Bryan Adams

With his trademark white T-shirt and blue jeans, Bryan Adams may have looked like a regular guy. But his unerring gift for radio-friendly pop hooks made him the most successful artist exported from Canada in the '80s. Even as critics dismissed his straightforward, anthemic rock as a shallow formularization of Bruce Springsteen, Adams' work received multiple Juno and Grammy awards, as well as three Oscar nominations.

Adams' father was a Canadian diplomat, and Adams attended military schools in England, Austria, Portugal, and Israel. When he was 12 his parents separated, and he lived with his mother in Vancouver, British Columbia. By then he had taught himself to play guitar and decided to make music his career. At 16, he quit school, bought a grand piano with money from his college fund, and joined bands. At age 17 he befriended Jim Valliance, who had written songs for the Canadian band Prism. After two years of writing and recording demo tapes, their partnership produced the 1979 disco-styled Canadian single “Let Me Take You Dancing.” The pair sold songs to Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Joe Cocker, and Juice Newton, then landed a publishing deal with A&M Records, which led to Adams’ recording contract.

Adams’ eponymously titled debut album stiffed, but the followup, You Want It, You Got It (#118, 1982), fared better, and Adams opened shows for such bands as the Kinks, Foreigner, and Loverboy. Cuts Like a Knife (#8, 1983) was Adams’ U.S. breakthrough, producing hits in “Straight From the Heart” (#10, 1983), the title cut (#15, 1983), and “This Time” (#24, 1983); the latter two were accompanied by popular eye-catching videos. Reckless (#1, 1984) was even bigger, selling over 5 million copies and yielding such hits as “Run to You” (#6, 1984), “Somebody” (#11, 1985), and “Summer of ’69” (#5, 1985), Adams’ first hit ballad in “Heaven” (#1, 1985), and “It’s Only Love” (#15, 1985), a duet with Tina Turner (with whom Adams toured, and for whom he produced a track on her 1986 Break Every Rule). Adams appeared at Live Aid in Philadelphia in 1985, and in 1986 he performed on Amnesty International’s Conspiracy of Hope Tour with Sting and U2.

His Into the Fire yielded hits in “Heat of the Night” (#6, 1987), “Hearts of Fire” (#26, 1987), and “Victim of Love” (#32, 1987). Adams refused to allow the use of the album’s “Only the Strong Survive” in the Tom Cruise film Top Gun because he felt the movie glorified war.

After performing at the 1988 Freedomfest in London to honor freed South African apartheid fighter Nelson Mandela, Adams began work on Waking Up the Neighbours. Meanwhile, Joe Cocker recorded Adams’ “When the Night Comes,” and Dion recorded his “Drive All Night”; Adams had a quick cameo in the 1989 Clint Eastwood film Pink Cadillac and performed at Roger Waters’ 1990 Berlin production of The Wall. The release of Waking Up the Neighbours (#6, 1991) was preceded by the appearance of “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” under the credits of the Kevin Costner film Robin Hood - Prince of Thieves. The ballad was an instant smash, topping the U.S. pop chart for seven weeks and the U.K. chart for a record-breaking 16 weeks, as well as scoring an Oscar nomination. In February 1992 Adams took issue with his homeland’s “Canadian Content” regulations, which restricted airplay of Neighbours because Adams cowrote and coproduced the record with an Englishman, Robert John “Mutt” Lange. Adams briefly threatened to boycott the annual Juno Awards, Canada’s version of the Grammys, where he ended up winning Entertainer and Producer of the Year awards. A hits collection, So Far So Good (#6, 1993), featured the new song “Please Forgive Me” (#7, 1993). This, along with a collaboration with Rod Stewart and Sting for the movie The Three Musketeers, “All for Love” (#1, 1993), cemented Adams’ status as a pop balladeer. This new image continued with 18 til I Die (#31, 1996), which included yet another film soundtrack hit, “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” (#1, 1995) from Don Juan de Marco, garnering Adams his second Oscar nod. The album also produced the popular love song “Let’s Make a Night to Remember.” Adams’ balladry reached new heights when he recorded a duet with Barbra Streisand for her 1996 movie, The Mirror Has Two Faces. “I Finally Found Someone” hit #8 on the pop chart and earned an Academy Award nomination.

The following year, Adams performed a concert for the MTV series Unplugged with his band as well as a 16-piece orchestra of students from the Juilliard School of Music. Highlights were quickly released as an album, MTV Unplugged (#88, 1997). On a Day Like Today (#103, 1998) found Adams duetting with Melanie C., Sporty Spice of the Spice Girls. In 1999 Adams focused on three non-U.S. projects: a second greatest-hits collection, titled The Best of Me, which had been rejected by A&M’s new parent company in the States, Universal, but sold 4 million copies worldwide; and two collections of black-and-white portraits of women, Made in Canada and Heaven. The first showcased Adams’ photographs of 80 prominent Canadian women (among them Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, and Joni Mitchell). The book’s royalties were donated to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. Heaven’s royalties benefited Haven Trust, a London breast-cancer support center.

from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia fo Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001)