Did BOC refuse a hit song?

I can totally hear a BÖC version playing in my mind.
It's Bryan Adam's best song and it would have been a good fit for BÖC in that time of their band history.

 

you got it! ' ; )

 

I could actually imagine this but am glad it didn’t happen.

BOC would presumably have requested a co-writer’s credit. Maybe that’s why it didn’t happen?

 

Both AOC and BOC are from New York.

 

So do I but can’t figure out how to umlaut.

 

Maybe it's the part about the song being written specifically for Blue Oyster Cult. Perhaps it was just offered to them.

Recall that "Straight From The Heart", the lead single from Cuts Like A Knife, was recorded not only by Bonnie Tyler in 1983, but also Jon English 2 years earlier in 1981. So Bryan was definitely getting his songs out there for others to record.

 

Bryan Adams (and Jim Vallance) wrote (or co-wrote) a lot of songs for other artists concurrently with his own releases. I don't know if he's talked about it in interviews as to why (particularly after his own career had some legs), but there's several: "War Machine" and "Rock and Roll Hell" on Kiss' Creatures OF The Night, Joe Cocker's "When The Night Comes," Roger Daltrey's "Let Me Down Easy", etc. I don't know the logic, but I'm assuming there was simply a decent sum of money up front for these kind of things (and BOC recording the song wouldn't have kept Adams from recording it himself).

I think if you're a songwriter just coming up in the industry, and there's opportunities to get your songs (and name) out there, you take them. (Particularly since if it clicks, that royalty money can help fund your own career) There aren't a ton of other examples like this, but if Adams hadn't been such a good singer and performer, he could've easily become one of those Holly Knight/Desmond Child/Dianne Warren types. Bryan is a smart guy and probably knew that was an avenue worth pursuing if his own career didn't pan out.

 

If we trust Wiki, it sounds like "Heart" was mainly written by someone else:

"The song was written by Eric Kagna, a Vancouver singer/songwriter, and the instrumental bridge was contributed by Adams."

If that's accurate, it sounds like Adams just glommed credit for a minor addition to the song.

The Tyler "Heart" came after Adams' own version.

Anyway, who knows? Obviously I won't claim for a fact that the "Adams tried to give the song to BÖC" story is false - just feels like it doesn't quite pass the smell test!

 

Yeah, those are good points, but the timeline of Adams' career makes it seem less likely to me.

Adams was an artist on the rise when he recorded "Reckless", as "Cuts Like a Knife" sold really well.

Just seems odd he'd be trying to give away songs with good commercial prospects like "Run to You" when he was on the upward slope!

 

Some good points there. It's strange though that both Ian Lloyd's version (from 1980) and Jon English (1981) give full credit to Bryan Adams. Eric Kagna isn't listed at all.

Fortunately for him, he does get credit (and royalites!) from the 2 biggest selling versions from Bryan and Bonnie.

 

History is full of artists not knowing that certain songs they wrote were going to be hits. Stuff like Bon Jovi almost leaving "Livin' On a Prayer" off the album, Toto burying "Africa" at the very end of Toto IV not really thinking anything of it, etc. Brian Eno almost destroyed the work-in-progress tape of "Where The Streets Have No Name." It's difficult to be objective about one's own work...sometimes you're just like "yeah, there's another song."

In hindsight, he should've held on to some of those songs for a post-Reckless world, but at the time, he was overflowing with songs, I'm sure he thought he could just do that forever.

 

Oh, I understand that artists are often poor judges of their own material. I mean, we both love Bruce, and look at how many great songs he left in the vault!

This one just seems weird to me, maybe also because it's not like BÖC were chart-toppers at this time.

Their career was in decline so it seems odd that Adams would give away a song to them when it seemed to have limited commercial prospects.

Anyway, like I've said, I don't intend to completely pooh-pooh the story, and I'm not as argumentative about it as I probably sound!

It may well be true! Just doesn't smell right to me!

 

I never knew this until now, but "Burnin' For You" came out in '81. (I always assumed it was older, and from the same general era as their earlier big hits). So their career wasn't really "in decline," and certainly after Ozzy, Quiet Riot, etc had brought hard rock back to some prominence by 1983, I'm sure the label was like "well, why not BOC?" Knowing they were only 2 years removed from a pretty decent-sized hit (at least based on how much classic rock airplay I remember it getting as a kid in the 90's), I think the commercial prospects may have been slightly stronger than you think.

 

Umlauts make everything better

 

But then their 1983 album stiffed and that was that for them.

Wiki claims "Run to You" was written in January 1983, but that makes no sense since they claim it was the final song written for the album - an album that wouldn't start recording sessions until March 1984. (Except for "Heaven" from 1983, but Wiki states that was done for a film so it fell outside of the main "Reckless" sessions.)

Just doesn't seem likely Adams had written all the "Reckless" songs more than a year before recording them. Wouldn't you think maybe at least one newer song would've materialized between Jan 1983 and March 1984?

