought they weren't going to be able to get the songs. And then I, I know that you know about like, all the people who were involved in getting the soundtrack together. But finally, when they got their enforcer in place, that's when they started getting like the songs they needed.

• 22:14Yasi Salek?

  And it's really insane to think about because if they hadn't of this movie, we would not be talking about it right now. It would have gone strange to VHS and nobody would remember it.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Kelly, Kelly Bishop, who plays Emily Gilmore herself, right?

• 22:26Yasi Salek?

  Fucking queen.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  Who plays Baby's mom. Recast at the last second.

• 22:30Yasi Salek?

  The most, I, I had to rewind because I read that. I ran in the very first scene. Apparently you can see the blonde hair of the original actress. Who got sick or something or got a different?

• 22:39Speaker 04

  Just was tired. And they're like, go home. Kelly Bishop.

• 22:43Yasi Salek?

  We have a queen.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  Legend of, of, of screen. She, so she played like Vivian, the bungalow bunny. That's what they called them, the bungalow bunny. Anyway, so they're like, Kelly Bishop, come on over, play, um, Baby's mom. But I was watching a Kelly Bishop interview about work. And she's like, we saw a rough cut of the movie and we're like, this is garbage. And then we saw it with the music and we were like, oh, this actually kind of rules.

• 23:07Yasi Salek?

  It would be funny to see like the, like a reverse director's cut, where they cut all the music out. So we could all see how, how like much it would not work without it.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  It's definitely like cheesy. But in the best way. Some of Johnny's speeches, you're like, oh, boy.

• 23:23Yasi Salek?

  I like that kind of stuff.

• 23:24Speaker 04

  Oh, I, I mean, I love this movie and I love Swayze and I support him in all his endeavors. But like, I wouldn't say the writing is the reason why Dirty Dancing is an iconic movie.

• 23:34Yasi Salek?

  It's true. It's, I just, I'm like.

• 23:37Speaker 04

  He's like, you gotta understand what it's like, baby, when you're from the rough streets of Philly.

• 23:41Yasi Salek?

  Rough streets of Philly, babe.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  And these women are just throwing themselves at you, baby. You gotta do what you gotta do.

• 23:46Yasi Salek?

  He didn't feel he had value. And they, he thought for a second, they saw him and valued him. They just saw him as a piece of meat.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  They were just pressing diamonds into his hands.

• 23:57Yasi Salek?

  Diamonds into his hands. I was like, you should get those diamonds.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  I agree.

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• 24:34Speaker 01

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• 25:05Yasi Salek?

  Okay, Kenneth Ortega. So, Kenny Ortega has come up actually randomly a few times in my band's play research because he, before, like, he started as an actor, he did some, like, musical theater stuff, and then he choreographed along with,

• 25:26Yasi Salek?

  oh my god, what is his name? Danny Elfman. This original iteration called The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  What the?

• 25:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, in, in the 70s.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 25:36Yasi Salek?

  So he was like, kind of in this, like, alternative, that's not what they called it back then, but this sort of, like,

• 25:42Speaker 04

  Alternative music scene.

• 25:43Yasi Salek?

  Fringe, you know, music world with Danny Elfman. He ends up becoming a choreographer for this San Francisco sort of new wave band called The Tubes.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  Oh, I know The Tubes.

• 25:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Santa Do.

• 25:55Yasi Salek?

  Of course.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 25:56Yasi Salek?

  And The Tubes... Would play all the time and they played in LA a bunch. And Kim Fowley saw them and was like, I need to hire Kenny Ortega to teach the Runaways how to move on the stage. And he was their choreographer. He taught the Runaways how to like-

• 26:12Speaker 04

  Jira.

• 26:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, everything. Cause actually the Runaways, I think people don't really maybe know or think about this, but they actually had quite a theatrical set. Like they would like costume change and there was like, the songs were kind of like, you know, they were acting out what the songs were. And he like taught them all how to do that and how to dance and to move.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  That's amazing.

• 26:32Yasi Salek?

  So cool, right? And then he was whisked off by Cher to choreograph a TV special for her. And then he also choreographed for Kiss on their Dynasty tour. Worked on Xanadu.

• 26:46Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:47Yasi Salek?

  Worked with Gene Kelly, who became his mentor.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  Have you heard of him, Gene Kelly?

• 26:51Yasi Salek?

  Ever, ever know him?

• 26:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:53Yasi Salek?

  He also choreographed a bunch of Oingo Boingo tours in the eighties. Cause we're still, you know, homies. Choreographed Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  The parade scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

• 27:04Yasi Salek?

  This is me.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  Icon.

• 27:06Yasi Salek?

  The legend. And then a little video by a small woman named Madonna called Material Girl.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  Have you heard of it?

• 27:13Yasi Salek?

  Have you heard of it? And then, this is later, but I'm obsessed with it, the High School Musical movies. And also Hocus Pocus.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  Newsies.

• 27:21Yasi Salek?

  And Newsies.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  Very important. He did Newsies.

• 27:24Yasi Salek?

  Crutchy.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  The fact-

• 27:26Yasi Salek?

  Never forget Crutchy.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  The fact that Kenny Ortega did Dirty Dancing, I mean, everything you mentioned, like Material Girl, all of that, amazing. But Dirty Dancing, Newsies and High School Musical are just these like absolute temples of what we understood it was like to move your body. What's so funny-

• 27:46Yasi Salek?

  He directed Newsies.

• 27:47Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:48Yasi Salek?

  And High School Musical and Hocus Pocus. It's so crazy. He went from choreography to directing.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  Because I've watched all the behind the scenes, scenes features on Newsies. That is like where I first met Kenny Ortega. He had quite a special ponytail at the time. But there's, if you want, because I've seen Newsies so many times and thinking about Kenny Ortega's legacy, he's so important. And like, there's a move that Swayze does- When Johnny jumps off the stage and then he gets down on his knees.

• 28:17Yasi Salek?

  At the end.

• 28:18Speaker 04

  At the end.

• 28:18Yasi Salek?

  The big scene, yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 04

  And gets down on his knees and sort of like spins around a couple of times. That's like Kenny Ortega's signature move. Christian Bale definitely does it in Newsies. Zac Efron definitely does it in High School Musical. It's like, it's his little like touch.

• 28:30Yasi Salek?

  It's a wonderful move. If a man did that for me, I'd crumble.

• 28:33Speaker 04

  Spin around on his knees for you?

• 28:34Yasi Salek?

  Absolutely crumble.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  Oh, great.

• 28:36Yasi Salek?

  Um, yeah, I love him. I also just, everyone knows this about me. I love when someone has a punk background. I think it's cool. I think it's very cool.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  Like, what an incredible career.

• 28:44Yasi Salek?

  So cool. Um, so Kenny Ortega's in place and now it's time to find some filming locations. And they actually couldn't film in the Catskills because all those borscht built resorts didn't exist anymore.

• 28:56Speaker 04

  Money, honey.

• 28:57Yasi Salek?

  And they couldn't build one. So they filmed in North Carolina and Pembroke, Virginia.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 29:02Yasi Salek?

  Let's talk about the cast. I mean, I alluded to this with you over text, but we were like, save it for the pod. I had to talk about Patrick Swayze in therapy last week. I've been.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Tell me why.

• 29:15Yasi Salek?

  Hyper fixated on Patrick Swayze. Well, I just feel they don't make men like this anymore.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 29:21Yasi Salek?

  Patrick Swayze, I'm gonna start with Patrick Swayze, even though he wasn't the first one cast, just because I need to talk about him. Um, he's from Houston, Texas, Houston legend. In high school did ice skating, classical ballet, acting and football to the point that he was like so good, he could have gotten a college scholarship.

• 29:37Speaker 04

  But he blew his knee.

• 29:38Yasi Salek?

  Had a knee injury. Moved instead to New York City to pursue ballet. They don't make men like, this is all I'm saying. It's like, where does this kind of man live?

• 29:49Speaker 04

  Right, so like his dad was this sort of like rough and tumble cowboy guy. And then his mom ran the like Houston dance company or whatever. And she was like, he was just like in her studio all the times where he met his wife.

• 30:04Yasi Salek?

  They were together for 34 years.

• 30:05Speaker 04

  I know.

• 30:06Yasi Salek?

  She's like the wind is a butter.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  She's like the wind, have you heard? Um, the fact that he moved to New York with his like bum knee and was like, I'm gonna be a dancer anyway. And there are just all these stories about how he had to have like four different knee surgeries, was constantly draining his knee because it was like blowing up. With fluid because he had entered it, but he's like, I'm gonna be a dancer anyway. Was Danny Zuko on Broadway? Like, not the original, but like, was Danny Zuko on Broadway? Like?

• 30:33Yasi Salek?

  He loved dance so much.

• 30:35Speaker 04

  A man's man, but also a graceful guy. And this is like the real Gene, a real Gene Kelly type, honestly.

• 30:40Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 30:42Yasi Salek?

  And I just loved it. But anyways, they cast.

• 30:44Speaker 04

  Why did you talk about him in therapy?

• 30:45Yasi Salek?

  I think it was just, well, I think it was so int- okay, if we're gonna keep it a hundred. I think I was like, wow, it's really cool that he didn't, I'm completely, um, putting thoughts into his mind and casting that, which I don't know if he had these thoughts, but it's my therapy, so I can.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:05Yasi Salek?

  It's useful. That he didn't think about like, I have to be this one kind of thing.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:10Yasi Salek?

  You know, like, I have to be this macho football player, or I have to be this artsy ballet type, or like, I can't make music also. Like, I'm a pilot. It seemed, I was just really inspired by the idea that he didn't feel hemmed in, or I didn't think that he would feel hemmed in by like, how the perception of him, because people don't like it when you are more than one thing. They like to place you somewhere.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:37Yasi Salek?

  It makes them uncomfortable if you try to be something else.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  You and I have very similar brains in that we get like hyper fixated on things when we do research or things. And I went down like a real Swayze alley for this and watched like a number of like, there's like a, an official documentary, but like a couple other.

• 31:52Yasi Salek?

  Not unofficial.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:55Speaker 04

  What does YouTube have to say about that Swayze? But the fact, like, he got beat up, like, once, I think, as a teen for like, being a dancer, then he just beat the shit out of everyone. And so they're like, never mind.

• 32:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  You're too scary and huge and muscly and we can't do it. That he was like desperate to please his mom, but also his dad. So that's why it's like football and ballet. That he was desperate to be taken seriously as an actor. And so when he was like, a sex symbol after Dirty Dancing and after Ghost or whatever, he's like, but can I be?

• 32:22Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  More? Do I have depth? He studied, you know, he went to acting classes. Like, he just like wanted to be an artiste.

• 32:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  And like, it's interesting that he is at the forefront of all of this, you know? If you think about Ghost, or like Roadhouse, or Dirty Dancing, or Point Break, A Shared Fave of Hours, like, he's at the forefront of these like. Like cornerstones of pop culture, but like it's not quite what he wanted. He did not want to be like heartthrob.

• 32:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  You know.

• 32:49Yasi Salek?

  Action.

• 32:50Speaker 04

  You know, that was not his vibe. He wanted to do something more in depth, but I don't know. The world was not ready for that.

• 32:56Yasi Salek?

  The world didn't want him, I know. And also like, I know this is just like how far we've fallen, but I'm like, he was with the same woman for 34 years. And that was like the love of his life.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:05Yasi Salek?

  And that's kind of unusual.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And they were like dance partners. In Hollywood, I know. It's just like very lovely.

• 33:10Yasi Salek?

  It's just wonderful. I love, and may he rest in peace.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  I know.

• 33:15Yasi Salek?

  Also was very open about his issues with drinking and his trauma and crashed a plane drunk once.

• 33:22Speaker 04

  This is allegedly why Jennifer Grey did not like him because he showed up drunk to Red Dawn.

• 33:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and was kind of like, well, she didn't say abusive.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  She said alpha.

• 33:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he like, was like macho, but also played pranks a bunch on her and she didn't like that. We're going to get into that because Jennifer Grey is cast first. Basically, the director, and I think so rightfully, was like, I don't want to have stand in dancers and have the actors be actors and have then dancers dance for them. I want them to be one and the same. I want professional actors who can also dance. And so Jennifer Grey was one of those because her father is.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  Joel Grey.

