![]() It’s a 4.) The Knockouts had a couple of other minor hits, but their moment was clearly over. Previte had been the leader of Franke And The Knockouts, a New Jersey soft rock band who’d only ever been in the top 10 once. When he started writing “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life,” Franke Previte didn’t exactly have a whole lot going on. That impossible final-scene song rode the tide, too, winning an Oscar and reaching #1 on the Hot 100. That year, the Dirty Dancing soundtrack outsold Hysteria and Kick and Bad and Appetite For Destruction only George Michael’s Faith moved more copies. ![]() The Dirty Dancing soundtrack kept selling in 1988, to the point where Billboard named it the year’s #2 album. But that Dirty Dancing soundtrack still rose to #1 on the album charts in November, kicking Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel Of Love out of the top spot and staying there for 18 weeks. Most of the songs were oldies - including a couple, like Maurice Williams And The Zodiacs’ “ Stay” and Bruce Channel’s “ Hey! Baby,” that have appeared in this column. The album only had a few new-to-1987 songs, none of which came from artists who were especially relevant to the pop music of the moment. The Dirty Dancing soundtrack was even bigger. (On the year-end box-office chart, Dirty Dancing is right between Lethal Weapon and The Witches Of Eastwick. It was never the #1 film at the box office, but it still took in $64 million in the US, finishing 1987 as the 10th-biggest hit of the year. Dirty Dancing was a slow-burner of a hit. When Dirty Dancing hit theaters in August of 1987, it resonated. (Bergstein had even been nicknamed Baby.) Director Emile Ardolino, who’d mostly only filmed documentaries about dancers, made Dirty Dancing on a low budget, with stars who weren’t yet stars. It’s memory as fantasy, which might be the purest definition of nostalgia.ĭirty Dancing literally is Baby’s story screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein wrote the movie as a semi-autobiographical account of her own younger years. It’s Baby rhapsodizing about this one beautiful experience in her life, telling the tale the way it exists in her imagination. That ending is where we learn that Dirty Dancing is truly subjective storytelling. In that ending, the film takes off into the realm of magical dream-logic reverie. It’s absurd, and it’s beautiful.īefore that ending, Dirty Dancing hadn’t exactly been going for cinematic realism, but it mostly took place in a world that at least had a passing resemblance to our own. Johnny lip-syncs along with a song that will not exist for another 24 years. Baby’s father - Jerry Orbach, five years before he began his Law & Order run - admits to Johnny that he was wrong. They pull it off, and the audience loses its collective mind.īy the time the extremely long and anachronistic song ends, everyone in the ballroom has a whole new perspective. Baby runs toward Johnny, and they do the Lift, the move they’ve been working on all summer. He joins his co-workers in a choreographed strut, moving toward Baby like he’s in a Michael Jackson video. Johnny twirls on his knees and headbangs while jumping. Johnny leaps offstage in ecstatic slow-motion, and Baby throws her head back in delight. The song starts up, all keyboard tones and ’80s drum sounds, and Johnny and Baby melt into each other, moving as one and transforming into a blur of motion. What happens next is pure romantic delirium. Then one of Johnny’s friends drops the needle on a 45 that couldn’t possibly have existed in the summer of 1963. He’s going to do his kind of dancing with a great partner - someone who’s taught him about the kind of person that he wants to be. He tells the audience that he always does the last dance of the season. ![]() Then he takes her by the hand, leading her onstage and interrupting that camp song. Johnny walks over to where Baby sits with her family and tells her father that nobody puts Baby in the corner. Suddenly, Johnny marches into the ballroom, a black leather jacket over his open shirt and purpose in his eyes. Instead, she has to sit there, devastated, watching a numbingly boring final-night talent show. But her father has discovered that she’s spent the night with Johnny, and Johnny has been fired. She’s spent the summer with her family at the Catskills resort Kellerman’s, and she’s fallen for Johnny Castle, the handsome young man who’s been working there as a dance instructor. The summer of 1963 is ending, and Frances “Baby” Houseman is dying inside. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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