The Rewind #4: The Legend of Stan Bush

There is a moment in Bloodsport (1988) where Frank Dux squares up, the synths swell, and a voice kicks in that sounds like it was engineered in a lab specifically to make you do one more rep. That voice belongs to Stan Bush. He is not in the movie. He is barely a credit anybody reads. But if you grew up on a steady diet of rental-store action, Stan Bush has been scoring your training montages for forty years and you probably never knew his name.

Here is the thing about Stan Bush: he might be the most famous singer you have never heard of, and the story of how that happened is better than most of the movies he sang for.

Start with Bloodsport

Paul Hertzog scored Bloodsport, and it is a masterclass in what you can accomplish with a couple of synthesizers, a drum machine, and total, unembarrassed sincerity. Two of the vocal tracks, "Fight to Survive" and "On My Own - Alone," were written by Hertzog with Shandi Sinnamon and performed by Bush. Those are the songs carrying Van Damme's famously enormous flashback sequence and the Kumite itself. Strip them out and you have a man doing the splits in silence. Leave them in and you have cinema.

Hertzog liked the arrangement enough to run it back a year later on Kickboxer, where Bush sang "Never Surrender." Same formula, same synths, more Van Damme.

Now the good part

In 1986, Bush and his writing partner Lenny Macaluso were kicking around ideas after watching Iron Eagle, one of Steve's favorite movies as a kid. After Louis Gossett Jr.'s character, Colonel "Chappy" Sinclair, is shot down over the Med on the mission he is executing with Jason Gedrick's Doug Masters, Doug plays a tape Chappy gave him over his F-16's audio system (do F-16s have audio systems?).

In that prerecorded message, Chappy tells Doug "God doesn't give people things he doesn't want them to use, and he gave you the touch." Macaluso heard that and thought: that's a song. He and Bush wrote the whole thing in roughly a day.

And they wrote it for Cobra. As in the Sylvester Stallone movie where he cuts pizza with a pair of scissors. That was the target. A Stallone soundtrack was prime real estate for an anthem about being at your best when the going gets rough.

They did not get Cobra. Bush's label, Scotti Brothers, placed the song somewhere else entirely: an animated movie about robots. Bush's reaction to that news was, by his own telling, roughly what yours would be. A cartoon. About toys. Terrific.

That cartoon was The Transformers: The Movie, and "The Touch" plays as Optimus Prime rolls into Autobot City to take on Megatron, which is to say it plays over the single most emotionally devastating twenty minutes of a certain generation's childhood. It went out as a double A-side single backed with Weird Al Yankovic's "Dare to Be Stupid," also from that soundtrack, because 1986 was an absolutely wild time.

So: a song inspired by a line in Iron Eagle, written for Cobra, immortalized by Transformers. Three movies, one song, and the rest, it would seem, is history.

Until...

Then Boogie Nights happened

Eleven years later, Paul Thomas Anderson put "The Touch" in Boogie Nights, where Dirk Diggler and Reed Rothchild attempt to record it and prove, conclusively and at length, that they should not. It is one of the funniest scenes in the film, and it works precisely because Anderson does not play the song as a joke. The song is fine. The guys are the problem.

A remarkable number of people have watched that scene assuming Anderson commissioned a fake power ballad for it. He did not. He liked the real one enough that he had already staged nearly the identical scene years earlier in his short film The Dirk Diggler Story.

Bush had nothing to do with any of it. The placement was arranged through his publisher, and he found out the same way the rest of us did, by buying a ticket and watching it happen. His take afterward was essentially that any exposure is good exposure, which is the correct posture for a man whose signature song keeps turning up in movies without him.

You got the touch, Stan. You never got Cobra, but you got the touch.