1983 had been a pretty good year for Bryan Adams. His third album Cuts Like A Knife and its lead singles were huge hits across North America, making small indents elsewhere around the world. This meant that after a huge tour opening for Journey, plans were made for overseas touring.
Adams went to Europe for a six-week solo club tour in September 1983, where the Gut Opherdicke show on 17th that month was broadcast live as part of the German Rockpalast TV show, giving him excellent visibility. He also did a headlining tour of Japan in November. A few months later, in February 1984, he would also play Australia and New Zealand, supporting The Police on their gigantic Synchronicity tour.
At the end of 1983, Adams had spent 283 days on the road. He had put in the work to get as many people as possible to get to know him and his music, but he knew he needed that international hit song and album to really reach the next level. As 1984 rolled around, his goal was to make an album that was so good that a breakthrough would be inevitable.
The interesting thing is that Adams was not just building his own solo career as an artist and performer. He also had ambitions as a songwriter, and saw writing for other people as a huge part of being successful in that field. He had struck up a songwriting partnership with fellow Canadian Jim Vallance. They did not just write most of the songs Adams had recorded under his own name, but had also penned a large amount of songs for international top artists. This included Aerosmith, Heart, Bonnie Raitt, Alice Cooper, KISS, Ozzy Osbourne, Europe, Scorpions, Joe Cocker, Carly Simon, Rod Stewart, and several others.
When Bryan Adams released his fourth album Reckless in 1984, Run To You was the first single of six. There were bigger hits on the album, but that first song also did extremely well. It became one of the songs that defined him as a top tier artist, bringing immediate attention to the new album. It told the world that Bryan Adams had a new offering of some quality, demanding that people should pay attention.
The interesting thing is that the song was never intended to be a Bryan Adams track.
Run To You was written as a commission in 1983. Adams and Vallace were contacted by producer Bruce Fairbairn, who was working with Blue Oyster Cult on their Revölution by Night album. Recognising their talents in writing catchy and melodic material, he wanted them to write something for the group.
In search of inspiration, Adams and Vallance started listening to some of the classic BOC tracks, somehow ending up playing around with the guitar intro to (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. The arpeggiated guitar riff that opens the song is a signature sound for BOC, and the two of them spent some time creating a riff of their own that would sound similar, but be different.
Jim Vallance remembers the songwriting collaboration well. In a write-up about it on his official website, he says “I still have a recording of Bryan and I passing the guitar cable back and forth (click, buzz, click, buzz), each of us trying a different variation as the riff developed. 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.”
With the song complete, they recorded a demo and presented it to Fairbarn, who liked it. He brought it to the BOC sessions and presented it for the band. Vallance remember that Fairbarn called him back a few days later with the verdict: “Bruce said over the phone, ‘they don’t like the song.’ Maybe there wasn’t enough cowbell?”
Refusing to be discouraged, they asked their publisher to send the song to a few more bands, one of which was definitely .38 Special, but they all declined to record the song.
This would turn out to be a huge blessing in disguise for Bryan Adams. Initially he didn’t think the song was right for him either, but he was talked into doing it by Reckless producer Bob Clearmountain.
In a 2006 interview with Sound On Sound magazine, Clearmountain remembered: “When I first heard Run To You I thought it was pretty good, but Bryan was thinking about leaving it off the album. He was writing songs for other bands at the time, and there was some other band that he was going to give that to. I remember riding around town in his car when I first arrived and he was playing me the demos, and when we got to Run To You he said, ‘I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this one,’ and I said, ‘You’re gonna put it on this album! It’s a great song.’”
The turnaround was pretty notable. It went from not being considered good enough to being added to the sessions anyway, then becoming a very important track from the sessions, and even becoming the first single from the album!
At face value, if you primarily focus on the chorus and don’t pay too close attention to the verse lyrics, Run To You could seem like a devoted plea of wanting to stay with your loved one. In actuality, the track deals with the subject of infidelity, and is sung from the perspective of a man who declares that he will continue to “run to” his seductive mistress over his faithful partner.
She says her love for me could never die
But that’d change if she ever found out about you and IOh, but her love is cold
Wouldn’t hurt her if she didn’t know, cause
When it gets too much
I need to feel your touchI’m gonna run to you
I’m gonna run to you
Cause when the feeling’s right I’m gonna run all night
I’m gonna run to you
The song recording started on 27 March 1984 at Little Mountain Sound in Vancouver, Canada. Album sessions would continue through the middle of the year, with Run To You largely being worked on and completed in April.
Once it was decided that Adams would claim the song himself, the initial riff was transposed down to E minor, also adding a capo to achieve an F#-minor tuning, which better suited Adams’ vocal range.
Jim Vallance mentioned on his official website: “Interestingly, Bryan says the track was completed in one take. Bob says it required ‘about a half-dozen takes out of which the best two or three were then chosen to edit between.’ I wasn’t there, so I can’t confirm either way.”
Run To You was released worldwide as the first of six (!) singles from Reckless on 18 October 1984, and became of the album’s most successful songs on American rock charts, going all the way to #1 on the Billboard Rock Tracks charts, as well as #6 on the Hot 100. It was his second single so far to chart in Europe, reaching #11 on the UK charts.
A music video was commissioned for the single. This cleverly avoids casting Adams as a cheating man by portraying his guitar as the object of desire. Instead of running to another woman at every opportunity, he wants to run to his guitar. But that was not enough to make Addams happy with the results.
The video was directed by Steve Barron, who worked on most of Adams’ clips from the era in addition to highly popular videos by Michael Jackson (the iconic Billie Jean), Culture Club, and Tears For Fears. In Run To You, we see Adams in the rain, in the snow, pulling a guitar from the leaves, as well as performance footage. The highlight of the video was supposed to be a tree getting hit by lightning, which would trigger a scene with a lightning storm. After blowing a lot of their budget building the tree, the lightning strike looked more like a transformer explosion that wouldn’t trigger anything.
Adams explained in the book I Want My MTV: “Imagine the shock and horror on set when the f–king thing burns in about a minute. We stood there, looking at this tree up in flames. And Steve Barron’s going, ‘Oh S–t.’ That is probably my worst video.”
The artist might not have liked it, but MTV did. The video was nominated for MTV Video Music Awards in five categories, including Best Special Effects (!) and Best Direction.
The album itself would follow on 5 November 1984, which also happened to be Adams’ 25th birthday. The album would see more than its fair share of chart success, awards, and certifications. Decades later the song continues to be an Adams concert favourite, and it still enjoys significant radio airplay around the world.
The blockbusters Heaven and Summer of ’69 may have done even better in most markets, but Run To You laid the groundwork and drew a lot of attention onto what turned out to be one of the great classic albums of the 1980s.
Facebook Comments