You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation

by Susannah Gora

  MTV soon became almost a way of life for 1980s teens. And thanks to the lightning-quick editing style and short length of its videos, the new cable network also changed, fundamentally, the way in which a narrative was presented, notoriously reducing the American attention span in the process. As MTV gained ever-greater popularity throughout the early to mid-1980s, people would hold MTV-watching parties, and harried parents would plop their kids in front of the friendly VJs on-screen. “MTV was the baby-sitter,” says Blackwood, “and that was a bad thing. But on the positive, young people had their own culture, which was empowering. The 1980s was a celebration of youth.”

  Before long, studio execs realized that the music video was a natural vehicle through which to sell movies to teens. “It became a very synergistic thing,” says Lionsgate’s Faires. “The film becomes a hit, it gives a break to a band in England that’s already big in England, MTV starts banging the video, and that sort of opened up radio. It reinforced itself. Those videos just became three-minute clips to go see the movie.” The soundtrack songs of movies from that period often had music videos that were nothing more than a montage of scenes from the movies, mixed with bits of footage of the bands moodily playing along. Record labels didn’t yet have big budgets devoted to music videos, so film studios would often pay for these themselves. Flashdance was one of the first movies to truly exploit the inexpensive power of MTV to sell movie tickets. The two soundtrack songs that became hugely popular, “Maniac” and “Flashdance … What a Feeling” both had videos that consisted entirely of film footage—the musical artists didn’t appear on-screen once. Flashdance became one of the top-selling albums of that year and, not coincidentally, one of the top-grossing films.

  “Every movie that came out that was going for a youth demo had its tie-in video,” says music journalist Rob Sheffield. “Nobody wanted to miss the boat on a possible ‘Maniac’ or ‘Footloose,’ a hit song and a hit video that becomes associated with the movie.” MTV was also a way to get very young kids, the ones who weren’t old enough to go to the movies on their own but who had access to the music channel at home, excited about the movies—so that soon they’d be begging their older brothers and sisters (or, in a pinch, their parents) to take them to the multiplex. A study at the time found that more than half of the MTV audience decided what movies to see based on exposure to films on the network.

  The Brat Pack movies caught a wave in the changing tastes of the American teen. Straight-out rock ’n’ roll, the kind that is now called “classic rock,” was the most popular type of music throughout the 1970s. But the classic rock genre was sorely tested by disco. The likes of KISS, Rod Stewart, and The Rolling Stones traded in some of their rock bona fides for a brief shot at disco glory. American rock music was starting to get muddled, and when disco imploded, there was nothing really to replace it, at least domestically. But in Europe, a new type of music that eschewed guitars and embraced keyboards and drum machines had taken hold. Bands with names like Joy Division and Depeche Mode introduced a computerized sound that borrowed the emotion of punk and the precision of Kraftwerk, yet was unlike any music heard before. In the early 1980s, these New Wave bands, and others like them, were phenomenally successful—but not in the United States. Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” was a hit in America in 1982, but the group didn’t bring mainstream success for the rest of the genre along with them.

  John Hughes did. “He was into it way before it hit the States,” says Michelle Manning of Hughes and his love for New Wave. It’s easy for someone who was not an adolescent during the 1980s to watch these movies and assume that 1980s teens were already listening to New Wave music, that the films’ soundtracks were portraying reality (like American Graffiti, the soundtrack of which was chockful of the exact songs that teenagers would have been listening to in California in 1962). But the genius of John Hughes’s musical influence is that masses of American teenagers were indeed listening to British New Wave—but only after he featured that music in his movies. “He put in stuff that he liked,” says film critic Eric Hynes, “and that’s the definition of trend-setting.” Earlier youth film directors had tried to capture what kids were listening to; Hughes changed what they were listening to.

  Hughes created on-screen worlds where it was a given that middle-class, Midwestern, suburban teens would be intimately familiar with completely esoteric songs recorded an ocean away. The songs that the kids in Pretty in Pink are listening to, says music critic Rob Sheffield, “are by bands that only obscure, gloom-obsessed, big-hair New Wave-y kids were listening to at the time—yet the movie presents that as the lingua franca of Midwestern American adolescence.” Which, in large part thanks to these movies, is what it soon became.