• 34:00Yasi Salek?

  Joel Grey, Oscar winning actor and dancer, Cabaret. Ever seen it? I have not, but.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  You've never seen it?

• 34:07Yasi Salek?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:08Speaker 04

  Wait, okay, so you're, where are you on musicals?

• 34:10Yasi Salek?

  I'm bad.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  You're out.

• 34:11Yasi Salek?

  No, thank you.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  Well.

• 34:12Yasi Salek?

  I have like a few that are like near and dear to my heart.

• 34:14Speaker 04

  I feel like Cabaret could hit with you.

• 34:17Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:17Yasi Salek?

  I will check it out. I've seen Grease 150,000 times. Could recite it to you in my sleep.

• 34:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 34:23Yasi Salek?

  It's very important.

• 34:24Speaker 04

  I think Cabaret is like spooky and weird enough that you would enjoy it.

• 34:28Yasi Salek?

  Okay. I kind of like the Phantom of the Opera.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  Spooky and weird.

• 34:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Um, I went to a high school, uh, performance of Les Mis. That was excruciating.

• 34:39Speaker 04

  High schoolers should not do Les Mis.

• 34:40Yasi Salek?

  They should not have been allowed.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  No.

• 34:41Yasi Salek?

  No one should have allowed them to do that.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  That should be illegal.

• 34:43Yasi Salek?

  It's incredibly difficult. Nobody was hitting their notes.

• 34:46Speaker 04

  No.

• 34:46Yasi Salek?

  It felt so long.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. The barricade was like three pieces of furniture.

• 34:49Yasi Salek?

  You don't understand class issues. Like, I just couldn't, it was.

• 34:52Speaker 04

  You know who understands the class issues? Baby.

• 34:54Yasi Salek?

  Baby. And Patrick Swayze.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:57Yasi Salek?

  So Jennifer Grey's cast, apparently Winona Ryder, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Sharon Stone were considered for the roles. Role.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  Sarah Jessica Parker was in a real dance movie era in the eighties.

• 35:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think she could have, she's the closest one I could see would have made sense.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 35:13Yasi Salek?

  You know? Winona Ryder, I don't think is a dancer.

• 35:15Speaker 04

  No.

• 35:16Yasi Salek?

  And Sharon Stone, too perfect of a face.

• 35:20Speaker 04

  Wildly incorrect.

• 35:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  But this is like, this is an abortion movie without saying abortion, and this is a Jewish movie without saying

• 35:27Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  Like Jewish.

• 35:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Do you think they cast her because of her nose to say that they were Jewish?

• 35:33Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 35:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Like, I'm not, I'm not part of that.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  I just, I feel like Eleanor Bernstein was like,

• 35:38Yasi Salek?

  She's Jewish.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  This is my movie, and I want a girl who looks like I did when I was a teenager.

• 35:45Yasi Salek?

  And also, I think part of the, part of the characterization of Baby is that she's not a classical beauty.

• 35:51Speaker 04

  Just a normal looking girl.

• 35:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 04

  Which you buy when she's in her little dresses, but as soon as like the slutty tank top and the,

• 35:59Yasi Salek?

  Jennifer Grey is stunning.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  And the denim shorts come out, you're like, okay, what are we talking about here?

• 36:05Yasi Salek?

  I don't know what you're, I don't know what you're saying. Although her sister, the girl who played her sister was like, classically beautiful, really gorgeous.

• 36:10Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 36:11Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so she gets $50,000?

• 36:14Speaker 04

  What I love is Jennifer Grey is like, the woman is never cast first. This is, this is the thing about Eleanor Bernstein.

• 36:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  She's like, she writes this movie about her life, goes to do research at like, in the Catskills and stuff like that, picks all the music, writes out like, a lot of the dance stuff into the script and stuff like that, becomes a producer, and so like, maintains that control over it. And so she's just like, we're casting the girl first, I want her to like, look like I did, all this sort of stuff like that. And so, yeah, Jennifer Grey is cast first, and all the guys have to figure out, can I match Jennifer Grey's energy?

• 36:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. The first person I guess they considered was Billy Zane.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  I can see it.

• 36:51Yasi Salek?

  No, Misa, this movie on fire, terrible. Can't.

• 36:55Speaker 04

  Well, it can't be anyone other than, than Swayze.

• 36:58Yasi Salek?

  Billy Zane, who I have enjoyed in multiple films, is not giving me the tender vulnerability that I need.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  What else do we have on the list?

• 37:09Yasi Salek?

  Val Kilmer, who I do think could have worked.

• 37:11Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 37:11Yasi Salek?

  Because I love him. Benicio del Toro?

• 37:14Speaker 04

  It's special.

• 37:15Yasi Salek?

  This is from Wikipedia and it could all be completely false.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  Really special.

• 37:18Yasi Salek?

  Do you think Benicio del Toro can dance?

• 37:21Speaker 04

  I, I would like to find out.

• 37:23Yasi Salek?

  I feel like Val Kilmer probably could. He was like a

• 37:25Speaker 04

  Falcon dance.

• 37:25Yasi Salek?

  Arts trained.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Don't know about Billy Zane.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  No.

• 37:29Yasi Salek?

  No. Anyways, thank God. None of those. This is very funny. Jennifer Grey's 26, playing 17.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:35Yasi Salek?

  Patrick Swayze 34.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. He had had a whole career in New York before this.

• 37:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 37:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:42Yasi Salek?

  And he had been in a couple of films, including like you mentioned, Red Dawn, 1984's Red Dawn. Have not seen it. Did not watch it for this.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  I've never seen Red Dawn either.

• 37:49Yasi Salek?

  It's about commies?

• 37:50Speaker 04

  It's like a fake war. They're like teenagers and, and it's an invented, like what if, you know, the communist, yeah, commies, I think. But teenage soldiers.

• 38:02Yasi Salek?

  I'll check it out.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  Will you?

• 38:04Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 38:04Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 38:05Yasi Salek?

  Um, maybe. If I were going to, I would have done it for this.

• 38:08Speaker 04

  I think so.

• 38:09Yasi Salek?

  Um, but maybe when I go on my Patrick Swayze deep dive, cause.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  Couple of years ago, um, I, I was like showing, doing this podcast series where I was showing a friend of mine movies she had never seen.

• 38:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  And we did Point Break and Dirty Dancing and Ghost. And she was just like, is Patrick Swayze the most important?

• 38:29Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 38:29Speaker 04

  Person who's ever been in cinema? And I was like, possibly.

• 38:32Yasi Salek?

  I think if you were our age and you grew up at that time, he kind of was one of, he was like Tom Cruise.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:38Yasi Salek?

  As far as I was concerned.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  Absolutely, he was. Like, he, like, his legacy hasn't stretched as far. Um, and I, well, I don't know, Roadhouse is very important to the men. And Point Break is very important to the men.

• 38:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  But like, he was very important to women.

• 38:53Yasi Salek?

  Also, The Outsiders is very important to me. And I know he doesn't play a main character in that film.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  Small role in that.

• 38:58Yasi Salek?

  But it's really a huge movie for me. His resume said, no dancing. Capital letters. I put the capital letters. I don't know if it was capital letters because of his terrible knee injury.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 39:09Yasi Salek?

  Um, but he read the script and he liked it. And he was like, okay, I'll do it. I'll dance anyways. Um, I'll dance through the pain. And Jennifer Grey was like.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  Drain that knee, buddy.

• 39:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, drain it. Let's get that syringe out. Jennifer Grey meanwhile was like.

• 39:23Speaker 04

  She's like, not him, anyone but him. Bring back Billy Zane, please, for the love of God.

• 39:29Yasi Salek?

  Get William Zane back on the horn, 20-year-old William Zane. She's 26, and again, I'm like, this is not gonna work. Johnny was supposed to be Italian. I guess that makes sense of the Benicio del Toro and Billy Zane of it all. And they switched him to Irish, because obviously Patrick Swayze is not giving Italian.

• 39:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:46Yasi Salek?

  They had a breathtaking chemistry test.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  Have you seen the footage of their, like, dance audition?

• 39:52Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  It's great.

• 39:53Yasi Salek?

  I mean, it made a lot of sense to me that, like, of course, people who don't get along, that's one of the...

• 39:59Speaker 04

  Crackling chemistry.

• 39:59Yasi Salek?

  Crackling chemistry. It's one of the hallmarks. If you're indifferent to someone, you're not gonna have chemistry. But if you had, like, a bad time with them, mm, girl. And he, I guess, like, really apologized to her and was like, you know, he said, she said during the screen test, he pulled me down the hall and said to me, "I love you, I love you, I'm so sorry. I know you don't want me to do the movie." And he got tears in his eyes, and she was like, "And I got tears in my eyes." It's very sweet.

• 40:24Speaker 04

  But then they still didn't get along on the set of this movie.

• 40:26Yasi Salek?

  I don't think so.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  They do, I mean, both of them speak very highly of each other, like, after the movie. You know, in both of the memoirs, I think they're like, very honest about what it was like. But I think after the movie, I mean, how can you not like, well, I guess, I suppose you can. But I feel like if you've done something like Dirty Dancing, it becomes the, like, biggest thing in the world. You are forever, like, trauma bonded, I suppose, by this.

• 40:47Yasi Salek?

  And so like, linked together in time.

• 40:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, they just, so they now speak, well, you know, positively, but like, they did for a long time, speak glowingly of each other and their work on the movie, so. They're not just like shit talking, like, what a piece of work. They were just sort of like, Jennifer Grey's like, "I was really nervous and didn't know what I was doing." And he's like, "I was a huge perfectionist and very impatient, and, you know, we tried to make it work, but we didn't always do that."

• 41:11Yasi Salek?

  Well, it works for the film. Because they also have to have some animosity in the film.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  There's, there's a couple fights.

• 41:19Yasi Salek?

  So great.

• 41:20Speaker 04

  In the rain, no less. Also, my understanding is that when they filmed this, a lot of the dance instruction scenes, they just sort of like let the camera roll.

• 41:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 41:30Speaker 04

  So like the scene where she's like giggling because he's like tickling her arm.

• 41:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 41:34Speaker 04

  Uh, that's her actually doing it. And the, the, the fact that he is like pissed off and impatient, that is him actually.

• 41:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And they were like, we need to leave this in the, they was like, I think they saw it in the dealies or something. And they were like, put that in the film.

• 41:44Speaker 04

  Movie magic.

• 41:45Yasi Salek?

  It is. It's one of the best parts, the most memorable parts of the film.

• 41:48Speaker 04

  And so like all the, all the times that she's like giggling and frustrated and said, you know, like that's just Jennifer Grey doing that. And that's like, that's the thing about this movie is like the authenticity of Eleanor Bernstein's experience, Jennifer Grey as, as a performer and her nerves about sort of like, I'm not a professional dancer. Can I do this? How that translates to Baby? And how like every, I, you know, I know that there are some men who enjoy this movie, but I'm just gonna say like, every young woman watching this movie feels like the authenticity of that, of Eleanor's story and Jennifer's story and the universality. And that's like, not to like skip ahead too much, but like, that's why the timey, time bending quality of the soundtrack doesn't bother me at all, because it's just sort of like, this is an eternal

• 42:31Speaker 04

  story of girlhood into womanhood. And so the fact that like, you not only have eighties and, and sixties and from the wrong years of the sixties, it's like songs in here, but like you have diegetic eighties songs in here. And it's just sort of like, it's, it's playing and they can hear it here. They're lip syncing along to like an eighties song. And I'm just sort of like, yeah.

• 42:53Yasi Salek?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 04

  Cause this is a forever story.

• 42:55Yasi Salek?

  It's, it works. No one, someone, um, um, made me want to go back and like watch the film. They're like, there was tons of like, not just music things, but things that are completely anachronistic in this film. And I was like.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  Her Keds?

• 43:07Yasi Salek?

  Oh, are those, those are so eighties, right? If they didn't have Keds in the eighties. In the fifties or sixties, this is sixties. Yeah. A lot of the clothes, that's the thing, a lot of clothes. I'm like, oh yeah, people did also kind of sometimes dress like this in the eighties. So it was like.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. Like her little dresses, like I could see someone wearing them in the eighties.

