the Bryan Adams Barbeque

the Bryan Adams Barbeque

FEATURES

Liz Derringer

“Released in November, 1984, Reckless has sold more than seven million copies, including four million in the U.S. and 1.5 million in Canada, where it was the biggest selling album by a domestic artist in the country’s history.”

—Press Information

“The afterglow of Reckless lasted throughout that year,” Bryan Adams says. “We had a great tour and the rest of the year I spent writing and recording.

I was a busy boy!”

Boy or not, he certainly was busy: Adams participated in the “Tears Are Not Enough” sessions (he also co-wrote the lyrics to that northern “We Are The World”), played at Live Aid and joined U2, Peter Gabriel and Sting for the six-city “Conspiracy Of Hope” shows for Amnesty International. All this in addition to the aforementioned great tour.

And it was on that tour, he says, that he started work on what would become Into The Fire... an album about a fellow ostensibly at the crossroads of his life.

“Well, that’s what the lyric says,” Adams admits. "I suppose there are some references that are similar to how I was feeling—basically, what I was trying to get across in my statement, was that I didn’t want to make the same record again. I didn’t want to make Reckless II,

I wanted to make a stronger lyrical statement.”

Whether he succeeded or not is up for grabs—and now, he admits, the songs on Fire are more “introspective” than autobiographical, citing "Rebel’’ as an example:

“It was originally written for Roger Daitrey,” Adams explains. “I did have an experience of going back and visiting a town that was very familiar to me, but ‘Rebel’ is about a guy—and this is not autobiographical—who was more of an outcast in his town. He left and came back to see what it was like and when he gets there everything is exactly the same. Just the faces are different. He probably shouldn’t have come back,” he adds as a wry afterthought.

Another cut—“Remembrance Day”— bears the same stamp of introspection/ para-autobiography: “I do come from a military background,” Adams says, “and I think my father would have liked me to go into the army. But I think I proved I could be a success without going through the usual route of college and the army and relying on the government’s education system. I think, even at an early age, I was striving for more individuality.”

Adams continues to strive. Despite his relative youth (27), despite his massive commercial success, despite the fact that Fire is his fifth album, he remains—to many—an unfocused character... a Springsteenian/Mellencampian Canadian without the sharp edges of either.

Of course, on the other hand, he has outsold the Guess Who, Rush and even BTO. So something must be going on here.

• • •

“I think this record has more of a European flavor to it than my other work,” Bryan Adams declares.

I interject: ‘‘Some of the sounds on it remind me of—”

“The Beatles?” he says. Hmmm.

"Possibly, but I was going to say Tears For Fears. Just some of the sounds.”

“Really? I wanted to work with their producer, Chris Hughes—I still do. I think he’s brilliant. I pleaded with him for a year but he was too busy for me,” Adams quavers, feigning tears.

Instead, he had Bob Clearmountain, so it was—as Bryan puts it—alright. The down-home Adams even recorded Fire at his own house: “It was probably the smartest thing I’ve ever done,” he says with some satisfaction. “Although it’s not really set up to be a studio; it’s more a place to write... a two bedroom split-level house built in the ’30s.

“I live in a real nice neighborhood,” he continues. "It could be the Joneses: it’s nice, it’s really quiet.” Adams finagled this nice, quiet place into a studio by running cables from a control board in the basement up to his living room, where the band—guitarist Keith Scott, bassist Dave Taylor, drummer Mickey Curry and keyboardists Robbie King and Dave Pickell—was actually recorded, Adams himself sang the vocals right there in the living room, hustling down to the basemerit for the final singing. To top it all off, he installed a couple of portable Sony cameras for each area to facilitate communication. “I thought it was fantastic!” he enthuses.

If not that, then most certainly Canadian.

• • •

Bryan Adams has been all around the world, you know—and he was around the world at a pretty early age, what with his father being a Canadian diplomat and all. He recites the locales with elan: Portugal for five years, Israel, Austria, and a fair amount of time in England. “I didn’t really live at home until I was about 14,” he notes. ‘‘When I got back I had to learn what baseball was all about—all I could play was soccer.”

Since that halcyon era, Bryan Adams has learned to play much, and not all of it music. Regarding his much-discussed. . . uh, singing. . .with Tina Turner, he still maintains: “It was one of those very professional things. I don’t really know her that well—we did the duet and then I didn’t see her until we played in Europe much later. We did a bunch of shows and recorded the video for ‘It’s Only Love,’ then I produced a song for her new LP (‘Back Where You Started’). It was funny because every time I would say, ‘OK, Tina, let’s record that vocal one more time,’ she would say, ‘If you make me sing that one more time, I’m going to call you Phil, as in Spector.’ ”

Bryan’s also learned there’s a lot of nuts out there—like the one who proclaimed the “Cuts Like A Knife” video was sexually controversial.

“Some stupid woman from some women’s group called me up on the radio,” he says. “She told me she had a copy of the video where there is a knife going into some girl’s head. I asked her to send it to me, but she never did. Obviously, she was trying to read something into the video that wasn’t there: it was a stupid, overblown story.”

But enough with the stupidity and on with the work—Adams says he was very surprised at the success of Reckless (adding that, perhaps, he should have called it Into The Frying Pan), but that he’s happy success took so long in coming. “It would’ve been different if Reckless was my first album. You can fall into that firstalbum-artist-thing where it takes 10 years to write it and then what? That isn’t the case with me—the success of Reckless gave me time—a year-and-a-half—to write this record.”

And now that this record’s out, he looks forward to not only another tour, but more of those charity efforts. “We’ve got two more planned in the near future: I’m doing the Prince’s Trust in England again and then I’m doing Rock The World on September 5th. It’s going to be a concert for Greenpeace done in Washington, Moscow and—I think—Boston. It’s going to be live between nine and six in the afternoon; I’ll be in Washington.”

Bryan’s no stick-in-the-mud, but he does say he’s committed to concerts of this kind: “This all sounds too serious, but I want to be able to look back and say that I did something in all this time. Not only did I sell millions of records, I was able to put something back into this funny place we call Earth.”

Not to worry: how seriously can we take a guy who’s decorated his house with Holiday Inn furniture—“Orange carpets, disposable lamps and TV sets, even the plastic switcher boxes that go on top of the television sets”—so that he doesn’t get cultural shock when he returns home? How seriously can we take a guy who says that being a rock star is “one of the funniest things in the world”?

Especially when he’s right?