Description
STAMPED PROMO!!
about Heaven:
Reckless is the fourth studio album by the Canadian rock artist Bryan Adams. Released on October 29, 1984 through A&M Records, the album was a huge commercial success, selling over 5 million units in the United States alone. The album peaked at number 1 on the Billboard 200 and reached high positions in charts worldwide. It was recorded at Little Mountain Sound Studios, Vancouver, Canada.
Six singles were released from the album: “”Run to You,”” “”Somebody,”” “”Heaven,”” “”Summer of ’69,”” “”One Night Love Affair,”” and “”It Only Love.”” All six singles made the top 15 on the US Billboard Hot 100, a feat that at the time had been accomplished previously only by Michael Jackson “”Thriller.””
about Run to you:
Kids Wanna Rock – Bryan Adams: How We Made Reckless
Innuendos, a hit single that Blue Oyster Cult turned down, and the best birthday gift a young man of 25 could give him self. Just what went in to making the multi-platinum Reckless?
Adams and his producer Bob Clearmountain were at The Power Station, a famous recording studio on West 53rd Street in Manhattan. They were on the final stretch: nine tracks had been recorded at a different studio, Little Mountain Sound in Vancouver, the Canadian city where Adams had lived since he was a teenager. Now they were applying the finishing touches, mostly vocal overdubs. But while Clearmountain was happy with what they’d got, Adams was not.
about “Summer of ’69”:
His instinct told him they needed something more, but he was too close to it to figure out exactly what was missing. He was also fatigued. He and Clearmountain had been working the graveyard shift, from six o’clock in the evening through to six in the morning. Adams was also sleeping on the couch at a friend’s house because he was sick of staying in hotels.But in his tired mind, one thing was certain. This was no time to be dropping the ball. In 1981, after his debut album had flopped, he had joked about naming the second Bryan Adams Hasn’t Heard Of You Either. Three years on, his mood was more serious. With Cuts Like A Knife, he’d gotten his foot in the door. With Reckless, he intended to bust it wide open. Everything about this record had to be perfect.
Adams summoned his manager Bruce Allen to New York for a playback of the album. Allen’s verdict was straight to the point: “Where’s the rock?”
According to Adams, these three words “changed everything”. The next day, he was on a plane back to Vancouver. He called Jim Vallance, his co-songwriter, and told him: “We need to pump up the volume on this.” With his manager’s words still ringing in his head, Adams chose two tracks that could be “taken up a notch” – One Night Love Affair and Summer Of ’69. In addition, he and Vallance wrote a new song from scratch – a song that answered Bruce Allen’s question in the most emphatic fashion. Its title: Kids Wanna Rock.
The three tracks were re-recorded using a drummer that Adams discovered playing in a ska band in a strip joint. And with that, he knew, at last, that he’d nailed it.
With Reckless, Adams found a niche that was all his own. As a rock record made for radio, it plugged into that mainstream audience dominated by Bruce Springsteen, John Cougar Mellencamp and Don Henley. But Adams was of a different generation to those established big-hitters. He turned 25 on the day Reckless was released – November 5, 1984. His hard rock sensibility – explicit in Kids Wanna Rock – was something that spoke to fans of Van Halen and ZZ Top, and the way he sang, belting it out like a young Rod Stewart, gave him that extra edge. With Reckless, Bryan Adams would knock the ball clean out of the park.
This much was evident to Jim Vallance when he first met Adams at a Vancouver music store in 1978. “Bryan was unemployed, penniless and living with his mom,” he says. At the time, Adams was 18, and had already taken his first steps as a professional musician. Three years earlier he had made his debut recording as the singer for glam-rock band Sweeney Todd. “I wanted to be the guitar player in a band,” he says. “I never wanted to be the front-man. If I could have been anyone, it would have been Ritchie Blackmore.” But by the time he met Jim Vallance, he was set on being a solo artist.
For Vallance, the timing of that meeting was perfect. At 26, he had recently quit playing drums for the hard rock group Prism to work solely as a songwriter. He had written all of the songs on the first Prism album under the pseudonym Rodney Higgs – his logic being that if the album failed, his career would not be ruined. In the event, the album went platinum in Canada, and Vallance would continue to write for the band. But he was also looking for other artists to work with, and in Adams, he sensed a huge potential.
“The first day we got together, I knew he was going places,” Vallance says. “He was only eighteen but he was overflowing with confidence. Not in an arrogant way, more like bursting with energy and ideas. Right away I’m thinking, ‘Wow, this kid can sing and write songs.’”
For months, they worked together in the tiny studio that Vallance had in the basement of his house. “We’d spend every day just busking,” Adams says. But there would be no short route to success for Bryan Adams. “For a long time,” he admits, “nobody gave a shit about me.”