  Of course, some particularly plugged-in American teens, especially those who grew up in cities, had been aware of this music well before the Hughes films. “The Psychedelic Furs and Thompson Twins is stuff we were listening to already,” says New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones. “I grew up in Brooklyn, and we had heard this music in clubs we had snuck into, or on college radio stations like WNYU.” But generally speaking, before these movies made New Wave commercially viable, says Sheffield, the genre “was slow to take on in America.” These were romantic, sentimental songs, and as Sheffield points out, “you couldn’t play Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark on American rock radio in between Journey and Bob Seger, because it would sound ridiculous, how emotional these dudes were.” But the movies made that over-the-top sentimentality acceptable. Thanks to New Wave, wrote the Toronto Star’s Christopher Hutsul, “suddenly, in those edgy ’80s, it was cool to be misunderstood, and fulfilling to be lonely.”

  Kids in the Chicago suburbs that Hughes set his movies in weren’t exactly facing the same problems as twentysomethings in London, but the music those Brits were making fit perfectly with the teenage stories being told on-screen. “New Wave is so serious and melancholic and grandiose,” says film critic Hynes. “That’s all you need when you’re sixteen.” In sharp contrast to the lackadaisical, laid-back vibe of late-seventies rock, New Wave music wore its heart on its sleeve. It was unabashedly emotional, at times embarrassingly earnest. New Wave music was a hypnotic auditory dreamscape in which your deepest wishes—and not just the ones about your pimples clearing up—could take flight. It inspired you to imagine yourself in new and different ways, and it invited you to wonder what your life might be like one day. With its electronically synthesized harmonies, the music sounded futuristic, for sure, but it also somehow sounded like your own future, or what you’d hope it could be.

  The videos for British New Wave bands were a natural fit for MTV because of “the British artists’ sense of theatricality,” says Nina Blackwood, “their New Romantic look. They were way ahead of the U.S. in terms of their image, the makeup, their onstage costumes.” Europeans were always ahead of the game when it came to videos. “It goes back to a very logical reason,” Blackwood explains. “Videos actually started in Europe, as a way to market the artist in house. They were promotional tools. That’s how the concept of MTV even came about—[network founders] John Lack and Bob Pittman knew about these videos and they thought, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be a good idea to get a channel and play these videos?’” It’s no accident that the first superstars created by MTV were British: Birmingham’s Duran Duran, who turned their early videos into stylish three-minute movies.

  Music was so important to John Hughes that he would often come up with a film’s soundtrack before he even wrote its script. He stayed emotionally connected to his young audience through his ardent passion for music, something he never lost upon reaching adulthood, as so many of us do. Because he was such a musichead, he was better able to tap into the soul of teenagers and tell their stories on film.

  Hughes incorporated music right in the forefront of the films’ narratives in such a way that audiences couldn’t possibly miss the sound of it, the feel of it. Pretty in Pink features scenes in which bands are seen performing. The Breakfa
st Club includes the much-imitated montage in which the characters dance to the song “We Are Not Alone.” In Sixteen Candles, Molly Ringwald’s notebook has scrawled upon it the name of one of her real-life favorite bands, The Rave-Ups. And often when we see a character’s bedroom, we glimpse huge posters of the musical bands they love (without it seeming like a crass ploy to sell albums). It gave us a more textured sense of who these characters were, since at that age, music is so closely linked with identity. It was also, says David Anderle, a way for Hughes to “let everyone know that he knew about these bands.”

  Hughes even used lyrics as a visual element. He chose to begin The Breakfast Club with a simple epigraph that captured the struggle the films’ characters face, a quote from David Bowie’s “Changes,” written in stark white-on-black lettering on the screen: “And these children that you spit on…They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.” “That came from me,” says Ally Sheedy. “I was listening to David Bowie all the time. I went into John’s office and I said, ‘I am going to play you this David Bowie song, and I am going to play you this one lyric.’ I wrote the words down for him, and I said, ‘I want you to think about putting this in the movie.’ He just took it and said, ‘I really like that,’ and never mentioned it again. And when I first saw the movie, it was there.”