• 43:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  But, but again, by the time she gets to like, it's either a tanked up or a bathing suit. I'm not sure with the jean shorts. I was like, that's. Deep, Baby is not wearing that in 1963.

• 43:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:34Yasi Salek?

  Wouldn't they? And I feel like the 60s bands were more like structural, you know?

• 43:38Speaker 04

  Also, the, like, when they're dancing and they're like in, like, skimpy bikini underwear and like stockings. And I'm just sort of like, that's flash dance. Like, that's what, you know, that's what we're doing. We're not.

• 43:49Yasi Salek?

  Subbed, yeah. But again, not, not a problem. I'm for it. I'm, I love it. Also, this dumb little fact that I love that Dr. Ruth was supposed to be in the film. Did you read that?

• 43:59Speaker 04

  No.

• 44:00Yasi Salek?

  She's supposed to play the, the shoplifting Mrs. Schumacher.

• 44:03Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 44:03Yasi Salek?

  But I guess.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  With all the wallets and her bag.

• 44:05Yasi Salek?

  But then she didn't want to be a criminal.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  Dr. Ruth should be in this, one of the sexiest movies of the eighties. She really should be here.

• 44:13Yasi Salek?

  Couldn't be more.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  I love Jerry Orbach, uh, who plays her dad, who I love, and Kelly Bishop. Like, Kelly Bishop and Jerry Orbach are like two of the greatest, like, stage Broadway actors of all time. And I love that they're here to, like, not dance or sing. When Kelly Bishop at the end is like, she gets those moves from me. I'm like, little wink.

• 44:32Yasi Salek?

  Um, I don't know Jerry Orbach from the stage at all. I know him from Law and Order and I was obsessed with him and I used to watch Law. When I lived in New York, I watched Law and Order every day of my life. And I, the, he died, I think, while I was living there and they did like a marathon. And I cried, like, every day. I was like.

• 44:47Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 44:48Yasi Salek?

  Jerry Orbach.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:49Yasi Salek?

  Lenny Briscoe.

• 44:50Speaker 04

  The, the, the fact that he becomes a Law and Order icon and Kelly Bishop becomes a Gilmore Girls icon is just sort of like these.

• 44:57Yasi Salek?

  Beautiful.

• 44:57Speaker 04

  These incredible careers.

• 44:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  The Lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows. Their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything, even our music. That hit song named after the color of lemons? Not a coincidence. Big Lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years. Think about it. But now, 7Up is fighting back with their new Lime Lemon Soda. Now lime comes first. 7Up, flip the sip.

• 46:04Yasi Salek?

  Okay, let's get into the soundtrack. Let's, the main event.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  Can I read this one quote from

• 46:08Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 46:09Speaker 04

  Her Eleanor Bernstein's 1987 New York Times interview?

• 46:12Yasi Salek?

  Please.

• 46:13Speaker 04

  "The selections fall into three basic camps. Fairly tame Latin music for the Killerman's Dance Floor. Clean teen pop Frankie Valli's Big Girls Don't Cry, etc. for the Hausmann Cabin. And sensual rock and soul Otis Redding, The Contours, for the staff quarters. These last songs speak directly to baby Hausmann from the physical world." Bernstein explained, "I tried to choose the harshest music I could find, the music that would be most sexually shocking, to a young woman who'd never heard it before, because I imagine in baby's bedroom at home, there'd be early Joan Baez, The Weavers, maybe Harry Belafonte." So she's like, "Otis Redding, what is this?"

• 46:49Yasi Salek?

  Crazy.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:51Yasi Salek?

  What a time.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  The fourth category is, of course, 80s adult contemporary.

• 46:57Yasi Salek?

  Adult contemporary 80s music that is amazing and you would have never heard in your life. Which I guess squarely, "I've Had The Time Of My Life", by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes falls into that category. Parentheses, "I've had", close parentheses, "The Time Of My Life". I got really invested in the story of this song, composed by Frank Previte, John Di Nicola and Donald Markowitz. Well Joanna, I'll tell you, in late 1986 or early 1987,

• 47:30Yasi Salek?

  The producer and head of Millennium Records, Jimmy Iiner.

• 47:33Speaker 04

  Now, this is their enforcer, Jimmy Iiner.

• 47:36Yasi Salek?

  And how did he get roped up into this? It's just like, Vastron kind of was like, this is who's gonna put the soundtrack out?

• 47:43Speaker 04

  Like, they didn't have him and then they did. I don't know what the connection was. But like, he's just like, Ronnie Spector, do my bidding. And he's like, okay, you know?

• 47:52Yasi Salek?

  He was, yeah, he was, his brother was, I don't know about at this exact time, but I think so, the head of Columbia Records, Don Iiner. So, they had like a powerful musical-

• 48:02Speaker 04

  Muscle.

• 48:02Yasi Salek?

  -family, yeah. He man, I think he managed, managed and or produced this guy Frank Previt, Previt, Previte, who had his own band.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:13Yasi Salek?

  And was kind of like, I failed, I'm quitting music, or whatever. And he was like, I need you to write this one song.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  He was like selling cars, right?

• 48:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. Like, but not even like at a dealership, like, just like, used cars out of his driveway, like, New Jersey or whatever.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  Amazing.

• 48:27Yasi Salek?

  And he was like, can you please just do this? And once again, the same thing. I thought it was a pornographic film. It's like, okay. And Jimmy Iiner was like, this is gonna change your life. Which is funny, because there's no way he could have known that, because no one knew that this movie was gonna-

• 48:41Speaker 04

  Everyone thought this movie was gonna be an absolute flop disaster.

• 48:44Yasi Salek?

  Flop disaster that no one hears.

• 48:46Speaker 04

  Tiny budget, nobody knows anyone in this movie, flop disaster.

• 48:50Yasi Salek?

  So he's like, can you write two songs? And he's, because he also, this trio also writes Hungry Eyes. And he's like, listen, the movie's not a porn, first of all. Secondly, here's the plot. Thirdly, this song needs to be seven minutes long and be ready in two weeks. And the guy was like, fucking what the fuck? He said, I've gotta write MacArthur Park. I had to go look that up.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  Someone left the cake out in the rain.

• 49:15Yasi Salek?

  Music expert that I'm not. I was like, oh yeah, this song.

• 49:20Speaker 04

  I think I only know MacArthur Park because there's a Bart station called MacArthur Park. And also, a lyric from MacArthur Park is, someone left the cake out in the rain, which is one of the weirdest song lyrics of all time. And so, I don't think it was Weird Al, I think it was someone else wrote a Jurassic Park parody, someone left the gates off in the rain. It's really good.

• 49:39Yasi Salek?

  Insane. That's amazing. He had a hundred dollars in his bank account.

• 49:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:44Yasi Salek?

  Nothing to lose. Tale as old as time.

• 49:46Speaker 04

  Let's do it.

• 49:46Yasi Salek?

  Calls his buddy John and he's like, can you help me compose a backtrack? Baby meets Johnny and the cat's goes yada, yada. Let's get this going. The chorus would begin at half speed and the verses would switch to double time. So it would become an upbeat dance tune. And then John De Niro was like, well, I need to call my friend because he has a drum machine. And that's how Donald Markowitz gets involved. And I guess-

• 50:09Speaker 04

  And gets paid for the rest of his life.

• 50:11Yasi Salek?

  They wrote the song in 20 minutes.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  Just because he had a drum machine. He's like, the money.

• 50:17Yasi Salek?

  Amazing confluence of events. And he was on the exit 140 on the Garden State Parkway in Union, New Jersey. Paid the toll and he put the cassette in his, you know, car. And he just starts going, nah, nah, time of my life. And he's like, what the hell am I saying? He's just writing time of my life on an envelope. And that's it. He wrote it, sent it on in, made it a duet. Because he was like, okay, well, it's boy meets girl.

• 50:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 50:43Yasi Salek?

  We'll make it a duet. He wrote the lyrics and

• 50:50Yasi Salek?

  that almost wasn't the end of the movie.

• 50:52Speaker 04

  So my understanding is that they like listened to, it's like over a hundred other options before they landed on this one.

• 50:59Yasi Salek?

  Can you believe it? It could have been another song.

• 51:01Speaker 04

  At their wits end, trying to find something.

• 51:03Yasi Salek?

  Because they were like, it's not working, it's not working.

• 51:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:06Yasi Salek?

  They were going to use a Lionel Richie song. Tough. That, like Kenny Ortega was like, absolutely not. And then they wanted Donna Summer and Joe Esposito to sing it.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  I saw Donna Summer, Lionel Richie, Daryl Hall, Kim Carnes.

• 51:23Yasi Salek?

  They all said no.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  We're like, no fucking thank you.

• 51:26Yasi Salek?

  Porno movie.

• 51:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. During dancing, no.

• 51:28Yasi Salek?

  No. Um, well, I mean, how could they have no?

• 51:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:32Yasi Salek?

  And then they went to Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers. And he also said no.

• 51:38Speaker 04

  Porno movie.

• 51:39Yasi Salek?

  Porno movie. And also, I'm about to have a daughter.

• 51:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:42Yasi Salek?

  She's about to be born. I need to be there with my wife. I can't be making this song for your porno movie.

• 51:48Yasi Salek?

  And he's also was like, I just did a song called Loving on Borrowed Time with Gladys Knight for the film Cobra, and it was an absolute flop, and I don't really want to live through that again.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 51:56Yasi Salek?

  Um, so Jimmy Anderson was like, okay, then he goes to Jennifer Warnes. I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to do a deep sidebar here. Because I actually didn't know about Jennifer Warnes' game. I was not, I'm sorry, Jennifer Warnes, I apologize, I was not familiar with your game.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  I didn't go down this alley. What do we know?

• 52:13Yasi Salek?

  She was a folk singer who was in a production of Hair. This is how she starts her career in L.A. in the late 60s. Then she meets a young man named Leonard Cohen.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Oh, I have heard of him.

• 52:24Yasi Salek?

  They become buds.

• 52:25Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 52:26Yasi Salek?

  She goes ahead and tours with him and his band for seven years. As a backup singer and then as a vocal arranger. She sings on five or six, maybe seven Leonard Cohen albums. Like, all the way through his career. Um, she even recorded her own album of covers of Leonard Cohen songs. She did her own album, she did several albums, but her third one was produced by John Cale. No big deal. She had a hit number one, like, easy listening song, and this was kind of her beat. She had a song called It Goes Like It Goes in the film Norma Rae. I've not seen it, but it won an Academy Award.

• 53:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. That song kind of sucks, actually, but I went, not on a deep dive, but I, like, spent some time listening to all the songs that have won Best Original Songs, and a lot of them suck.

• 53:12Yasi Salek?

  But you know what doesn't suck?

• 53:14Speaker 04

  This one.

• 53:14Yasi Salek?

  Well, also. Love lifts us up where we belong.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 53:19Yasi Salek?

  Which is her other song.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 53:20Yasi Salek?

  I fucking love that song from Officer and a Gentleman. Where the eagles fly. I'm up with Joe Cocker. I love that. I love that song. Um, Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote that song.

• 53:30Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:31Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, um, she also was like, I don't want to do this. Express reluctance.

• 53:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:37Yasi Salek?

  Not because of the porno movie, just didn't like the song. And Jimmy Anderson was like, here's a bag of money. Will you do it now? And she was like, okay, but you have to get Bill Medley to do it with me.

• 53:47Speaker 04

  It's a small bag, though.

• 53:48Yasi Salek?

  It's, it was a small bag of money.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  It's one we have left over.

• 53:50Yasi Salek?

  I mean, she was probably doing okay with her Oscar-winning song, Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong, but, um, that's not the, it's just called Up Where We Belong. This is not important. Bill Medley's like, okay, my daughter was born. Fine. God, leave me alone. I'll do it. And they did it. And look what happened.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  It's such a good song. It's an insane song. Um, that, that like, that drop of the beat, you know?

• 54:19Speaker 04

  His insane voice.

• 54:21Yasi Salek?

  Righteous Brothers.

• 54:22Speaker 04

  Righteous Brothers. Do you think Swayze, when he did Ghost, was like, we gotta get the Righteous Brothers back in here? I've, I've never failed with a Righteous Brothers hit.