Before he found a manager, Adams approach, hocking his demos to various labels. It was a chastening experience. “I remember this one record company guy said to me: ‘You got a band?’ I said: ‘No’. ‘You got a manager?’ ‘No.’ He said: ‘You’re wasting my time. See ya!’”
When Adams eventually got a contract with A&M Records at the end of 1978, it was for a nominal fee of one Canadian dollar. “They signed me as a songwriter initially,” he explains, “with the provision that they would allow me to make an album. And I got the shittiest deal. But I was grateful for the break. To have someone at least give you a chance, it was all I wanted.”His first album, self-titled, was released in 1980. It was a low-budget affair, what Adams describes as “a glorified demo session for Jim and I”. The album failed to chart outside of Canada, and even there it stiffed. From this he learned a valuable lesson. “There’s writing songs, and there’s making a record – two different things. To take it to the next level I needed a producer.”
To this end, he travelled to New York to hustle Bob Clearmountain into listening to his songs. To a point, the plan worked. Clearmountain produced the second album – named You Want It You Got It, after Adams’s original joke title was “kiboshed” by A&M. It sounded good. But again, sales were weak. In the US, the album didn’t even make the Top 100.
It was only in 1983, with his third album, Cuts Like A Knife, his first great record, that Adams started to get some traction in Canada, the US and beyond. Boasting a punchier sound, and boosted by the swaggering title track and the piano ballad Straight From The Heart, it reached the Canadian and US Top 10.
In late ’83, A&M bosses presented Adams with a platinum disc for one million sales. And in this moment of triumph he learned another lesson about the music business. As he held the award and posed for photographs, he whispered to his manager: “Bruce, I haven’t been paid for this.” The reply was typically blunt. “No, and you’re not gonna be paid. They’ve taken the money. Everything you’ve done for the last three years, they’ve been paying for.”
When he got home to Vancouver, Adams had the money to pay the rent on his apartment, and just enough left over to buy a car. Not a Ferrari, but a Volkswagen Beetle. Second-hand. And again, the advice that he received from Bruce Allen was succinct. “You better write another new record…”
Such criticism meant nothing to Adams. He didn’t aspire to be the next Dylan, nor was he making the kind of socio-political statements that lent gravitas to the work of Springsteen. In truth, Adams was as much a working class hero as the latter, except that Adams didn’t make this a part of his act. “For me,” he says, “there was no message, no trying to be a man of the people. I was just trying to write great songs.”
He was also smart enough to know exactly how he should up his game. Supporting Journey on the enormo-dome circuit, he realised that he needed more songs that could connect to big audiences. “I was scrambling for live songs,” he says. “I was doing whatever I could to get the crowd going, but I needed a better setlist.” In short, he needed anthems. Reckless would be an album full of them.
Adams was surprised that BÖC had passed on Run To You, given that its opening guitar riff echoed their classic 1976 hit (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. But when he went back to the song, it sounded better than he had remembered – so good, in fact, that he wondered why he hadn’t thought to keep it for himself. And once he and Vallance got into their rhythm in those basement sessions, more songs came in quick succession. “It was almost as if every day we got together another song would happen,” Adams says. “Monday would be Somebody, Tuesday would be She’s Only Happy When She’s Dancin’, Wednesday would be Summer Of ’69…”
The latter song, originally titled Those Were The Best Days Of My Life, was inspired by another great American rock hit from 1976, Bob Seger’s Night Moves. “That’s such a brilliant song,” Adams says. “It always pissed me off that I didn’t write it.”
What resonated so powerfully with Adams were the lyrics in Night Moves, its portrayal of adolescent rites of passage, with images of cars and girls and long, hot summers. “It’s a nostalgic song,” Adams says. “Romantic. Teenage blues, that awkwardness of trying to figure out sexuality – it’s all there.”
The song’s title was a rude joke that stuck. “I always got a laugh out of it,” he says. So too the final line: ‘Me and my baby in a sixty-nine.’ “I really nailed it there,” he says with a proud laugh.
“I’m proud of that,” Adams says. “I remember Bob Clearmountain standing up in the control room and saying, ‘Whoah! You guys have gotta hear this!’ And when he played it back, I said: ‘Let’s not touch that. Next song!’ We did record it two or three times afterwards, because we could. But we never got it as good as the first one.”
Another song that came together quickly was one that Vallance had brought to the table. It’s Only Love wasn’t written with a vocal duet in mind, but Adams felt it needed another voice, “to make it special”. And he had only one candidate in mind: Tina Turner, the soul singer who had recently launched her comeback with the single Let’s Stay Together. A demo of the song was sent to her management, and a meeting arranged for when Turner was doing a show in Vancouver as support to Lionel Richie. Adams admits he was nervous as he waited for her backstage.
