The Song "You Don't Own Me" Sung by The Blow Monkeys

Johnny Castle has become angry because Baby Houseman will not tell her father that Johnny is her boyfriend. Later, Baby runs to Penny Johnson's cabin and finds Johnny there. Baby and Johnny goes out onto the porch, where she silently caresses his back and shoulders.

Then Robbie walks by and remarks that Baby is slumming with Johnny. Then Johnny beats up Robbie.

While all that is happening, the soundtrack plays the song "You Don't Own Me" sung by The Blow Monkeys.

The song is barely audible for the movie audience. The person who made the above videoclip is specially playing the song much louder on some audio device.

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The song You Don't Own Me, which was a big hit in the year 1963, when the movie's story takes place. This 1963 hit was sung by 17-year-old Leslie Gore.

Here are the lyrics:

You don't own me.
I'm not just one of your many toys.
You don't own me.
Don't say I can't go with other boys.

And don't tell me what to do.
Don't tell me what to say.
And please, when I go out with you,
Don't put me on display.

You don't own me.
Don't try to change me in any way.
You don't own me.
Don't tie me down, because I'd never stay.

I don't tell you what to say.
I don't tell you what to do.
So just let me be myself --
That's all I ask of you.

I'm young, and I love to be young.
I'm free, and I love to be free --
To live my life the way I want,
To say and do whatever I please.

In the finished movie, however, the song is performed by an all-male British band, The Blow Monkeys. The performance was included in their album released in 1987, which was the same year when the movie was released. The singer was 26-year-old Robert Howard (born in 1961).

The Blow Monkeys, who in 1987 sang for the 1963 movie "Dirty Dancing"
Don''t say I can't go out with other boys. 

In the 1987 performance, Robert Howard sings: Don't say I can't go out with other boys.

Because the song is played so quietly in the movie's soundtrack, most of the audience does not recognize or even notice it and cannot understand any of the lyrics.

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The movie scene shows Johnny and Robbie fighting. However:

* Johnny has not told Baby she can't go out with other boys.

* Robbie has not told Baby she can't go out with other boys.

* Baby has not told either Johnny or Robbie that she wants to go out with other boys.

Baby's father, however, has prohibited Baby from going out with Johnny. Because Baby has not objected to that prohibition, Johnny is mad at Baby. She has not protested to her father that he (her father) does not own her. Those are the circumstances of this scene.

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The fight was added by Patrick Swayze, who wrote in his autobiography Time of My Life (page 136):

Some of what Lisa [Mrs. Swayze] and I suggested made it into the film ... We inserted the fight scene between Johnny and the cad waiter, Robbie, to give Johnny the rougher edge his character needed. We wrote it so Johnny would stop before knocking the guy out, though, since he’d be wary of getting fired — something that had no doubt happened to him before.

If the fight had not been added to the scene, then how would the scene have ended? Perhaps Baby, while caressing Johnny's back and shoulders, would have said, I promise I will tell my father that I am going out with you.

If the scene had ended thus, then the song "You Don't Own Me" on the soundtrack there would make sense as foreshadowing Baby's imminent confrontation with her father.

Perhaps Baby did say so in the original script, but Swayze removed that statement when he re-wrote that scene. Swayze wanted the scene to show Johnny's wrath, and so Johnny should remain angry at Baby's refusal to tell her father about him.

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I speculate that Bergstein and the producers intended for the soundtrack to play Leslie Gore singing the song. However, because of a later decision to buy the rights for the song Love Is Strange, the producers no longer could afford to buy the rights to Leslie Gore's recording. Bergstein has told this story about the filming of the song.

Love is Strange. The script says "Baby is teaching Johnny to dance." Kenny [Ortega] and I worked out the routine in my motel room the night before. The executives came running onto the set after it was shot -- the song was not listed on the carefully calibrated chart of songs we could afford. There was no budget for it -- and worst of all -- we'd had the actors "lip synch," meaning we couldn't replace it with a cheaper song and might have to scrap the whole scene. Luckily everyone agreed after they saw it the scene was to good to scrap. You do what you have to do.

What the producers had to do, apparently, was to buy just the lyric rights to the song "You Don't Owe Me" (written by John Madara and David White, not by Leslie Gore) and then pay a low-cost band to sing the lyrics. (See also my article Business Decisions About the Movie's Music.)

Eventually when the scene was filmed, Baby's promise to Johnny to tell her father was removed from the dialogue. Thus the song no longer made any sense in the scene, and so its volume was reduced so far down that the movie audience hears only a soft instrumental.

I suppose that The Blow Monkeys sold the song to the movie's producers for a flat payment that did not entitle them to any royalties from the soundtrack album.

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Here I will offer an alternative explanation for the inclusion of this song in the movie.

I recently published on this blog a couple of articles titled "Last week I took a girl away from Jamie the lifeguard" -- Part 1 and Part 2. There I speculated that Bergstein's story originally included a subplot that took place at the resort hotel's swimming pool. In this subplot Neil Kellerman took a girl away from a character named Jamie the lifeguard.

If Jamie objected to that girl leaving him for Neil, then the song "You Don't Own Me" would make sense in the soundtrack there.

No such subplot, however, was included in the final movie. If the producers already had purchased the song's lyric rights and also the Blow Monkey's cheap cover recording to play over that subplot, then perhaps they simply placed the song onto the fight scene as the only plausibly suitable scene in the final movie.

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