• 54:32Yasi Salek?

  I hope so, because that's a great connection and he was correct.

• 54:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, unchained melody, very importantly. But, um, I love this song. I love that he lip syncs along to the song when they're dancing at the end. Like, again, I don't know if that was like, or like, if that was like an outtake or something like that, but it's just like, it's so good.

• 54:53Yasi Salek?

  How did you know this song in 1963?

• 54:54Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 54:57Yasi Salek?

  It's mad, we're suspending disbelief.

• 54:59Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 54:59Yasi Salek?

  This song lives in the universe of this movie.

• 55:02Speaker 04

  The fact that they were able to like court, because like, sometimes in movies, you don't have the song and so you can't, you like, choreographed to something else entirely.

• 55:09Yasi Salek?

  The fact that it works so perfectly with what they shot.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  No, they shot it again. So they like, they had sort of started working with, with like, other options or no options or whatever. And then they got this song. They shot with the-

• 55:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he's lip syncing.

• 55:21Speaker 04

  They shot with the demo that like, these guys, the drum machine or whatever had made. And so they're dancing to the demo. And then when Jennifer Warnes and Bill Mendley record this, they're recording it to the footage. So Jennifer Warnes is like, I was like hitting certain things while the lift was happening.

• 55:39Yasi Salek?

  I read that. So cool. She's like, she's like, I had them wheel in.

• 55:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, the footage. So like, Bill and Jennifer are singing like this, like classic, you know, Barbra Streisand like moment or whatever in the studio. And then like, right over here though, is the footage of Swayze and Jennifer Grey, so that they can like, hit the, you know, emotion when they need to. It's perfect. The song is so important. The song is just like-

• 56:03Yasi Salek?

  When he says, "Just remember."

• 56:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. You're the one thing I can't get enough of.

• 56:12Yasi Salek?

  Um, it's an absolute stone cold banger. It's a fucking jam. There's no way you could put this on and not feel happy and good and- Dance.

• 56:22Yasi Salek?

  It's just, it's magical and wonderful.

• 56:24Speaker 04

  And the people who wrote it retain the publishing rights, so they get paid forever.

• 56:28Yasi Salek?

  As they should, because they were doing a big favor.

• 56:31Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:31Yasi Salek?

  Apparently, Bergstein wanted the demo version, and she liked, she liked.

• 56:37Speaker 04

  The guys with the drum machine.

• 56:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, cuz he, he had a woman sing with him too. I can't remember who it is.

• 56:42Speaker 04

  Probably, yeah, yeah.

• 56:43Yasi Salek?

  You can hear it, it's on YouTube. And I think he put it out later on one of his albums. But he has like a way higher pitched voice than Bill Medley, and she just for some reason really loved that. It does sound, I know, I think she wanted, is it, is it true that she wanted Bill Medley cuz she wanted someone who was like an older figure that could like, kind of like, be that?

• 57:04Speaker 04

  Be 23-year-old Johnny Cash.

• 57:05Yasi Salek?

  No, no, like the bridge to like, like.

• 57:08Speaker 04

  Someone from the 60s.

• 57:09Yasi Salek?

  From the 60s.

• 57:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, that makes sense. I don't know, but that makes sense.

• 57:11Yasi Salek?

  I think so. I think that's what I read. Or not she, it's someone who was like, let's at least have someone from the 60s.

• 57:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's smart.

• 57:18Yasi Salek?

  Um, but really, actually Frankie Preveate, I can't say his name, voice sounds more 60s and the high pitched.

• 57:24Speaker 04

  In the like Frankie Valli kind of way?

• 57:26Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 57:26Speaker 04

  Oh, got it.

• 57:27Yasi Salek?

  Um, but it's, I mean, I can't, it can never not be Bill Medley.

• 57:30Speaker 04

  I mean.

• 57:32Yasi Salek?

  I can't get enough of.

• 57:35Speaker 04

  I'll tell you one thing.

• 57:38Yasi Salek?

  Do, do, do, do.

• 57:39Speaker 04

  This could be love.

• 57:52Yasi Salek?

  I'm not done with this song. I apologize. I really apologize. I thought I was done, but there's another small fact that I'm obsessed with.

• 57:58Speaker 04

  Please.

• 57:58Yasi Salek?

  Two small facts. One is that the guy that plays guitar in this song is Loris Juber, who was in the, was in Wings, Paul McCartney's Wings. He was the second guitar player of Wings.

• 58:05Speaker 04

  As opposed to the NBC sitcom Wings?

• 58:08Yasi Salek?

  Correct, which I love. And, um, really, as I've said this on this podcast, absolutely shaped my sexuality. Shout out, I'm Tim Daly.

• 58:15Speaker 04

  Tim Daly, Stephen Weber.

• 58:17Yasi Salek?

  Two of the hottest men to be on television.

• 58:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, Tony Shalhoub also.

• 58:19Yasi Salek?

  Love Mr. Monk.

• 58:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:20Yasi Salek?

  Love. Um, but no, the band. And then there's backing vocals here by a woman named Marcy Levy.

• 58:27Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:28Yasi Salek?

  She went by Marcella Detroit. She co-wrote the 1977 Eric Clapton hit, Late on Sally. And she was in the band Shakespeare's Sister, which is named after the Smith song, which by the way itself, this, I hope you'll like, is a reference to Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own."

• 58:42Speaker 04

  I do like that.

• 58:43Yasi Salek?

  Speculates about if Shakespeare had a sister, she certainly would not have been given. You know, the education and the, yeah.

• 58:50Speaker 04

  Guess what? I did like that fact.

• 58:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I thought you would.

• 58:53Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 58:53Yasi Salek?

  I thought you would. Shakespeare's sister is awesome. It's Marcela Detroit and Siobhan Fahy was in Bananarama. And they have one of the best album titles that's ever existed called Hormonally Yours.

• 59:05Speaker 04

  Incredible.

• 59:05Yasi Salek?

  They had a banger on it called Stay in 1982. And also, in 1980, pertinent to my interest, but also potentially a future episode of this show, she sang a duet with Robin Gibb called Help Me, which is featured on the official soundtrack for the film Times Square, which is one of my all-time favorite soundtracks.

• 59:22Speaker 04

  You mentioned this as like your favorite.

• 59:24Yasi Salek?

  We will, yeah.

• 59:24Speaker 04

  When we were talking about this verse.

• 59:25Yasi Salek?

  It's my number one favorite, but I think it's.

• 59:27Speaker 04

  Really high up on your list. And you're like, it's underrated.

• 59:29Yasi Salek?

  It's underrated. It's so interesting. It really captures like a time and like, there's so much cool music on it. Sean tried to say that it's more of a 70s soundtrack because it was 1980. And I was like, okay, well.

• 59:43Speaker 04

  Fantasy's not the boss of you. It's okay.

• 59:44Yasi Salek?

  ACAB, Sean Fantasy, you know? You know, Robert Crisco gave this soundtrack a D, and he hated the song and said it had technocratic orders.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 59:57Yasi Salek?

  Just saying. He's wrong.

• 59:59Speaker 04

  He's wrong. This album sold one gajillion copies.

• 1:00:02Yasi Salek?

  That's true. That's true. No one cared what he said. This won an Oscar, a Grammy, this song, and a Golden Globe. And topped the Billboard Hot 100.

• 1:00:11Speaker 04

  This was the best original song at the Oscars where Cher won her Oscar for Moonstruck.

• 1:00:18Yasi Salek?

  Can you believe that?

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  We were living.

• 1:00:19Yasi Salek?

  Can you believe it?

• 1:00:20Speaker 04

  We were alive.

• 1:00:21Yasi Salek?

  So the next song, I had to Google this, but I was like, oh, Joanna will know better. Because I was like, in my mind, Be My Baby's been in 175 films and TV shows. And that's actually not true. But it has been in quite a few, probably because it keeps getting more expensive, that it's not. But I have imagined that it's in so many. But I guess it's maybe most famously in Mean Streets. Um, and it's in Quadrophenia, it's in Baby Mama.

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:49Yasi Salek?

  I don't know if you remember that film.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  Mm hmm, I do.

• 1:00:51Yasi Salek?

  And Barbarian, which is a more recent film, which I've not seen.

• 1:00:55Speaker 04

  Horrifying movie.

• 1:00:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Um, and loads of TV shows. People love this song. I love this song.

• 1:01:00Speaker 04

  It's an iconic song.

• 1:01:01Yasi Salek?

  It's a perfect song.

• 1:01:03Speaker 04

  Ronnie Bennett was eighteen year old, eighteen when she recorded this, which is, and I love this song because, like, the Phil Spector, what a piece of shit, but like, wall of sound aspect of the song, incredible. Her, her teenage voice, uh, incredible. And then just like, uh, and plenty of people have written this about it, but like, this idea that like,

• 1:01:27Speaker 04

  it's a song that sounds like it's written from the point of view of the man, but it's the point of view of the girl, right? Be my baby.

• 1:01:33Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:01:34Speaker 04

  Like, that's, you know, in the, in nineteen, in the nineteen sixties, that was not a lyric often that a girl got to sing.

• 1:01:41Yasi Salek?

  It's so cool. I mean, I, I really, I'm quite obsessed with girl groups of the sixties and particularly like,

• 1:01:50Yasi Salek?

  teenage death songs. Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  It's like. A Leader of the Pack?

• 1:01:53Yasi Salek?

  Like Leader of the Pack. There's a whole, there's like a whole slew of them. It was like a big, Leader of the Pack is probably the most famous one.

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  Tell her I love her.

• 1:01:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:00Yasi Salek?

  I'm so obsessed with this.

• 1:02:01Speaker 04

  Where, oh, where could my baby be?

• 1:02:04Yasi Salek?

  The.

• 1:02:05Speaker 04

  It's a lot of car crashes and a lot of motorcycle crashes.

• 1:02:08Yasi Salek?

  They didn't wear seat belts back then and they drove drunk a lot, I think.

• 1:02:10Speaker 04

  The best is when those songs, cause Leader of the Pack definitely has this, when you can like, hear the crash in the song.

• 1:02:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Yasi Salek?

  I just like, it's, it's so goth, but also it's so, it's so Lana Del Rey. It's so like, and they're literal, like, I mean, the Shangri-Las, they were like fifteen, sixteen years old. These are like, it's real teenagers and you can feel the real teenage emotion in it.

• 1:02:33Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:02:33Yasi Salek?

  I just love this kind of music. And obviously Be My Maybe one of the pinnacles of this genre. And it's so good in the movie.

• 1:02:40Speaker 04

  It is incredibly good. This is the opening, right? Like where you're got, you have black and white images of people doing, it's just like, thigh, thigh, thigh, and this song.

• 1:02:59Speaker 04

  How many of the songs on the soundtrack do you think were picked because the word baby is so prominently used in them?

• 1:03:05Yasi Salek?

  I thought, I thought about it. I wonder if like particularly Be My Baby, she was like, I have to have it. The girl's name is Baby. It's so good. I think you could throw a stone and hit a song that Baby is prominently used in.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  That's very true.

• 1:03:17Yasi Salek?

  It's a big.

• 1:03:18Speaker 04

  But having Hey Baby also on.

• 1:03:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think there was a little winking going on.

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  You know, like, yes, baby is one of the top, like especially in the 60s, like one of the top words that show, like if you do the word cloud of all the lyrics, like it is very large. Yeah, but still.

• 1:03:33Yasi Salek?

  I, I think you're right. I'd, I'd love to know more, but I think they were like, let's really drive this home. Her name is Baby.

• 1:03:39Speaker 04

  Her name is Baby and all the songs will reflect that.

• 1:03:41Yasi Salek?

  Well, it's time to get to my fucking favorite Mount Rushmore best song of this entire soundtrack as far as I'm concerned. And that is She's Like the Wind by my man Patrick Swayze.

• 1:03:51Speaker 04

  Mr. Patrick Swayze.

• 1:03:52Yasi Salek?

  The thing that I love about this song is I feel like it has half as many lyrics as a normal song has.

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  It's just repeating.

• 1:03:58Yasi Salek?

  It's just refrain, refrain, refrain.

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Yasi Salek?