If "Run to You" was written 1/83, then it becomes more likely he would've offered it to BOC, but if it's January 1984 - on the heels of a flop album and nearly 2 years before their next one - then it makes less sense.

Doesn't anyone here have Adams' phone #? Call him and ask!

 

Here's a bit more of a fleshed out story.

==

Adams wrote this in 1983 with his songwriting partner Jim Vallance. They wrote the song for Blue Oyster Cult, whose producer Bruce Fairbairn asked them to write something for the group. Adams and Fairbairn messed around with the guitar intro to "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," and as Vallance explains on his website, " We transposed the riff down to E-minor, later adding a capo to achieve an F#-minor tuning, which better suited Bryan's vocal range. Once the riff was solidified, the rest of the song started to unfold. We spent a few days getting the lyrics and arrangement right, with particular attention paid to the interplay between the bass, drums and the guitar riff."

Blue Oyster Cult turned down the song, as did .38 Special. Adams didn't think it was right for him either, but when producer Bob Clearmountain asked Adams if he had another song they could use on Reckless, Bryan played him the demo and they turned the song into a hit. It was the first single from the album.

 

His song Can't Wait All Night (another one where some sources claim an Eric Kagna co-write!), recorded by Juice Newton on her '84 album of the same name, sounds like an archetypal Bryan Adams hit yet as far as I know he never recorded it. Similarly, the two BA tunes released by 38 Special could have easily fit on any of those earlier BA albums so he seemed happy enough to sell good songs on.

 

where do you buy 'em? Can you grind 'em up? Add 'em to coffee? Eggs?

 

Yeah, but you can't buy a new car with "respect". No matter how cheesy those song-doctor hits were, without them acts like Starship and Cheap Trick would have been completely invisible during the mid-late 1980s. They extended their careers considerably.

BOC did not have any song-doctor hits in the 1980s, which is why they fell off the map during that time and nobody knows any songs they did after circa 1981.

 

Bryan Adams DID write a song for Krokus.

Boys Nite Out (1984)

 

Assuming Vallance is telling a correct story, then pull out that Emily Litella quote for my posts: never mind!

Here's the link to his website's discussion:

Bryan Adams - Run To You

 

maybe because it didn't have enough cowbell in it

 

This is absolutely true. At the time, Bryan Adams and his writing partner Jim Vallance were writing many songs on “spec” (meaning the authors were given a specific assignment for a project or person to write for) as part of a publishing deal they had signed. This was before he had made it into the big time, himself, and it was another way to help get his career off the ground. There’s a long list of artists - especially in the early days, Canadian artists like himself - including the likes of Prism, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Ian Lloyd, Loverboy, Bob Welch, Nantucket, KISS, Randy Meisner, Tim Bogart, Scandal, Uriah Heep, Bonnie Tyler, 38 Special, Ted Nugent, Joe Cocker, Krokus, Roger Daltrey and many more, including Blue Oyster Cult. Many of these tunes were songs that Adams would release and have hits with, himself, after these other artists recorded, and some, in the case of BOC, were where the artist passed on them. When he wrote “Run To You”, to make it fit into the band’s mold, he essentially inverted the chord structure for their song “Don’t Fear The Reaper”, modifying it just enough to be different . However now that you know this, try listing to both and not being able to hear it.

We covered a lot of this on this thread years ago.

Bryan Adams - Album by Album

 

The Fire of Unknown Origin album in '81 was kind of the last gasp for them. They followed it up with a reasonably successful live album, Extra Terrestrial Live, but with Albert Bouchard gone, they had lost one of their main songwriters. Working with Loverboy's producer for their next album probably wasn't a great idea either, but even bringing Sandy Pearlman back to produce Club Ninja didn't help much. Their last album for Columbia, Imaginos, was really an Albert Bouchard solo album that Columbia decided to put out as BÖC after getting Buck and Eric to redo most of the lead vocals and Allen and Joe to play some keyboards. It wasn't a bad album, but it wasn't BÖC.

The basic problem is that there was a certain magical chemistry to the original collection of people involved with the band -- not just the five musicians, but also Sandy Pearlman, Murray Krugman, Richard Meltzer, and Patti Smith. And it was the times as well, the post-psychedelic hard rock scene of the early '70s. As time moved on and people started drifting away, things changed for the band. Their lyrics were never as interesting once Pearlman, Meltzer, and Smith stopped writing for them (though they kept writing songs based on old lyrics of theirs as late as "Shooting Shark" in 1983), and the whole vibe of the group changed from an eerie, intelligent ensemble whose songs seemed full of hidden meanings to a commercial hard rock band doing songs on random fantasy topics like Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion (though admittedly "Black Blade" was a highlight of Cultösaurus Erectus). Then once Albert was gone, they seemed to lose all sense of who they had been, and started taking songs from other people.

 

Why did they reject the song?