Movie Music Monday – A First

Today I’ll be featuring three songs from three different movies. Why? Well it was on this day in 1985 that a Billboard “first” happened. For the first time in history, the top three songs on the Hot 100 Chart were all songs that were written specifically for movies.

Let’s start with #3

We Don’t Need Another Hero – Tina Turner

From Songfacts.com:

Written by Terry Britten and Graham Lyle, this is the theme song to the film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. The third installment of the post-apocalyptic Mad Max series finds star Mel Gibson at the mercy of a nefarious leader named Aunty Entity, played by Tina Turner, who is determined to secure her power over Australia’s Bartertown.

It was Turner’s first film role in over a decade, the previous being The Acid Queen in the Who’s 1975 rock opera Tommy. But the glamorous ruler, clad in a chain-mail gown, wasn’t quite what Turner had in mind for her big-screen comeback. “Aunty Entity was not as fierce as I wanted her to be,” she told Q magazine in 1988. “I wanted her to go back into the trunk and pull out the clothes that she was wearing when she built that city, because she built herself up from nothing and she definitely wasn’t wearing that chain dress and those high-heeled shoes.”

At #2 …

The Power of Love – Huey Lewis

From Songfacts.com:

“The Power Of Love” was featured in the movie Back to the Future and included on the soundtrack.The film’s director, Robert Zemeckis, wanted Lewis to do the song – Huey Lewis & the News were rising stars with a modern sound that worked well in the movie, which takes place in both 1955 and 1985. Lewis had never done film work and hesitated at first, since he didn’t want to write a song called “Back To The Future.” When Zemeckis told him that the song didn’t have to be about the movie, Lewis accepted the challenge.

Lewis was working on this song while Back to the Future was in post production. By the time he delivered it, most of the scenes were mixed; the only place the song worked was the scene where Marty is on his skateboard going to school. This scene has nothing to do with the power of love, but the music fits the vibe and works in context.

And on this day in 1985, sitting at #1 –

St. Elmo’s Fire – John Parr

From Songfacts.com:

David Foster and John Parr wrote this song specifically for the movie St. Elmo’s Fire, but the song itself is about a Canadian athlete named Rick Hansen, who was paralyzed from the waist down after a car crash when he was 15. On March 21, 1985 Hansen began his “Man In Motion” tour, traveling about 70 miles a day to raise money for spinal cord research. At first, Hansen had trouble getting media attention and donations, but when this song was released with the movie in June, it became his anthem, and as the song rose up the charts, interest in Hansen’s journey grew. By the time the “Man In Motion” tour was completed on May 22, 1987, Hansen had put over 40,000 Kilometers (24,856 miles) on his wheelchair in 34 countries on four continents, raising $26 million. He became a national hero in Canada, where he is closely associated with this song.

Parr told songfacts.com how he wrote the song:

“I wrote the lyric when we were working on the movie. David showed me a video of Rick Hansen and I was inspired to write the story of his planned epic journey to circumnavigate the globe in his wheel chair. I wrote the lyric ambiguously, so the film company would think “all I needs these pair of wheels” referred to Demi Moore’s jeep when actually I am referring to Rick’s wheelchair, or “for once in his life a man has his time” actually refers to when Rick would end his journey wheeling back into Vancouver with a million people lining the streets – not when Emilio Estevez finally kisses Andie Macdowell.”