  And I shouldn't change one thing about it.

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  They went to the top of the charts.

• 1:04:03Yasi Salek?

  To me, you are perfect.

• 1:04:07Yasi Salek?

  Patrick Swayze wrote this song in 1984.

• 1:04:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:04:12Yasi Salek?

  With Stacy Whittlets. Yeah, I did go to Stacy Whittlets' website.

• 1:04:17Speaker 04

  I saw, I, I watched an interview with Stacy.

• 1:04:20Yasi Salek?

  So we, we did our due diligence. He had gone to an acting class with a friend and performed piano, cause he was a musician, Stacy Whittlets. For this musical scene, it was the Beverly Hills Playhouse. And they had a big discussion about music and the theater or whatever. And afterwards, a guy called Buddy came up and was like, I really loved your playing, man.

• 1:04:45Yasi Salek?

  And he was at the time, living with his girlfriend, Wendy Fraser, a great singer on the song.

• 1:04:50Speaker 04

  On the song.

• 1:04:51Yasi Salek?

  And they started hanging out and he got his first movie Buddy. I guess he went by Buddy. Did you, did that come up in the, in the documentary?

• 1:04:58Speaker 04

  In all the documentaries. Uh, his dad was Big Buddy and he was Little Buddy. It's a very Texan thing, I think. Yeah.

• 1:05:05Yasi Salek?

  Maybe I need to go to Texas.

• 1:05:07Speaker 04

  Maybe.

• 1:05:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:08Speaker 04

  Maybe all your, all your, like.

• 1:05:10Yasi Salek?

  All my exes. Future exes are gonna be living in Texas.

• 1:05:13Speaker 04

  All your men, all your, all your big, hunky, graceful men.

• 1:05:15Yasi Salek?

  I am going to a rodeo in Kansas City, well, outside of, two hours outside of Kansas City. And I'm like, maybe that's where my husband is.

• 1:05:21Speaker 04

  Maybe.

• 1:05:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Um, for listening. I'll be there.

• 1:05:25Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:05:27Yasi Salek?

  So, back to Patrick Swayze. Gets this movie, Grand View USA. What happened to see Thomas Howell?

• 1:05:35Speaker 04

  I don't know, but he's in like every story that you hear around the eighties.

• 1:05:39Yasi Salek?

  He was one of the big, I mean, he's Ponyboy.

• 1:05:41Speaker 04

  He's an outsider, he's in Red Dawn.

• 1:05:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. He was a huge actor.

• 1:05:45Speaker 04

  Was it Soul Man? Do you think that ended his career? Possibly.

• 1:05:50Yasi Salek?

  He was like a very scary serial killer in Criminal Minds. That was like kind of the last time I saw him, but I'm sure he's done stuff since. Anyways, he gets to Stacy and he's like,

• 1:06:02Yasi Salek?

  he told me he had a bunch of lyrics in some music, but couldn't get anywhere with it. Would I work on it with him? And they, he, they wrote it together.

• 1:06:11Speaker 04

  They wrote it together.

• 1:06:11Yasi Salek?

  He played guitar really well and he brought it in and he only had two chords. And he had his first two lines, "She's like the wind through my trees. She rides the night next to me." And they're like, that's just the song. It's the name of the song and we'll say it 20 times in the song and that'll be great.

• 1:06:38Speaker 04

  I love that you love this song.

• 1:06:39Yasi Salek?

  I love it so much.

• 1:06:40Speaker 04

  It's one of the cheesiest things I've ever heard in my entire life. Also, how many times have you seen the music video?

• 1:06:46Yasi Salek?

  So many times.

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  Which is just like slow mo, black and white footage from Dirty Dancing and then Swayze singing.

• 1:06:55Yasi Salek?

  Wonderful.

• 1:06:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:06:57Yasi Salek?

  I love him so much. I think it's a gorgeous and beautiful song of yearning and I, you know, he wrote it about his, his wife. Apparently, there was a, Rob Lowe went on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2020 and said that he had also brought the song to Youngblood and they said, no.

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:19Yasi Salek?

  And thank God.

• 1:07:20Speaker 04

  Imagine this in Youngblood.

• 1:07:21Yasi Salek?

  Thank God they were too stupid.

• 1:07:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it doesn't quite fit as well. But Fitz in here is so perfect thematically, lyrically, she's out of my league.

• 1:07:29Speaker 04

  Just a fool to believe.

• 1:07:31Yasi Salek?

  She's like the wind. Yeah, I'm sorry. I love this song.

• 1:07:36Speaker 04

  I support you.

• 1:07:37Yasi Salek?

  I support you.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  I would never see you.

• 1:07:38Yasi Salek?

  Lawrence Stuber of Wings also plays on this song.

• 1:07:40Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:07:41Yasi Salek?

  This one, maybe not on the awards, but I think it, it did some chart topping.

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  Oh, it went right to the top of the charts. It was huge. And the thing that I love about these songs is that like, you know, this is still in a time when they, they put out like.

• 1:07:55Yasi Salek?

  Singles.

• 1:07:56Speaker 04

  Singles.

• 1:07:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:57Speaker 04

  And the B-side to this is Stay.

• 1:08:00Yasi Salek?

  Juno's one of my favorite songs of all time.

• 1:08:02Speaker 04

  Stay?

• 1:08:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:03Speaker 04

  It's a great song, but like it goes up the charts because it's the B-side of She's Like The Wind and the B-side on I've Had The Time Of My Life is Love Is Strange, Mickey And Sylvia, which is.

• 1:08:12Yasi Salek?

  Also one of the.

• 1:08:12Speaker 04

  Incredible song.

• 1:08:13Yasi Salek?

  I had this like.

• 1:08:14Speaker 04

  But I just love that they were like putting out these contemporary songs and the B-side is going to be this like jam from the sixties on the other side.

• 1:08:21Yasi Salek?

  We used to be a proper.

• 1:08:22Speaker 04

  We used to live in a society.

• 1:08:23Yasi Salek?

  We still live in a proper country. Hungry Eyes is next.

• 1:08:26Speaker 04

  I love how they front loaded this shit out of this.

• 1:08:29Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  With like.

• 1:08:30Yasi Salek?

  Cause it, you're right. It was cassette. So they're like, side A is going to blow your socks off. We're putting everything. Eric fucking Carmen, babe.

• 1:08:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. I love the way that this is used in the, in the movie. So this is like, there's, oh, this movie is like 80% dance montage. Great. Love it. Uh, this is when, um, it's Penny and Baby are dancing.

• 1:08:55Yasi Salek?

  Such an amazing visual.

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. And Johnny's just like on the floor watching them and you know, the cameras are just like pelvis, pelvis, pelvis is like happening. And then the three of them are dancing together and right when the song first hits, Hungry Eyes, Baby looks up from her feet at Johnny, like at them. It's like so on the nose and I, it's perfect.

• 1:09:17Yasi Salek?

  Love it.

• 1:09:27Speaker 04

  The, the visual of the three of them dancing together, they're not, they're not grinding on each other. They're doing like proper like ballroom dancing, but it is so sexual.

• 1:09:34Yasi Salek?

  It's also just like so, there's something like really like metaphorically striking about it. Like it's like, I don't know, it's like she's got like divine feminine on one side.

• 1:09:43Speaker 04

  I love that.

• 1:09:44Yasi Salek?

  You know, divine master on the other and she's sort of like being guided in both directions. Like I just, I love that scene.

• 1:09:51Speaker 04

  Very good.

• 1:09:52Yasi Salek?

  And then you got fucking Eric Carmen crooning in the background. I love the raspberries. Power pop pioneers, if you guys don't know, that's where Carmen came from. Jimmy Iyer had worked with them. He was their producer, hence him tap, tap, tapping on.

• 1:10:05Speaker 04

  Again, that muscle.

• 1:10:06Yasi Salek?

  Eric Carmen's window. Hello, please roll down your window. I need you to.

• 1:10:10Speaker 04

  Illegal maneuver, tapping on someone's car window.

• 1:10:12Yasi Salek?

  I need you to come in, being Hungry Eyes.

• 1:10:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Yasi Salek?

  It's kind of crazy that these three people who had been with love and respect, absolute failures in the musical industry, wrote these two world-class bangers.

• 1:10:25Speaker 04

  Back to back.

• 1:10:26Yasi Salek?

  Back to back. Carmen also, we talked about it. He didn't want to do it. He didn't say any pornography. He said that he thought soundtrack music died horrible death.

• 1:10:36Speaker 04

  Wow. He was wrong.

• 1:10:38Yasi Salek?

  He was wrong. Well, I guess, is it kind of like an eighties thing? This is something I guess would be worth talking about. Is like the original song and the sales of a soundtrack being like a major thing? Kind of like a more new thing of the eighties? I know in the seventies, there was Saturday Night Fever.

• 1:10:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:10:57Yasi Salek?

  Which was a really big one and like Shaft was a big one.

• 1:11:00Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:11:01Yasi Salek?

  I, I think there's a handful, but it feels like maybe, maybe with the like advent of cassettes and.

• 1:11:08Speaker 04

  MTV.

• 1:11:09Yasi Salek?

  MTV, yeah, like.

• 1:11:10Speaker 04

  Well, being able to watch a music video that has clips from the movie that you loved.

• 1:11:14Yasi Salek?

  So major.

• 1:11:14Speaker 04

  Very important.

• 1:11:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Obviously the peak of this is the nineties where like soundtracks are like blowing out and you could like make tons of money on soundtracks. But like, yeah, I could see, I could see like, with the exception of those like handful of seventies ones, like a lot of seventies soundtracks probably don't exist anymore. And they, and when you look back on even some eighties soundtracks, but a lot of seventies soundtracks, they really would, would kind of. Focus around one original song maybe and the rest is kind of filler.

• 1:11:40Speaker 04

  Or like a closing credit song, something like that. But yeah, 87 is kind of late to have that point of view, though, because I think at that point, like, there's been a plenty of absolute banger 80s soundtracks that you're going to discuss.

• 1:11:52Yasi Salek?

  Thank God, thank God, your, your boy Jimmy dragged you out here. It was Carmen's biggest hit since All By Myself, which was obviously his, I think, big thing. The next song on here is Stay by Maurice Williams.

• 1:12:06Speaker 04

  Why is this one of your favorite songs?

• 1:12:07Yasi Salek?

  I don't know.

• 1:12:07Speaker 04

  It's an incredible song.

• 1:12:08Yasi Salek?

  I, I love, I think it's one of the sexiest songs of all time because of the pacing of the music. Please, please, please. It's just like a really, like, it's like very like.

• 1:12:22Speaker 04

  And your daddy won't mind.

• 1:12:23Yasi Salek?

  Daddy won't mind. I had a, when I was like 11 or 12, I, I had a turntable in my room and I, at a garage sale, got this like awesome, like, four-disc vinyl, like, doo-wop classics. And this was on here and I would just, I would listen to that all the time because I love them. But this song in just particular, like, I was just obsessed with it.

• 1:12:46Speaker 04

  I love that.

• 1:12:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I just find it really sexy and cool and it's so vibey, like.

• 1:12:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is.

• 1:12:53Yasi Salek?

  And yearn, yeah, like yearney songs, like.

• 1:12:55Speaker 04

  Absolutely, this is.

• 1:12:57Yasi Salek?

  Sexually yearney, I think, not romantic.

• 1:12:58Speaker 04

  Well, this is very much like, stay out, stay later than you're supposed to. Your parents will be okay with it, baby, if you fuck me in my cabin.

• 1:13:06Yasi Salek?

  That's kind of, yeah.

• 1:13:16Speaker 04

  I wrote little like notes next to the track of like what's happening in, in the movie when this song is playing. And this, I wrote pelvic grinding part two.

• 1:13:25Yasi Salek?

  A lot of pelvic grinding in this film.

• 1:13:26Speaker 04

  They need a good pelvic grinding music and this is good pelvic grinding. Like when baby comes back with the cash to the cabin and Penny's feeling better about the fact that she's knocked up and she and Johnny are just like grinding it out to stay, even though they're not dating or fucking, but they love to grind on each other.

• 1:13:44Yasi Salek?

  They love to grind on each other and they, they do it well.

