Bryan Adams looks back on the miraculous creation of his breakthrough album

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2014 saw the 30th anniversary of Reckless, the multi-platinum, 12-million-plus-selling smash that catapulted Bryan Adams towards global superstardom on the heels of five radio-ready, perfectly crafted pop-rock miniatures (Run To You, Summer Of ’69, Heaven, Somebody and It’s Only Love). As the album received a double CD deluxe edition makeover, we asked Adams to look back on the making of the original.

How did the success of your third album, Cuts Like A Knife (1983), set up the stage for Reckless?

Quite a bit, because at the time for me it was the beginning of a very long treadmill between touring and recording, touring and recording. We concentrated for most of ’83 on America and nowhere else. Actually, we did a few shows in Canada and the UK, but we really set up America for the next album. You could feel it growing on Cuts Like A Knife; you could feel the momentum as the tours went on. People started recognising the songs; it was no longer just a set list of literally unknown songs, it was suddenly becoming a set list of very well-known songs.

So yeah, I think by the time Reckless came along we had touched ground in most places in America and we built a very good base with FM radio. This was also around the time MTV was about to explode as well. Cuts Like A Knife was one of the first videos ever played on MTV, so it made an enormous difference to be there in the groundbreaking days.

Knowing that you’d reaped success with the Cuts Like A Knife album and had started to build an audience, did that add a different layer to the songs you wrote for Reckless?

No, I never felt like that. I only thought, let’s just make songs that will be good for the setlist. What do I need? I need this kind of song and I need this kind of song. So I just set about to write them. Fortunately, during ’83 and the Cuts Like A Knife album and going into ’84, Jim Vallance and I had a very good writing partnership where practically every time we sat down we’d end up writing another song that ended up being on Reckless.

For example, Monday was Heaven, Tuesday was Run To You, Wednesday was Somebody and Saturday was Summer Of ’69. We just had this momentum of writing song after song, and without really realising what we were doing because we were just writing what came to us. We were inspired.

Heaven was written for a really bad movie. A&M Records wanted me to write this song for a film they were producing so that song came about because of that. And then one of our good friends, Bruce Fairbairn, who was a great producer who’s no longer with us, was producing Blue ?yster Cult and he asked me if I’d write a song for them. So Jim and I submitted Run To You to them, and I wrote Somebody, thinking about Nile Rodgers [of disco pioneers Chic] and his guitar playing.

I was just riffing on different influences that were happening at the time. With Summer Of ’69, one of my favourite songs around that time was Bob Seger’s Night Moves. I really wanted to write the bookend to Night Moves, people figuring out their sexuality, young lust and young love. It’s such an enticing topic that I thought I would broach it with Summer Of ’69.

When you pair up with Jim Vallance, that songwriting spark is always there.

Quite frankly, we get along on many levels. First of all musically, and second of all our sense of humour is similar and we come from the same part of the world. So there’s lots of parallels there.

The Reckless 30th anniversary edition is an extremely comprehensive package, from the liner notes to your interviews with Jim Vallance and mastering engineer Bob Ludwig, along with the generous array of images and ephemera.

It was a really incredible journey trying to put it all together because everything’s gone. Everything’s lost. There’s nothing from 1984; my label lost everything. They lost the artwork, they lost the negatives and they lost the fucking tapes. They lost every single original thing from that album, so I had to go back and scramble around and try and find everything all over again. You can’t master from a CD; you’ve got to master from an original tape. And so did they have any tapes? No, they had nothing.

So I called [Bob] Clearmountain and asked if he had anything and he didn’t have any tapes. I called all the studios that were still around and they didn’t have anything. I’ve got a room that’s probably sized 12 foot by 20 foot and it’s literally wall-to-wall tapes with everything from the mid 70s forward. I dug around and I found a copy of the master mixes for Reckless. I sent it to [Bob] Ludwig and said: “Bob, what do you think?” He said: “Well, it says ‘copy’ on it but it sounds really fucking good. Let me try it and see what happens.”

We didn’t really have any choice now, because the master tapes are gone. Then Bob came back and said: “This is gonna be incredible. Don’t worry, we got it. This is gonna be fine.” Okay, so the tapes are sorted, next thing is trying to find artwork. During the course of making Tracks Of My Years with David Foster in LA, he happened to be in the same building as the Universal archive. So I called the guy there and said: “Look, can I come down?” And he said: “I’m sorry Bryan, we don’t have anything.” But I said: “Let me come down and sniff around.”

So I sniffed around and spent an afternoon there and found one significant thing, which was a 10x8 transparency of the album cover, photographed by Hiro. I thought: “Holy shit, this is it, I found the cover!” So okay, boom, I’ve got the album cover now.

So from there, it was all about digging up everything else. I went into my archive and found all the photographs that I had taken at the time. I also contacted all the photographers that I knew around that period and got them to send me their negatives, and we managed to scramble it together, and I’m really proud of it now. It’s worth every second of beating everybody else up trying to find stuff. Man, it was a real chore.

Was there was a debate about the direction of the recording of Reckless?

I was never really paying attention to anybody else. I was so tormented during the making of this record because I knew I had good stuff.

The songwriting process gets to a certain place, and then it’s about making a record. I already had the best engineer in the world at the helm, Bob Clearmountain, and he’s making it sound great. It’s down to me to get the performances and for me to make sure I’m happy with every single thing that’s happening.