  Hughes introduced many American teenagers to the wistful world of New Wave music, and along the way, he introduced his casts and colleagues to it as well. Emilio Estevez listened to The Psychedelic Furs on the flight to Washington for St. Elmo’s Fire because Hughes had gotten him into the band on the Breakfast set. “John turned us all on to music,” says Lauren Shuler Donner. Remembers Andrew McCarthy of the Pretty in Pink film shoot, “John was always coming in with different songs—asking us, ‘Waddya think of this song? Waddya think of that song?’ And then again, two minutes later, ‘Waddya think of this song?’”

  Anthony Michael Hall, who would spend time with Hughes at the director’s Illinois home, remembers, “He had his own room where he would write—there were thousands of records in this one room. Music inspired him.” (And it wasn’t just New Wave. Producer Tom Jacobson remembers that Hughes, who would listen to music as he wrote, was passionate about “any kind of music—hillbilly hollow music; he loved the roots of music.” Indeed, the soundtrack for Planes, Trains and Automobiles was a mix of electronic pop and country.)

  “He would make me these mix tapes,” says Ringwald of Hughes, honey-sweet nostalgia permeating her voice, “and I would make him mixes. It was really sweet, and kind of…teenage! To this day I will hear songs and I will think of him.” On the tapes Hughes made for Ringwald, he put plenty of songs by The Beatles, the band that had meant so much to him as a teen. “I had known The Beatles,” says Ringwald, “but I didn’t really know them,” until Hughes schooled her.

  Hughes used music in his directorial debut Sixteen Candles to great effect, such as when The Geek dances frenetically to Oingo Boingo’s “Wild Sex in the Working Class” at the dance, Jake Ryan and his girlfriend slow-dance to Spandau Ballet’s “True” (the song was already popular—a rarity in a Hughes film), or when Samantha and Jake kiss atop the dining table to the strains of The Thompson Twins’s “If You Were Here.” But unfortunately, the film’s “official soundtrack” was barely a soundtrack. Released only on cassette and EP (and never rereleased on CD), it featured only five songs—the only two worth mentioning being “Sixteen Candles,” by The Stray Cats, and “If You Were Here.” The soundtrack was also famously underprinted. Musician Cary Brothers, who would cover that Thompson Twins song in 2008, once told a reporter that he “spent a year riding around on my bike to record stores trying to find it.”

  Growing up, Dave Ziemer, the creator and program director of the Cinemagic movie music channel on Sirius XM, was so enthralled by the song “If You Were Here” from Sixteen Candles that he found a way to listen to it whenever he wanted, in spite of the film’s underprinted soundtrack. “I had the movie on videotape,” he remembers, “and I would play that scene over and over again just for that song. As a teenager I was an ubergeek, but that song summed up the ideology of what love is to me. It made me feel like everybody will find love in their life.”

  Fans would have no problem getting their hands on the soundtrack of Hughes’s follow-up film. In a sense, The Breakfast Club had music in its creative DNA: the picture was a co-production between Universal and A&M Records, which had just branched out into the movie business. During its pre-production, Gil Friesen, the president of A&M; Andrew Meyer, the head of the film division of the company; and David Anderle, the head of A&R (Artists and Repertoire) for the company, flew to Chicago to have dinner with Hughes, Ned Tanen, and Bruce Berman, and to talk about music for the film. “I immediately fell for John,” says Anderle. “I liked his musical taste—the cutting-edge, alternative stuff. I was blown away by the lexicon of artists that he was mentioning.”

  Anderle and Hughes got into a passionate conversation about the kind of music that should be on the Breakfast soundtrack. Hughes made it clear he favored British New Wave bands, and Anderle suggested that Keith Forsey, a music writer-producer who had recently worked with Billy Idol, would be great for the Breakfast soundtrack. Hughes enthusiastically agreed. Unfortunately, nobody else at the table was all too jazzed about Forsey. After getting back to L.A., recalls Anderle, “Ned Tanen called Andy Meyer and Gil Friesen and said, ‘What the hell is going on? You bring this guy out here and he’s talking about somebody named Keith Whatever. What about Sting? What about Bryan Adams? Big names?!’” But Anderle’s instincts would be vindicated a week afterward, when Forsey won an Oscar for cowriting the lyrics to “Flashdance … What a Feeling.” “So now I was a hero,” Anderle says, laughing.