• 1:13:47Speaker 04

  They do it very well. She's conservatively like seven feet tall and six of those feet are her legs. She's incredible.

• 1:13:53Yasi Salek?

  Incredible. This song is written by Maurice Williams, I didn't know that. And it was, this is like the original song, original writer, original recording. What do you make of "Yes" by Mary Clayton?

• 1:14:03Speaker 04

  It's like barely in the movie.

• 1:14:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Speaker 04

  And like a really stupid part of the movie, so it doesn't really feel like, I know it just because I listened to this cassette so many times, but it doesn't, I don't associate it with this movie the way.

• 1:14:14Yasi Salek?

  They included this, I don't know, like, do you?

• 1:14:17Speaker 04

  I think, feel like they put all of the contemporary songs on the cassette.

• 1:14:21Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:14:22Speaker 04

  Versus like paying Ronnie Spector, et cetera, et cetera, you know?

• 1:14:26Yasi Salek?

  I mean, Mary Clayton's a fucking legend, you know? For those of you who don't know, she is an American soul and gospel singer. But she, she did tons of singing on tons of people's music, but I think maybe most famously to this day is Gimme Shelter with the Rolling Stones. She's the singer on there. And also the most insane story around that where she was pregnant.

• 1:14:46Speaker 04

  And like they called her in the middle of the night?

• 1:14:48Yasi Salek?

  Called her in the middle of the night. She was pregnant while she recorded it and the intense singing resulted in a miscarriage.

• 1:14:56Speaker 04

  I don't think I knew that part.

• 1:14:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:15:00Yasi Salek?

  She also sang with Neil Young on his like debut album on a couple of songs, which is an absolute legend. And this song is like fun. It's so eighties.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  It's very eighties.

• 1:15:08Yasi Salek?

  It's so like, to me, like the end of a movie where like everything's like.

• 1:15:11Speaker 04

  I was thinking like the beginning of the, like the opening credits and like, she's running to work and she's got her like high heels in her bag and she's got sneakers on.

• 1:15:19Yasi Salek?

  She's wearing sneakers, one million, or something, skirt suit, yeah, nylons.

• 1:15:23Speaker 04

  She's doing it. She's leaning in.

• 1:15:24Yasi Salek?

  Funny you say that because then it goes into "You Don't Own Me," but the most bizarre version by the Blow Monkeys.

• 1:15:30Speaker 04

  And once again, barely in this movie, like, I had to go back and find where in the movie it is. It's like Johnny and Baby are having a fight and then he punches the shit out of Robbie who has an annotated copy of The Fountainhead. Like the most villain coded thing you could possibly do.

• 1:15:44Yasi Salek?

  Amazing little detail. It's like so good. Whoever like, whoever put that in, kudos to you.

• 1:15:49Speaker 04

  He's like, Baby, here's my copy of The Fountainhead.

• 1:15:51Yasi Salek?

  Did you know that he is a soulless capitalist?

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  Do you know he's evil? He has an annotated copy of The Fountainhead.

• 1:15:58Yasi Salek?

  Here's his Einrein book or whatever.

• 1:16:01Speaker 04

  But yeah, It's You Don't Own Me, which of course, like, a lot of people our age know best from The First Wives Club, you know, etc. But like, yeah, this is, is this the original? I don't know if this is the original.

• 1:16:12Yasi Salek?

  No, Leslie Gore's is the original.

• 1:16:14Speaker 04

  Right, right, okay.

• 1:16:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah, she's seventeen years old.

• 1:16:16Speaker 04

  Right, so this is like a guy singing it, isn't it?

• 1:16:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's a British pop band, like, an early eighties British pop band called The Blow Monkeys.

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  So like, so weird, because Leslie Gore singing it is like, such a cool, like, feminine anthem, and then you've got these like-

• 1:16:31Yasi Salek?

  Do you think it was like, well, I think they were like, kind of a thing, The Blow Monkeys, for a second. I've, I do not know them.

• 1:16:40Speaker 04

  I will admit, I think that's a sick name for a band.

• 1:16:42Yasi Salek?

  It's great.

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:43Yasi Salek?

  They did have another soundtrack hit, which was "It Doesn't Have To Be This Way", which-

• 1:16:52Speaker 04

  Oh, it's an eighty, okay, sorry, because, yeah, so of course, it's the eighties version of the song.

• 1:16:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. It was in Police Academy Four?

• 1:17:00Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:17:01Yasi Salek?

  So, but yeah, I had never heard of, I had never heard of this band, and I love British rock bands, but I didn't know about them. I don't, this is not my favorite version of You Don't Own Me.

• 1:17:15Speaker 04

  No, of course not.

• 1:17:16Yasi Salek?

  But, Leslie-

• 1:17:18Speaker 04

  I would rather hear Leslie Gore singing it, yeah.

• 1:17:20Yasi Salek?

  What about "Hey!" exclamation point baby by Cousin Brucie?

• 1:17:25Speaker 04

  I wanna know, oh, oh-

• 1:17:27Yasi Salek?

  Bruce Channel.

• 1:17:28Speaker 04

  If you'll be my girl-

• 1:17:30Yasi Salek?

  That's not Cousin Brucie, I've conflated two people, but Bruce Channel, yeah, this is a fucking banger.

• 1:17:34Speaker 04

  It rules. How do you feel about, so, this isn't a, the opening of this movie is so weird, because we get a baby voiceover right at the beginning, which you read the script of, right, it's nineteen sixty-three, etc., etc. And then there's no voiceover for the rest of the movie. And then you get, like, over the P A., you're like, "Hey, it's Cousin Brucie," like, blah, blah, and I was, like, expecting that, you expect that to be, like, throughout the whole, the way that, like, um, like, the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack has, like, radio, interstitial radio-

• 1:18:00Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:01Speaker 04

  You know, and stuff like that, it's just sort of like-

• 1:18:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  If Cousin Brucie-

• 1:18:03Yasi Salek?

  Sort of Good Morning Vietnam, right?

• 1:18:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, if Cousin Brucie had been, like, throughout the whole movie, you could've had, like, Cousin Brucie interstitials, like, through the whole soundtrack.

• 1:18:12Yasi Salek?

  I don't know that they thought that far, maybe.

• 1:18:13Speaker 04

  They should've.

• 1:18:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:14Speaker 04

  They should've gotten more out of Cousin Brucie.

• 1:18:17Yasi Salek?

  Cousin Brucie was, like, her friend, who was, like, a comedian.

• 1:18:19Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 1:18:20Yasi Salek?

  Is that right?

• 1:18:20Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 1:18:21Yasi Salek?

  Um, I think that's what I read.

• 1:18:23Speaker 04

  This song rules.

• 1:18:24Yasi Salek?

  This song rules, not Cousin Brucie, Bruce Channel, a different person. Here's a fun fact, though. He wrote the song, co-wrote the song.

• 1:18:33Yasi Salek?

  He toured Europe and played a gig with the Beatles, who were at that time unknown. And John Lennon loved Hey Baby and was really obsessed with the harmonica on the song. And according to popular legend, this guy taught him how to play harmonica. And he was inspired to put that into Love Me Do harmonica.

• 1:19:04Speaker 04

  I love that.

• 1:19:04Yasi Salek?

  So that's.

• 1:19:07Speaker 04

  Love Me Do is an all time harmonica song.

• 1:19:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Speaker 04

  Hey Baby, incredible song. This is the log dance montage.

• 1:19:14Yasi Salek?

  That is, I'll say it, my favorite scene in the movie.

• 1:19:17Speaker 04

  Really, the log dance?

• 1:19:18Yasi Salek?

  I think so.

• 1:19:18Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:19:19Yasi Salek?

  I think so.

• 1:19:19Speaker 04

  They're twist, they're doing the twist.

• 1:19:21Yasi Salek?

  I just.

• 1:19:21Speaker 04

  Bare feet.

• 1:19:22Yasi Salek?

  It's so beautiful.

• 1:19:23Speaker 04

  He's in black jeans, she's in white jeans.

• 1:19:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:26Speaker 04

  There's a lot of like Footloose-esque, we're just filming the feet. You know, if we're not on pelvises, we're on feet in this movie. And this is like a really good, they're both barefoot, twisting on the log.

• 1:19:36Yasi Salek?

  I also love, I feel like you guys have a word for it when you talk about film and TV, like, it's like expertise porn or something like when like.

• 1:19:45Speaker 04

  Competency porn.

• 1:19:46Yasi Salek?

  Competency porn, yeah. And I love this part where he's like, here's the, here's how you learn how to balance.

• 1:19:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:51Yasi Salek?

  Let's like, and like shifting the energy to a different space and being like, if you can do it on this, you know, tree log or we can do it in the water.

• 1:19:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:00Yasi Salek?

  I just really like it. And it's so beautiful, looks cool.

• 1:20:11Speaker 04

  Apparently, because, you know, because they were on such a short schedule.

• 1:20:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:17Speaker 04

  Do you, do you read about like the weather stuff that they endured in this movie, right? So apparently Jennifer Grey got hypothermia for the.

• 1:20:23Yasi Salek?

  They had to paint the leaves because they turned color and they had to paint them green so it still looked like summer.

• 1:20:27Speaker 04

  Well, they're all out there in their like summer gear and it's like, it's deep into fall in, on the East Coast. And so they're in the lake doing this lift. And everyone, Jennifer Grey in her memoir was like, everyone's on the shore. In like puffy coats with like warm coffee and I'm in this like see-through white tank top, like nips out in, in the lake during this lift and she got hypothermia. Also Apollonia in Purple Rain, same thing happened when they threw in the fucking, when Prince throws her in the lake. It was like very cold October time in, in Minnesota. Listen, we suffer for our art, I guess. And by we, I mean they, because I would not do that. It does, it does sound like that constantly only happens to women. True. It's like only women who have to be like scantily clad. Yeah, with zero percent body fat. And they're just like, oh no.

• 1:21:13Speaker 04

  Insta hypothermia, yeah. Okay, the next song is absolutely perplexing to me. Overload. To me, it sounds like Sledgehammer. Exactly. When I was rewatching, so I rewatched this a couple of times to prep for this because I care about you and I care about preparing for your podcast.

• 1:21:31Speaker 04

  But the first time when they started, I was like, is Sledgehammer in this movie? Yeah, Peter Gabriel. Is that you? And it's just, it's such a knockoff Sledgehammer moment. How did we not get a lawsuit from the Peter Gabriel estate? I have no idea. This is when Johnny is breaking into his own car. And she's like, you're wild. He's a man's man. He doesn't care. He doesn't care about things like car windows.

• 1:22:06Speaker 04

  Don't have much information about this. I just wanted to say that it's a bizarre inclusion. It's very weird. It's very eighties and it sounds exactly like Sledgehammer, except a little bit worse. Yeah. Love is strange. This is my favorite. This is my favorite scene of the movie. So prominently, this song is so prominently featured in the film. Like they are singing it to each other. Singing it to each other. It's just the cutest fucking scene because they've like, they've already had sex. And so they're just like playing with each other. They're dancing. She's like mocking him and she's like, this is my space. This is your, you know, she's like using all of his lines back at him. The crawling around on the floor. It's so iconic what she's wearing, the like knotted up white blouse. But he's in the like, the black tank top and it's just like this.

• 1:22:50Speaker 04

  And then the time of your life dance, I think are like the two most iconic moments of the movie. And, and just their like playfulness and the lip syncing along and like, we just like, as kids, we just love, you know, oh, love a boy. Like it's so fun.

• 1:23:08Yasi Salek?

  I also feel like it's such a good song because is it because they go baby?

• 1:23:19Speaker 04

  A little more baby.

• 1:23:21Yasi Salek?

  I think, you know, we're talking about it being a coming of age, but like there's such a, this is such a shift moment, right? Because she's really like, you know, she's lost her virginity. But you can see like her timidness is gone. She's like, now she owns the space and she's playing with him, you know? And like this song has that dynamic as well between Mickey and Sylvia. And so it's like, it's such a perfect thing to like soundtrack what's going on with the character.

• 1:23:49Speaker 04

  He plays the air guitar. It's very important.

• 1:23:52Yasi Salek?

  So great.

• 1:23:54Speaker 04

  I mean, this is, this is a feminist movie. Like this is a.