You ask anybody who made this record with me – they’ve probably forgotten about it now – but I drove everybody crazy. If you look at some of the notes on the record you can see my handwritten notes for the drum takes where I would go through four, five, six takes of a song, and literally edit out sections and jigsaw a performance together.

But there are one-take performances on the record. One example is Run To You – the first take of the song is the track you hear on the album. No edits, nothing. And then of course I overdubbed my guitar and my vocal afterwards. But the performance of the actual bass, drums and rhythm guitar is what you hear. But then you get to a song like Summer Of ’69, which was recorded in its entirety twice; it was demoed three times.

Now, looking back I don’t know what the hell we were worried about, because it was good. But when you’re in deep and when you’re in the trenches, you don’t know what’s over the top until you look, and you don’t look over the top until you’re sure the smoke has cleared. And that’s what I feel like when I hear some of these songs now. I’m like: “What was I thinking? Why was I so concerned about it?” But it’s part of the process. When you’re making a record and you’re really close to it and passionate about it and this is your life’s work, you want it to be as good as it can be.

There’s a deceptive simplicity that runs through your work. You can play any of your songs with the most basic instrumentation and the essence is there. 

Most of my songs are written on guitar with me riffing vocally on top of it. So they come from a place of performance; nothing is done on drum machines. We didn’t have a drum machine back then. You have to be able to play a song. As I’ve said many times, it’s all about the setlist. I needed more songs for my set, because I was playing a couple of songs from the first album and a couple of songs from the second album and a few songs from the third album. I was grasping; I needed material. I tried to write songs that were gonna be amazing live.

Heaven was your first No.1 record. That wasn’t written on guitar, right?

Yeah, that’s right. Heaven wasn’t one that I wrote on guitar. That was written with Jim on piano and me singing. I’ve got a demo tape of us doing that. Here, I’ll play you a little bit right now. [Plays excerpt of Heaven demo.] Jim played drums and made a drum loop of that and recorded it on a cassette machine. So we would just sit there and run ideas by each other; I don’t know at what point in the writing process I had that melody. Then we’d riff the chorus and go from there. It’s about playing; it’s about musicians playing in the room together and getting off on ideas.

Tell us more about the Run To You/Blue ?yster Cult connection.

Simply put, I was trying to write a song for Blue ?yster Cult that had that Don’t Fear The Reaper vibe, even though Run To You doesn’t sound anything like it. I came up with something in a similar sort of arpeggiated vein.

So they heard the song and turned it down? 

Yeah, they heard and turned it down, and I’m happy they turned it down. But to be fair, if you’re a band and you have an outside song coming in, you probably didn’t want to do that. They were doing perfectly well without anybody writing their songs.

Tina Turner sings on It’s Only Love. When you and Jim were writing it, did you have it in the back of your mind that it needed a female vocalist?

I knew that song needed something else and that it would never stand up on its own. Obviously, I thought it would be fantastic if Tina would do it. It just so happened that she was in Vancouver around the last week of recording. This is before Private Dancer had come out and before she had her resurgence. So I managed to get backstage to see her. I’d sent the song ahead of time. I just remember a lot of people backstage.

She was opening up for Lionel Richie and there were people everywhere, and all I could see was this really large mane of hair coming down the hallway. I heard her saying: “Where is he? Which one is he?” Then someone said: “He’s over here!” And she came over and said [imitates Tina’s voice]: “Bryan Adams! I love this song!” The next day we recorded it.

Is there a song on Reckless that wasn’t a hit that deserves reappraisal? 

I think the best songs on the album were released as singles. Maybe One Night Love Affair could have been a single, but that would have been the last one. Kids Wanna Rock got lots of airplay on FM radio, but it wasn’t a single.

Were any of the bonus cuts songs worked up for Reckless, or were these mainly songs you and Jim were writing for other artists?

These songs were all written for the album. They all ended up being on other people’s records, except for a couple of them; a lot of them got covered by other people. There’s a song on there called Let Me Down Easy, and we wrote that for Stevie Nicks, but she never recorded it. .38 Special recorded Teacher, Teacher. Reckless was recorded by Loverboy, but they used a different title for it. They changed the title because they didn’t want to be associated with me. Too Hot To Handle was never recorded by anyone.

Can you recall when you first heard Reckless had hit No.1?

I was in New York City and I got a telegram delivered to my hotel room from the record company saying: ‘Congratulations, you’re number one in America.’ It was an amazing feeling.

Where do you rank the Reckless album in your canon of work? 

It’s at the top for me. I have lots of great memories recording it and the songs have stood the test of time.

Not many people may know this, but early in your career you co-wrote two songs recorded by Kiss: War Machine and Rock And Roll Hell. Share the backstory behind that. 

Kiss’s deal was they had to have their name on the songs if they were gonna record it. They put some bit in the song that would qualify for a credit, but they had nothing to do with writing the songs. At the time, this was around ’81; Jim and I were just young songwriters looking for a break. I guess we were grateful for that. [Bryan Adams released his own versions of War Machine and Rock And Roll Hell in 2024].

Looking back, can you pick a ‘do over’ moment in your career? 

I signed a lot of bad deals when I was young, so perhaps I wish I hadn’t signed this or that. But looking back, you can say that but at the same time I’ve got no regrets because it’s all worked out pretty good.

This interview originally appeared in Classic Rock Presents AOR 13, published in 2014.