My very favorite song from any John Hughes movie is a no brainer. It’s not Don’t You Forget About Me by Simple Minds nor is it the cover version of The Smith’s, Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I want  by The Dream Academy, though that’s pretty good. No, it’s Wouldn’t it Be Good, by Nik Kershaw, though the version on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack is by the Danny Hutton Hitters, a one off group put together to cover the song, possibly just for this album as I can’t find another song by them. Danny Hutton was one of the founding members of Three Dog Night, a 60’s band that I have heard of but a perfunctory glance of their catalog only brings  recognition of the song “Never Been To Spain”, not because I like it, but because I had a roommate in 1994 who insisted it was great. It isn’t. 

The Danny Hutton Hitters version of Wouldn’t It Be Good is a perfect version of 1980’s pop that falls out towards the edges of synthesizer music and approaches college rock, what would be come alternative. I knew for a long time that Nik Kershaw wrote and performed the original but really didn’t know he didn’t sing the one on Pretty in Pink until maybe the early 2000’s.  

The Kershaw version is a couple beats slower and as I’ve aged, I find is more “in the pocket”, a term used to describe the tension and space created by the beat of a song performance and its “perfect time”. In music terms the pocket is the way the beat of a song makes you feel.  Time is metronomic (think of the staleness of an electronic beat). 

Anyhow, all of this to say, I love this song. It’s a snapshot of the movie and teen longing, one of my favorite things.  

Just as a couple of days ago, a snippet of a song entered my brain and I felt compelled to tell, last night the same happened with this song. For no apparent reason (I hadn’t just heard it) the first line popped into my head. 

“I got it bad, you don’t know how bad I got it. 

You got it easy. You don’t know when you’ve got it good.”

It wasn’t in relation to anything. It just popped up and I started this. This morning, I kept at it. Digging and scratching. Giving you the back story to a song I love. As I press forward, I now remember seeing a live video of a band playing “Bed’s Are Burning” by Midnight Oil last night.  It was a decent version but it was a reminder to me that when you cover an 80’s song, you’d best either change it into something different and fantastic or mimic it exactly, because it is so recognizable that anything other than perfection comes off as bad. I have long wanted to play Wouldn’t it Be Good, but I lack all the things to make it great. The voice, the synthesizers, the 80’s hair. 

So instead I sit and enjoy it. Content with the wash of nostalgia. Of identifying with the brilliance of John Hughes’ commitment to tying music to his characters, the story and the theme. In digging around for Danny Hutton I came across this from the inside of the Pretty in Pink soundtrack and it is why John Hughes spoke to a generation by authentically tying the music to what it felt like to be a teen in the 80’s. 

“The music in ‘Pretty In Pink’ was not an afterthought. The tracks on this album and in this film are there because [director] Howie Deutch and I believe in the artists, respect the artists, and are proud to be in league with them.”

Related. I will always love 1980’s Molly Ringwald. 

#hugsandhi5s