• 1:23:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, we have the abortion, abortion storyline.

• 1:24:01Speaker 04

  The abortion storyline, but like John, don't, nobody puts baby in a corner.

• 1:24:05Yasi Salek?

  Nobody puts baby in a corner.

• 1:24:06Speaker 04

  You know, like this is like, I just love this movie and, and, and I love, I love dance movies in general. And dancing as like teenage rebellion, I think is such a fun, like Footloose is absolutely iconic.

• 1:24:19Yasi Salek?

  Anymore, I don't think, but.

• 1:24:20Speaker 04

  No, but at the time or when, you know, or like Saturday Night Fever is its own like version of that. Or say the last dance if you prefer, but like, which I don't, but like one might, but like I, I love what this captured about. The one thing that they could have done with She's Like the Wind that they did nail in Footloose is the angsty solo dance. You know, even Kevin Bacon.

• 1:24:44Yasi Salek?

  You wanted Patrick Swayze to do a solo dance to She's Like the Wind?

• 1:24:48Speaker 04

  You would have loved that and a little bit of gymnastics, which is what Kevin Bacon does in Footloose. It would have been very important, I think.

• 1:24:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Okay. So he's thinking about her and he's doing a little dance.

• 1:24:58Speaker 04

  Just a fool to believe.

• 1:24:59Yasi Salek?

  It's out of my league. Yeah, I'll do it. I would, I would take it.

• 1:25:03Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:25:04Yasi Salek?

  No, I already know what you're gonna say. I was like, should we ask AI to make it for us?

• 1:25:09Speaker 04

  If you know one thing about me.

• 1:25:10Yasi Salek?

  The cursed video that AI would produce of Patrick Swayze dancing to this song. Just one last note about Love is Strange. It is technically based on a Bo Diddley song. So Bo Diddley is like the credited. Yeah, he wrote, it's a guitar riff. Yeah, and yeah, he, uh, he wrote it under his wife's name.

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:25:35Yasi Salek?

  So it was written under Ethel Smith. Um, Buddy Holly also did a recording of this. Thought that was cool.

• 1:25:43Speaker 04

  It's sick. The harmonies are really good. It's a great song.

• 1:25:46Yasi Salek?

  Nobody puts a baby in the corner. Feminist, feminist.

• 1:25:48Speaker 04

  Feminism.

• 1:25:49Yasi Salek?

  Well, it's also, and this is like, I'm so corny, but I don't care. I love, I love movies that are about being a better person.

• 1:25:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:59Yasi Salek?

  About striving to be good and to do the right thing. I know that's like so corny, but like a, a big through line of this movie is that like, one of the best scenes in this film, and it doesn't have anything to do with music or the soundtrack, is when she confronts her father.

• 1:26:15Speaker 04

  I agree.

• 1:26:16Yasi Salek?

  And she's like, I know I let you down, but you let me down too. Like you told me everyone was.

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  I lied, but you lied.

• 1:26:21Yasi Salek?

  I lied, but you lied. You told me everyone was equal, but you met only people like you.

• 1:26:25Speaker 04

  And I mean, okay, so does this movie have flaws around that? Do you just, cause I'm so moved. This movie has flaws around that, obviously, because like it features all this music by black artists and there are like no, there's like one speaking role for a black person in this movie.

• 1:26:40Yasi Salek?

  I mean, I do think that's like realistic to the story. There wouldn't have been.

• 1:26:43Speaker 04

  Well, there are like black teenagers dancing in the barn, but like none of them have a line, you know?

• 1:26:49Yasi Salek?

  Or like any sort of characterization.

• 1:26:51Speaker 04

  But I do think Eleanor Bernstein being like, what if I wrote a version of my own teenage experience, but first of all, I get to fuck Patrick Swayze. And secondly, I get to be a really, like, maybe she was a great person.

• 1:27:02Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:27:02Speaker 04

  But like, this is, this is the dream of the privileged white person that like, if it were me. I would get money for that woman's abortion and I would like clear my working class boyfriend's name of like, uh.

• 1:27:16Yasi Salek?

  Wrongdoing.

• 1:27:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, petty larceny and like all this other stuff like that, like this, so I want to be, but I do like that the film kind of makes fun of it too. Like when she meets that other kid played by Lonnie Price and he's like, I'm going to be with the Freedom Riders and you know, it's just like, it's very like.

• 1:27:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's self-aware.

• 1:27:31Speaker 04

  It's self-aware in that way.

• 1:27:32Yasi Salek?

  Even him pushing back on her and being like, yeah, anyone can run to their dad and get their money.

• 1:27:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:36Yasi Salek?

  You know, like, there are like some self-aware checking moments of it. And I, I mean, fucking to her credit, bad bitch, like, they, they were asked to pull the abortion subplot.

• 1:27:48Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. And she's like, no.

• 1:27:49Yasi Salek?

  Because they had like a sponsorship of like Noxzema or something. And Noxzema was like, I.

• 1:27:53Speaker 04

  No abortion, no way.

• 1:27:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And like, it's kind of a pretty early, I mean, there's been obviously abortion in film, but like, not in like, I, you know, in, as such a plot point.

• 1:28:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. What year did Fast Times come out? Eighty-two. Yeah. Fast Times has a, yeah, very good storyline. Yeah, it's, it's not, it's, I think it's surprising. And like, you talk to some people and they're like.

• 1:28:14Yasi Salek?

  Both these films were made for women.

• 1:28:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, but they're like, I had no idea. You talk to some people and they're like, I had no idea there was abortion. As you said, it was like fifty percent or something like that. They're like, I had no idea that that's what the storyline was. And it's just like, what did you think was happening?

• 1:28:28Yasi Salek?

  Think was happening. I'm gonna, I won't lie to you. I don't have any thoughts about Where Are You Tonight by Tom Johnston, who was in the Doobie Brothers.

• 1:28:37Speaker 04

  Nor do I, really.

• 1:28:38Yasi Salek?

  No shade, no tea.

• 1:28:40Speaker 04

  Oh, no. Okay, this is what I will say.

• 1:28:42Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 1:28:43Speaker 04

  So it's eighty-seven. It's one of the eighty-seven songs.

• 1:28:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:46Speaker 04

  But it's, this is the most anachronistic. I think, well, because like, it's, I think Where Are You Tonight sounds like it could be from the sixties. In a way that Time of Your Life does not.

• 1:28:56Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:28:57Speaker 04

  And it's the siren song that like lures baby to the staff quarters, is what she hears in the first place.

• 1:29:02Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:29:02Speaker 04

  Before she carries a watermelon. Uh, she's just like, walking around in the dark and she hears this song playing from the staff quarters. And she's like, what is that? But that's a nineteen eighty-seven song that does, like, I had to look up when it came out because it sounds like it could be from somewhere in the sixties.

• 1:29:19Yasi Salek?

  Production is really eighties.

• 1:29:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Really eighties.

• 1:29:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. But yeah, why wouldn't they have just used a sixties song for that moment?

• 1:29:25Speaker 04

  That's so funny. Cause like, Time of Your Life, you're like, we're in, we're in like, we're bending time and space. It's fine.

• 1:29:31Yasi Salek?

  We've left the confines.

• 1:29:33Speaker 04

  Like, very early, you know, because like, once she gets inside there, it's sixty, you know, it's sixty songs, not sixty-three songs, like, later sixty songs, but like, still, we're in the sixties. But that song that like, calls to her from the dark is this weird nineteen eighty-seven song. Yeah.

• 1:29:48Yasi Salek?

  And then we bring it the fuck home. Which in Within the Still of the Night by the Five Satins, which was also on my doo-wop vinyl, and I love it so much and it's so beautiful.

• 1:29:59Speaker 04

  It's so good. In the Still of the Night sold over 10 million copies as part of the Dirty Dancing soundtrack in the 80s, right?

• 1:30:06Yasi Salek?

  So fabulous.

• 1:30:07Speaker 04

  I love this.

• 1:30:07Yasi Salek?

  Do you think that Fred Paris and the Five Satins cashed out on that?

• 1:30:10Speaker 04

  Or the Fred Paris estate, the Five Satins estate?

• 1:30:12Yasi Salek?

  Sure, that's true.

• 1:30:13Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 1:30:13Yasi Salek?

  1956.

• 1:30:14Speaker 04

  This is Baby and Johnny post-coital. Writers are about to be spotted by Vivian as they tenderly say goodbye. But yeah, this song rules. I mean, to your point about like doo-wop classics, like shouldo, dooby, like this is it, yeah.

• 1:30:28Yasi Salek?

  Well, okay, here's one song that I associate so strongly with this film that is probably my biggest, why did they leave this out? And it's the contour song.

• 1:30:40Speaker 04

  Cause it's about dancing.

• 1:30:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I can mash potato.

• 1:30:44Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:30:44Yasi Salek?

  Mash potato. I can do the twist. I can do the twist.

• 1:30:49Speaker 04

  I was like, tell me who?

• 1:30:50Yasi Salek?

  Tell me, baby. You know, again, throw a rock.

• 1:30:54Speaker 04

  Do you like it like this?

• 1:30:55Yasi Salek?

  Um, but that's a song that I, to me, I've always associated with Dirty Dancing, but I was kind of surprised now looking back to be like, oh, it's not on the actual soundtrack?

• 1:31:04Speaker 04

  I also think that These Arms of Mine and Cry to Me, which are like the, the two, you know, Cry to Me is the...

• 1:31:11Yasi Salek?

  The big seduction.

• 1:31:12Speaker 04

  The big seduction. These Arms of Mine, the seduction, like those aren't on there, which is wild to me. And then like Love Man is not on there.

• 1:31:22Yasi Salek?

  Will you still love me tomorrow? Great, great song.

• 1:31:26Speaker 04

  Really good.

• 1:31:27Yasi Salek?

  Um, and Big Girls Don't Cry.

• 1:31:29Speaker 04

  Big Girls Don't Cry. But like, I think it's, I think it's really weird that like the Otis Redding really like Love Man.

• 1:31:36Yasi Salek?

  Maybe it was really expensive.

• 1:31:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. I'll, I'll, I'll believe it. I carried a watermelon, she said. Baby and Johnny's first dance, Love Man, Otis Redding, not on the soundtrack. Very weird, but that's why they, they put out more Dirty Dancing.

• 1:31:48Yasi Salek?

  And, and, and they, and then there was a third one that was like...

• 1:31:52Speaker 04

  The full thing in chronological order.

• 1:31:55Yasi Salek?

  They were like, we're gonna squeeze every last dollar.

• 1:31:57Speaker 04

  We're gonna put join hands and hearts and hands on there like as well.

• 1:32:02Yasi Salek?

  The Kellerman.

• 1:32:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Kellerman song. And then they did a live concert tour. Of the soundtrack? This is like glee in concert. They did a live concert tour of the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.

• 1:32:13Yasi Salek?

  Why didn't I get to go to that?

• 1:32:13Speaker 04

  It's on YouTube, apparently. I haven't watched it, but apparently we can, maybe we should put it on and watch it together.

• 1:32:18Yasi Salek?

  I would love that. Well, this film did amazing, in no small part, I think, to the soundtrack. We talked about a little bit how it exceeded expectations, but it was the first film to sell over a million copies on home video.

• 1:32:30Speaker 04

  I think it was the number one VHS, like, sale of 1988. Once again, every single slumber party, people are watching this movie. And their parents are like, oh, this is fine.

• 1:32:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And I, I want to ask you, like, before we close it out, like, how, do you feel, I mean, we, we talked about just the success of the film working, resting so much on the music, but do you feel that the soundtrack itself, like, as an entity in the world, kind of fed back into the popularity of the film?

• 1:33:01Speaker 04

  Absolutely, I do.

• 1:33:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Like, hearing those, like, maybe people started hearing those songs on the radio, or seeing them on MTV and was like, what's this about?

• 1:33:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, so certainly, this movie comes out, and it just, like, finds its first weekend, but then it climb, like, goes up the box office charge, which is such, like, a rare thing to do, so like, a bona fide word of mouth hit, uh, which is incredible. And I think, yeah, in no small part due to the soundtrack. The soundtrack came out, as they always do, before the movie flopperoo, because no one gives a shit about this. And they're like, I've had the time of my, what? Who cares?