  Anderle and Forsey arrived on the Chicago-area set of The Breakfast Club just as Hughes and his cast were preparing to begin shooting. Forsey watched as Hughes blocked out the opening scene, in which each character enters the library. “Keith just started moving around the set,” recalls Anderle, “and apparently he had music already in his mind for a song. And as he’s walking around, talking to the actors, the idea for a theme song started formulating in his mind, a song called ‘Won’t You Forget About Me.’” The “won’t” was changed to a more hopeful and insistent “don’t,” “because of the way the film ends,” says Anderle, “with Molly and Judd.” Hughes wanted the film’s soundtrack anthem to have a drum-heavy sound, to reflect the storyline’s “clocks ticking and emotions ticking,” as he later told a reporter. The lyrics of “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” closely mirrored the plot of the film, asking if the characters would remain close on Monday or would revert back to their previously designated hierarchies: “Will you recognize me?…Or walk on by?”

  As Hughes filmed Club, the other songs of the soundtrack were recorded, including “We Are Not Alone,” by Karla DeVito, and the instrumental pieces. When shooting on the film wrapped, however, one song—the song—had yet to be recorded.

  Forsey originally thought that Bryan Ferry, late of Roxy Music, would’ve been perfect to sing “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” so Anderle and Michelle Manning flew to London to try to persuade him. But unfortunately, while Anderle and Manning were on their transatlantic flight, Ferry’s father passed away. “So there was no Bryan Ferry,” recalls Anderle, “no meeting, no nothing.” Anderle developed a full-body rash, and Manning was sufficiently freaked out as well. “We’re both, like, the most miserable characters in London,” Anderle remembers, “walking around the streets looking at our shoes, scared of coming home totally empty-handed.”

  “It was basically David and me going door to door trying to get somebody to do the song,” remembers Manning. “Annie Lennox passed, Dave Stewart passed.” Finally, says Manning, A&M, who controlled Simple Minds’s American distribution, “basically forced” Simple Minds to record the song. “I needed them,” says Anderle of the band, “because Keith Forsey loved them and John Hughes loved them, and I was out of option
s.”

  Simple Minds front man Jim Kerr was less than thrilled about being strong-armed into recording the song. When Anderle met with Kerr in London, “it was like walking into a refrigerator, it was so cold. Our reception was horrible. Jim Kerr was saying, ‘I don’t want to do this. We write all our own songs. Why are we forced to do this for some silly American youth film?’ But they knew they had to do it.” A handful of the band members, including drummer Mel Gaynor, were excited by the song, and particularly by the prospect of working with Forsey.

  Forsey, who was a big admirer of Simple Minds, wanted to record them performing the song live (as opposed to overdubbing or building the track one element at a time). The song was recorded “at some weird commercial studio way out in the boondocks of England,” recalls Anderle. Kerr’s one caveat was that he be allowed to contribute to writing the lyrics of the song—the extremely catchy “hey, hey, hey, hey” was his. Kerr didn’t receive a writing credit, and his addition seems rather insignificant, until, says Anderle, you realize “that was as much of a hook as the [chorus].”

  Kerr still hated the song, once going so far as to tell a Rolling Stone journalist he wanted to vomit whenever he played it. He was reluctant to perform the song at concerts, ultimately succumbing at the largest concert they would ever play, Live Aid. Bob Geldof insisted that artists play their most popular hits, on the assumption that they could raise the most money that way. Simple Minds sang “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” and the crowd went absolutely wild, pumping their fists in unison with Kerr’s “hey hey hey heys.” In that moment, Simple Minds knew how truly big the song had become. Says Anderle, “That’s when they realized.” “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” went to number one on the American charts, and established the band in the United States and globally.