Allow us to take you back to a pivotal scene in the 1987 romantic drama, Dirty Dancing. Frances “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey) and Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) are saying goodbye to one another after Castle was fired from his job as a dance instructor at the Catskills resort where Baby and her family are staying. The goodbye is emotional and wistful. Complete with Baby standing in the dust that Johnny’s car kicked up on the gravel road. Drama.
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Playing underneath this tender and sexually frustrated scene is a sax-filled ballad called “She’s Like the Wind”. This song, along with the movie’s main theme, “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life”, broke into the Billboard Top 10 after the movie’s late summer release. It’s not immediately recognizable, thanks to the gruff affectation Swayze put on his Johnny Castle character’s voice. But the man singing in “She’s Like the Wind” is actually Swayze.
Though certainly multi-talented, Swayze never achieved another musical chart success, which places him definitively in the “1980s one-hit wonder” category. But perhaps the most fascinating part of the song is how it came painfully close to being in another 80s flick with a much, much different vibe.
Before There Was a Catskills Resort, There Was a Hockey Rink
Patrick Swayze might be most known for movies like Dirty Dancing, Ghost, and Roadhouse. But he was an entertainer of all trades. Dirty Dancing showed off his dancing skills, of course. However, he had also been songwriting for years before he appeared on the silver screen as the emotionally unavailable and devastatingly smooth Johnny Castle. In fact, he wrote “She’s Like the Wind” with Stacy Widelitz while filming the comedy-drama Grandview, U.S.A. in 1984.
Two years later, Swayze was working on Youngblood, the 1986 hockey drama, alongside actors like Rob Lowe, Cynthia Gibb, and Keanu Reeves. During a 2020 appearance on Joe Rogan Experience, Lowe revealed that Swayze had brought a demo of “She’s Like the Wind” to production to see about including it in the movie.
“He might be the most intense guy I’ve ever worked with,” Lowe said. “He’d be up all night writing and, like, doing body-weight pushups with his feet up against a wall. All night long. Then show up at the set, having not slept and wanting you to hear his new demo. He was a lot.”
Unsurprisingly, Lowe and others didn’t see how “She’s Like the Wind” would fit into Youngblood, and Swayze dropped the idea. But the actor-singer-dancer didn’t have to wait long for a new opportunity for “She’s Like the Wind” to arise. Dirty Dancing came out the following year.
Lawsuits Started Blowing in Over “She’s Like the Wind”
Patrick Swayze often struggled with the public’s tendency to compartmentalize him because of his good looks and sex appeal. In his memoir, The Time of My Life, Swayze detailed his desire to be seen as a well-rounded artist, not just a silver-screen hunk. He recalled listening to an Entertainment Tonight host preview an upcoming segment about him by saying, “After the break, Patrick Swayze bumps and grinds his way into movie history.”
“My heart sank,” Schwayze wrote. “This was it—my worst nightmare come to life. I’d worked so hard to be taken seriously, and now this would be my legacy. I was definitely proud of [Dirty Dancing], but ‘bumping and grinding’ was not what I wanted to be remembered for.”
Luckily, thanks to his Top 10 single, “She’s Like the Wind”, he wouldn’t have to be. The song peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, spurring a wave of lawsuits—at least five—all of which claimed to have written “She’s Like the Wind” before Schwayze. This was a simple, albeit tedious, fix.
“I dug up that master [from 1984] and sent it to Fred [Gaines, my lawyer]. That finally ended the lawsuit. But because it had dragged on so long to begin with, whoever sued us certainly felt the pain in their own wallets. Just as they should have.”
Photo by Gary Gershoff/Getty Images
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