• 1:33:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, she's like, the huh, I don't know. And then the movie comes out.

• 1:33:35Yasi Salek?

  If you hear those songs divorced from the film, they're not gonna really, they're not gonna hit the same way. People are like, Patrick Swayze made a song called She's Like The Wind?

• 1:33:44Speaker 04

  The guy from Red Dawn? To go back to our earlier conversation about, like, sort of, post-internet, sort of like, we all live in, in the soup together now. There, there's this, there were various things that kept movies alive in your thoughts and your heart. And like, the soundtrack is part of it, a DVD commentary later is part of it. Let's re-watch it, but like, listen to the filmmakers talk about it. Rewatchability, like, it's just running on cable all the time.

• 1:34:13Yasi Salek?

  Dirty Dancing was, I feel like, on all the time.

• 1:34:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, they might have cut some of the abortion stuff, I do not recall, but like, it was definitely just like, on TNT all the time, or TBS, or whatever.

• 1:34:25Speaker 04

  So like, running on cable all the time, you have the VHS, let's put it on every single, like if you open up someone's cabinet.

• 1:34:32Yasi Salek?

  I had it. We had it.

• 1:34:33Speaker 04

  They had a bunch of white Disney clamshell VHSs.

• 1:34:36Yasi Salek?

  Oh, the Disney clamshell.

• 1:34:37Speaker 04

  And then they definitely had the like, a very battered, like, just one little cardboard sleeve, Dirty Dancing, that they had watched one million times. Like, for sure, that was in the collection. And it was just sort of like, let's, and it's a perfect rewatchable. Like, this is, the runtime's not that long. It just feels great to, to watch it, and...

• 1:34:56Yasi Salek?

  I was literally, like, 12 years old again when I watched it, even though it came out way before that. But like, I was like, like, oh my god, love is real. Love is possible. This is gonna happen to me. I'm gonna be swept away.

• 1:35:09Speaker 04

  I feel like we don't, you know, and, and MTV, like, let's watch the music video that has clips from the movie and remember how much we love it, which is like, you know, what I did when like, The Bodyguard came out, or, you know, all those sort of things. It's just sort of like, oh my god, it's the music video that has clips from this movie that I love. And so like, that all keeps it alive, and we're quoting it back and forth to each other and stuff like that. And we just like, don't often do that with movies anymore. It's true.

• 1:35:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:31Speaker 04

  I am, I love that we're talking about this Dirty Dancing success story in the year of something like Obsession or Backrooms, when like, these little movies that come from nowhere and just like, climb the box office charts and absolutely dominate.

• 1:35:45Yasi Salek?

  Do you know my feelings about this?

• 1:35:47Speaker 04

  What's that?

• 1:35:47Yasi Salek?

  Which I actually haven't seen Obsession, which I need to. I love Backrooms. I think it's so interesting that the films that are like dominating, that are like, these like little, you know, things that could, are all horror movies.

• 1:36:00Speaker 04

  Horror movies, yeah.

• 1:36:00Yasi Salek?

  It's like so reflective of a society in pain.

• 1:36:04Speaker 04

  On the one hand, yes, and I agree with you, but on the other hand, I've always, I mean, I'm not the first person to say this, but like, you want to see a horror movie and a comedy in a theater with a bunch of people.

• 1:36:14Yasi Salek?

  Totally. It's a shared, it's a shared experience.

• 1:36:17Speaker 04

  It's kind of like, I mean, honestly, it's kind of like dancing and music, right? Like, you want to see like, big music things in a theater too, or like, you know, I've been thinking a lot about dancing, not just because of Dirty Dancing, but like, the new Madonna album is all about...

• 1:36:32Yasi Salek?

  Coming back to the dance floor and stuff and it's like, it's physical, it's physicality, it's being in your body, it's not being on your phone, it's not being at a computer, it's not being in front of a screen, it's being with other people. It's like moving in, moving to a thing that other people are moving to, it's like a community space. Like there's so much, and you talked about it as rebellion, like there's something about it that's like so lost now that I think people are so hungry for, so hungry eyes for. And I wonder if we will start to get some like dancing films or like, you know, something that's like, well, you know what, I haven't seen it yet, but I heard Club Kid by Jordan Firstman is a massively amazing movie.

• 1:37:13Yasi Salek?

  Which is about being, you know, in the nightclub scene and like that is like, I, I, you know, I can see it coming because we're all so fucking sick of being at home and looking at our phones alone.

• 1:37:25Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And I think especially with Dirty, I love that and let's go see Club Kid together, but like, and talk about how it's the same as Dirty Dancing. It's the exact same movie. But I think like when, if you go back to your guy, Patrick Swayze and his like, uh, classic training as a ballet dancer. And he talks about, he talks about, and Jennifer Grey talks about how like, he really knew how to connect. This is how he fell in love with his wife, how he knew how to connect.

• 1:37:50Yasi Salek?

  Through physicality.

• 1:37:51Speaker 04

  Through dance specifically. And then also Swayze, in, this is like his version of like, I thought it was a porno. The quote that he gives all the time about Dirty Dancing is like, it's the man's job to not draw focus, to make the woman look like beautiful and like she's flowing and all this sort of stuff like that. So like Johnny's like constantly like dressed in black. It's all black, except for when he, when he comes in, in that, in the first like Dirty Dancing scene, when he's like in his like, tux, like the high waisted pants and the open tux shirt and he's just like grinding. That's like, sort of the most showbod-y. And then at the end, when he does like solo dancing, um, that's a bit showbod-y, but mostly he's like there to support Jennifer Grey.

• 1:38:32Speaker 04

  And there's just like something about that that is very, like so powerful for young women to watch. I think it's so incredible. Can I tell you, I showed this movie to my best friend only a couple of years ago. She had never seen it for some reason. And the way she described Patrick Swayze in this movie, she was like, he's like a ship sharp little pony. And I just think it's a perfect description of him.

• 1:38:54Yasi Salek?

  Well, the main for sure.

• 1:38:56Speaker 04

  The main, but then like the high waisted, tight pants. It was just like, he's just like clip clopping around and just like, yeah.

• 1:39:01Yasi Salek?

  His movement.

• 1:39:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Yasi Salek?

  Honestly reminds me, what is the name of the Greek mythological creature that is like?

• 1:39:08Speaker 04

  Oh, centaur. Yeah.

• 1:39:09Yasi Salek?

  He's like a centaur.

• 1:39:09Speaker 04

  He is like a centaur.

• 1:39:10Yasi Salek?

  He's got like those like floppy legs with a broad chest and the hair.

• 1:39:14Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 1:39:15Yasi Salek?

  God bless. What a film. What a film. What a soundtrack. Like, you know, we said, it's, it's so eighties by, by dint of being so looking back towards the sixties.

• 1:39:28Speaker 04

  The sixties. And being like, and there's this like nostalgia moment at the end of the movie when like the Max Kellerman is that his name?

• 1:39:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:34Speaker 04

  Who's like, this is all leaving now. It's not going to be like this anymore. The kids don't want to come to the Catskills anymore. It's slipping through our fingers. But like, that nostalgia is really interesting. I'm so excited for this series that you're doing. I, I think I'm the, I'm the first you're recording with. I don't know if it's the first.

• 1:39:52Yasi Salek?

  Purple Rain.

• 1:39:53Speaker 04

  Oh, you did Purple Rain. Of course.

• 1:39:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:54Speaker 04

  Okay. But I'm so excited for this series. Purple Rain's hard to beat in terms of like impact, but Purple Rain's more of like an album.

• 1:40:02Yasi Salek?

  I think you could, I mean, you can't even place Purple Rain in the canon because it's like, anything Prince is gonna do, but also like, it's not only the best eighties soundtrack, it's the best soundtrack and it's maybe one of the best albums of all time.

• 1:40:15Speaker 04

  That's the thing.

• 1:40:15Yasi Salek?

  Without being a soundtrack. Because it's all original music. It's all by Prince. Like, it's, it's kind of stands on its own.

• 1:40:21Speaker 04

  Right. Okay. This isn't a competition.

• 1:40:23Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 1:40:25Speaker 04

  And I've heard some of the selections that some of our other colleagues have made and they're like quite good.

• 1:40:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:30Speaker 04

  But in terms of like, impact, like, this is the thing about Dirty Dancing is it's like, it's so, people think of it, it's so easily dismissed. It's so girly. It's so whatever it is.

• 1:40:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:42Speaker 04

  But in terms of like, the impact.

• 1:40:44Yasi Salek?

  Women's issue is not important, I guess.

• 1:40:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. Fuck the eras tour. But like, this is the eras tour of the eighties is the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. It's so. Bizarrely impactful. Um, so beat that, anyone else?

• 1:40:58Yasi Salek?

  You think yours is, uh, what do you think Bill Simmons' favorite soundtrack is that he's, um, won't tell us?

• 1:41:04Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 1:41:05Yasi Salek?

  He wants us to guess and we keep getting it wrong.

• 1:41:07Speaker 04

  What do you think it is?

• 1:41:08Yasi Salek?

  No clue. I've been throwing guesses out left and right.

• 1:41:11Speaker 04

  I know.

• 1:41:12Yasi Salek?

  I'm like, maybe he's right that I'll never, ever guess it.

• 1:41:14Speaker 04

  We're on a text thread with Bill about this very subject. He's made a different, a different selection for what he will be talking to you about.

• 1:41:21Yasi Salek?

  True, I'll spoil.

• 1:41:22Speaker 04

  So he's doing best instead of favorite and his favorite is something else. It's gotta be something like really out of left field, but like, do you have any guesses right now?

• 1:41:29Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:41:30Speaker 04

  Do you think it's something like really like quote unquote girly?

• 1:41:32Yasi Salek?

  Obscure?

• 1:41:33Speaker 04

  Oh, you think it's obscure?

• 1:41:35Yasi Salek?

  Well, like, it'd be so cool if it was like less than zero.

• 1:41:37Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 1:41:38Yasi Salek?

  Amazing soundtrack.

• 1:41:39Speaker 04

  That's an interesting Bill choice.

• 1:41:40Yasi Salek?

  A lot of, um, Rick Rubin worked on this soundtrack and it's Def Jam. So it's like a lot of like, uh, LL Cool J and Danzig and stuff. It's, I don't know if that's very Bill.

• 1:41:50Speaker 04

  That's not Bill. I don't think. But I'll happily, I'll happily be wrong.

• 1:41:54Yasi Salek?

  We're gonna find out. He said he'll reveal it.

• 1:41:56Speaker 04

  He said on your, this is a great teaser.

• 1:41:59Yasi Salek?

  On the.

• 1:41:59Speaker 04

  But I do think you should ask every single guest to guess what they think.

• 1:42:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and see.

• 1:42:03Speaker 04

  Bill's favorite is.

• 1:42:05Yasi Salek?

  Favorite is and see if we get, any of us.

• 1:42:06Speaker 04

  Who gets closest.

• 1:42:07Yasi Salek?

  We'll do a betting poll.

• 1:42:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:08Yasi Salek?

  Well, Joanna Robinson, this has been an absolute, I'll say, time of my life. Thank you. Never felt this way before.

• 1:42:17Speaker 04

  Yasi, you know what? You're like the wind to me.

• 1:42:20Yasi Salek?

  God.

• 1:42:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:21Yasi Salek?

  Through the trees.

• 1:42:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:23Yasi Salek?

  Thank you for doing this. Um, thank you guys for listening. Come back next week, uh, for a new, presumably soundtrack episode of Bandplain.

• 1:42:39Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandplain. Our guest today was Joanna Robinson. You can find her on the Prestige TV podcast and House of R and many other places. This episode was produced by Rob Senterman and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Video production by Jacob Cornet. Executive producers for Bandplain are Gina Dalvak and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by. Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavain and graciously recorded by Carlos Delgarza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, producer Dylan, AKA Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Sean Fantasy and Celsius, which I should stop drinking, but I will not. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandlain on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

• 1:43:28Yasi Salek?

  It's your show. I get distracted and I'll look at myself too much, so. I like it all. Yeah. I will be narcissist. I know. Fall into the pond.

• 1:43:40Speaker 00

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