John Hughes and the Soundtracks to Our Lives

John Hughes, who passed away on Thursday at age 59, graduated Glenbrook North High School in suburban Illinois in the spring of 1968. I graduated high school in 1988. He should not have known what it was really like for people like me to walk those tricky halls and hang out in those polarized parking lots two decades and half a country away from his "Shermer" (really, Northbrook), Illinois. But he knew. The same way he knew what it would probably be like for the kids who graduated in 2008. Truth is timeless, and the three movies he either wrote or produced and directed in the mid 80s (call it his "High School Trilogy," or more simply, his "Molly period,") had real truth in them.

John Hughes movies weren't about teens wanting to have sex like, well, just about every other teen movie of the '80s, both great (Risky Business), and not so much (Porky's 1-3). They were about kids wanting to fall in love and be liberated -- literally delivered -- from high school. John Hughes used music as this delivery system.

Think about the '80s teen movie soundtracks before him. With the exception of Valley Girl, they all kind of bite (unless you're really into Tangerine Dream). Can you name one song off Fast Times at Ridgemont High's soundtrack that does not involve Phoebe Cates emerging from a swimming pool or Jennifer Jason Leigh losing her virginity to Ron Johnson (stereo consultant) in a baseball dugout? Oingo Boingo's wonderful "Goodbye, Goodbye," if I recall correctly, and please point out if I don't, is not even on the soundtrack album but there are two theme songs, by Sammy Hagar and Billy Squier. Pre-Hughes soundtracks seemed like clearing houses for Big '80s deal-making fallout; contractual obligation throwaways.

Even Hughes started slow. He wasn't operatic from the jump in '84. Pulling my copy of Sixteen Candles (Music From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) from my vinyl bin, I think, "If You Were Here," by the Thompson Twins is the only keeper a quarter century on (apologies to Ira Newborn and the Geeks and their "Geek Boogie"). Annie Golden's "Hang Up the Phone," is sweetly retro and girl group-ish, something the Shangri-Las or the Crystals might have sang. "If You Were Here," is no "Are You Ready For the Sex Girls." There's something dark and real about it, complicated. It's a love song, but the lyrics are, "If you were here, I could deceive you." These were giant steps for teen movie music.

He saw that high school wasn't about one side vs. the other, it was really about one side wondering about the other.

His next film, The Breakfast Club, opens with a black screen and a lyric from David Bowie's "Changes" -- a good omen, and sure enough, Hughes was supplying something a whole lot more personal and confident and bold, his stories told in part through "modern rock," the music and the images -- Bender's fist frozen in the air at the close, Claire's earring in his ear -- needed to be together forever.

"Don't You Forget About Me," was my generation's "Somewhere" (from West Side Story), promising a place where our defenses (vanity, insecurity and a half a dozen others) would not be harmed or touched. Where we would be alone and dancing until all of us realize we're the same. The fact that Hughes was a Summer of Love brain was box-office utopia. Both sportos and neo-maxi zoom-dweebies all bought tickets to his films, even though the dweebies were proprietary. Hughes, a National Lampoon contributor in the '70s, had written hit films before and after the "Trilogy" (Vacation and Home Alone) and knew the difference between blunt conflict and the intricacies of character and story. He saw that high school wasn't about one side vs. the other, it was really about one side wondering about the other. If you were a Bender or a Claire, a Blaine or a Ducky, you saw yourself in his characters and the music spoke your thoughts.

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