Everybody knows we lost a wonderful actor when we lost Patrick Swayze. His best filmsâThe Outsiders, Dirty Dancing, Ghost, and Point Breakâare now considered classics. Even Swayze's best worst filmsâRed Dawn and Road Houseâhave achieved classic status. And thereâs even a small, but ambitious, sect of emerging film theorists exploring the significance of what has recently been coined âSwayze's Forgotten Trilogy,â namely Steel Dawn, Tiger Warsaw and Next Of Kin. (The latter is not completely true, but it should be.)And everybody knows that rappers loved Swayze. Due to his role in Ghost, some clever emcees started saying âSwayzeâ instead of âghost,â meaning âto leaveâ or âto disappearâ or âto bounce.â Method Man. Red Man. Nas. EPMD. Notorious BIG. Black Moon. Black Sheep. Young Jeezy. CL Smooth. All of them dropped âSwayzeâ at least once, and have contributed to elevating Swayzeâs pop culture relevance.But one thing about Swayze that hasn't been fully addressed is how much he loved music. Thatâs an understatement: Swayze didnât just love music, he made music. He was a singer and a songwriter. His most popular song was âShe's Like The Wind,â which he initially co-wrote with Stacy Widelitz for Grandview, U.S.A., the1984 film in which Swayze had a small role as a demolition derby driver named Ernie âSlamâ Webster. For whatever reason, âSheâs Like The Windâ wasnât used in Grandview, U.S.A., but it ended up on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack three years later.âSheâs Like The Windâ peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100, climbed to number one on the Adult Contemporary chart, and helped propel the soundtrack to the top of the charts for several weeks. The lyrics are terribly clunky. âSheâs like the wind through my tree,â Swayze sings. And in the next verse: âI look in the mirror and all I see, is a young old man with only a dream.â Ouch. The chorus is super defeated, but totally triumphant. âJust a fool to believe I have anything she needs,â Swayze sings, perhaps referencing the Doobie Brothersâ big hit âWhat A Fool Believes.â Despite its faults, itâs a stirring (hilarious) late-1980s love song with cheesy horns, cheesier keys, and the cheesiest electric guitars. Though none of them blew up quite like âSheâs Like The Windâ did, Swayze wrote and performed songs for some of his other films, too.In 1989, Swayze starred in Next Of Kin, where he played a Chicago police officer trying to track down the mobsters who killed his brother before his other brother (played by Liam Neeson) can kill them. The film didnât go over too well. But Swayze had a song called âBrothersâ on the soundtrack. Itâs a duet with the country singer Larry Gatlin. And just like âSheâs Like The Wind,â itâs very corny. âYouâve always known if anyone tried to get to you, theyâd first have to get through me,â sings Swayze, emotionlessly. Given the filmâs plot, it makes sense. But it doesnât work outside of the story. And when Swayze hits that chord change in the middle of the tune, itâs a nightmare.In the same year (1989) Swayze starred in Road House. Here he played Dalton, an NYU philosophy student-turned-badass bar bouncer hired to clean up a tough Missouri roadhouse. Swayze had two songs on the soundtrack: he sang the oddly religious â,â and he wrote and performed the slow-burning anthem âCliffâs Edge.âThe lyrics are hilarious. âA one time nothing, a one time Adonis,â sings Swayze, âyou forget how fast, the years pounce on us.â (Boy, do they!) Itâs a road song, and it seems like he was going for something similar to what Bon Jovi did two years earlier with âWanted Dead Or Alive.â But he failed. Whatâs interesting, though, is the chorus: âRiding with the dawn, with a ghost in my head, / Racing down the highway, just feeling dead.â Ghost, Swayzeâs most popular film next to Dirty Dancing, came out the following year. Was he referencing his upcoming film? Was he looking into the future? How far could he see?Swayzeâs next song didnât appear until 2003, on the soundtrack of One Last Dance. It was written and directed by Swayzeâs wife, Lisa Niemi, who starred in the film alongside her husband. Like on Road House, Swayze unleashed two new songs: a heavy ballad about dancing (another one of his many loves and talents) called âWhen You Dance,â and a fist-pumping rock-n-roll ripper called âFinding My Way Back.ââI shake these voices from my head, but they only scream louder instead,â he sings, as if picking up where the story left off back on âCliffâs Edge.â He wasnât able to get rid of the ghost he alluded to on that song. It lingered until the last second. âAnd then life warned me that nothing ever lasts.â The ghost got louder. âI lost me and I lost you.â Then the ghost was the only thing left. But Swayzeâs last song doesnât end on a sorrowful note: he transcends space and time and finds his way back to the place where it all started. He goes back to the beginning. Back to forever.Ghost.Weâd be fools to believe these are Swayzeâs only songs. There must be more. He loved composing and singing way too much to have only recorded six tunes. Nobody only records six tunes. He must have left tracks chilling in an archive somewhere, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be shared. Maybe theyâre raw, lo-fi, bedroom four-track recordings. Maybe theyâre fully formed, hi-fi, studio hits. No matter what the songs sound like, I want to hear them. And Iâm not the only one. Until these lost tapes are made public, the specter of Swayze is haunting us.Elliott Sharp knows that the truth is out there. He's on Twitter - @elliottsharp
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