Bryan Adams often convinces us because his own faith—above all, in the redemptive power of love and rock’n’roll to set us free—never wavers. He’s guileless about this too: “I want to be young for the rest of my life” (from “18 ‘Til I Die”) may be the most dangerous theme to live up to since “Hope I die before I get old” Yet what Adams means isn’t a devotion to Ozzy-like immaturity but a deep desire to never lose the spirit and intensity an 18 year old brings to living.
It adds up to a vision of how his world works—as he draws you into it, how your own world might work too. There’s an exhilaration to this, whether he’s singing “Heaven” or “Please Forgive Me.” When he sings, on the recent “This Side of Paradise,” about driving through a landscape of illusion at age nine, you’re right there with him.
Not that he’s an innocent. As Adams stresses, “Summer of ’69” has nothing to do with the year 1969. Instead, he calls it “a double entendre, it's about sex, much like Bob Seger’s ‘Night Moves.’”
Of course it’s more than that too. The key to the song, and in many ways the key to a lot of what Bryan Adams has had to tell us, is in the middle eight: “Man we were killin' time, we were young and reckless / We needed to unwind, I guess nothin' can last forever...” This is music made for its moment—and that so much of it has outlived its time is its triumph.
Bryan Adams stands in the long line of great rock’n’roll acts of the Creedence stripe, alongside the Raspberries, the Hollies, the Cars, the Crickets, and other exemplars of music that has few pretensions and yet expresses heart and passion in abundance. Keeping things simple and to the point requires three things in short supply: talent, discipline and confidence. Bryan’s songs consciously call on rock tradition, with their banks of guitars slicing through the bedrock of 4/4 time. You may have heard a thousand or a hundred thousand examples of this kind of rock’n’roll, but when done right, it remains forever new and immediate, even thrilling.
You can’t make this kind of music without a great voice out front and, of course, a truly individual rock’n’roll voice is the hardest thing to find, the one thing you can’t buy, rent or steal. Bryan’s slightly hoarse tenor is one of the classic rock instruments, a little reminiscent of Rod Stewart and Don Henley, and a perfect match for Bonnie Raitt’s female equivalent, as proven on “Rock Steady.” In many ways, Bryan’s voice provides the most powerful thread running through 2005's Anthology, a signature on everything he does.
On slower songs, beginning roughly with “(Everything I Do) I Do for You,” he is one of the master dramatists, using his singing to make vivid and undeniable even a line like “There’s no love like your love.” What’s original here isn’t the words but the way they are performed—once more, it’s a matter of complete commitment to the material: He simply can’t be denied.
Besides his persistence of vision and that voice, the hallmark of his recording career has been his consistent musicality and unpretentious approach. This is the kind of artist it’s easiest to under-value. In this respect, Adams belongs more within the tradition of R&B singers like Bobby Bland, who evolve within a tradition rather than by moving from style to style. Few performers are able to sustain such commitment because, for one thing, it means constant and direct comparison can be made among all a performer’s work, so there’s no room for sloppiness or slack. There is a seamless progression here from the first song where he really hit his stride, “Cuts Like a Knife,” to “This Side of Paradise” and “Why Do You Have to Be So Hard to Love,” tracks from the 2004 album, Room Service.
All of this also means that Adams might be the last rocker for whom excellent production quality makes a big difference. His long relationships with mixer Bob Clearmountain and co-producer Mutt Lange, in particular, helped define what straight-up, unhyphenated rock’n’roll became during the past two decades. This also extends to his songwriting collaborations with Lange, Jim Vallance, and most recently, the under-rated Gretchen Peters. These collaborations extend into several film themes, a skein which began with “All for Love” with Sting and Rod Stewart in 1993’s The Three Musketeers and now includes “Have Every You Ever Really Loved a Woman,” from Don Juan DeMarco, and, the unlikely but very successful “Here I Am,” produced by Jam and Lewis, for 2002’s Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.
So in the end, when you hear Bryan Adams, he is speaking for himself. He’s never deviated for a second from a course that now must feel like it was fated. But I remember another summer, about 1981, when a friend introduced me to this up and coming rock’n’roller backstage at someone else’s show. He seemed terribly young—he was about 22, I think, the second album hadn’t come out yet. That Bryan Adams was modest, quiet, pleased to be where he was, eager for everyone to hear his music, which means he was also sure that he was onto something, and determined to make good on his promise.
He was right, too. As the Anthology shows, his best has been far better than good. It’s a part of rock’n’roll history and the story is still growing.
Dave Marsh