“And then,” he says, “I saw this big mane of hair coming down the hallway. I could hear her saying, ‘Where is he? Where is he?’ Someone said: ‘There he is.’ And Tina says, ‘Bryan, I loooove this song! I wanna record it!’ I said: ‘Let’s do it tomorrow.’”
She agreed. He thought to himself: I’ll believe it when I see it. But on the following afternoon, Turner arrived at Little Mountain to deliver a performance that left Adams and his team feeling like they’d been hit by a force of nature. “After we’d recorded it and she said goodbye, it was like a tornado had just ripped through there. I said: ‘Bob, could you just play that back? You definitely got that on tape, right?’ He said yes, thank God.”
The album was eventually completed in August, with the re-recording of One Night Love Affair and Summer Of ’69, and the addition of Kids Wanna Rock. “Those were the missing ingredients that it needed,” Adams says. “And I give credit to my manager for that.”
He also credits Jim Vallance as the inspiration for Kids Wanna Rock, a full-throttle rock’n’roll blaster with a ridiculous, gonzoid lyric, its title coined by Vallance in a moment of evangelical fervour after he and Adams had attended a concert by synth-pop boffin Thomas Dolby.
“After that show,” Adams recalls, “Jim was so emphatic about the fact that people just weren’t getting into the keyboard thing. Jim’s a rocker, man, and he wasn’t gonna have it. He just said: ‘The kids wanna rock!’ And I thought that was so funny.”
Adams knew before Reckless was released that it was a good record. He was certain that among its 10 songs were some of the best he had ever made. Jim Vallance, the man who believed in Bryan Adams when nobody else did, remained pragmatic. “In Bryan’s career, up to Reckless, each album had done better than the one before,” he recalls. “I was confident Reckless would do better than Cuts Like A Knife. I just wasn’t prepared for how much better.”
Run To You was the first single. It reached No.4 in Canada, six in the US, and 11 in the UK. And the hits kept on coming. Most spectacular of all was the success that Adams had in the US, where six singles from the album made the Top 15; a feat achieved only by Michael Jackson with Thriller and Bruce Springsteen with Born In The USA. In June 1985, Heaven topped the US chart. Two months later, Reckless did the same.
His celebrations were modest: a few drinks, nothing more. Adams was never a big drinker. “It never interested me,” he says. In his distant past – “as a kid” – he had experimented with soft drugs. But in an era when cocaine use was effectively de rigueur in the music industry, at all levels, drugs had no appeal for Adams. “I was too focused,” he says, “way too focused to go off the rails. None of the guys in the band were drinkers. Certainly, nobody was doing any drugs. I wasn’t interested, and it wasn’t around me.”
It also helped that Adams had, at a time when the pressures of global fame were upon him, a girlfriend who understood the strangeness and complexities of a life in show business. Vicki Russell was the daughter of British director Ken Russell, whose films include the big-screen version of The Who’s rock’n’roll musical Tommy – in which a young Vicki played the role of the reverend’s daughter-turned-groupie, Sally Simpson.
“Vicki was a great girlfriend and fantastic character to have on tour,” Adams says. “She could see through the bullshit way before I could. Someone would come up and say, ‘Hey, really nice to meet you!’ And she’d just say in my ear, ‘Wanker!’ She was a perfect foil for me.”
Vicki also had an appreciation of the absurdities of the rock’n’roll lifestyle. “While we were on stage,” Adams says, “she would go out into the crowd and find three or four girls and bring them backstage, and when we walked into the dressing room, these birds were all topless! Brilliant!”
In the end, it was Adams who called time on the Reckless campaign, against the wishes of his manager and record company. “If they could have pulled one more single off it, they would have,” he says. “And when I told Bruce, ‘I gotta go home,’ he said: ‘No, man, keep going!’ But I stopped the tour. I’d been away from home for such a long time. Two years. I was exhausted.”
And at this point, he could afford rather more than an old VW Beetle. “I got paid, finally,” he says. Adams bought a house in Vancouver. He also did what every working class boy dreams of doing, if and when they make it big.
“I bought my mum a house,” he says with pride. “I took care of everybody. That felt pretty good.”
For Adams, so much has changed since then. In those 30 years he has made six more albums, some good, others less so. And for all the success that he had in the early 90s with (Everything I Do) I Do It For You – No.1 in 18 countries, including 16 straight weeks in the UK – it came with a price. It defined him in the public consciousness as a balladeer – something he has never really shaken off.
But with Reckless, it was a different story. It was an album with more hits than most artists’ greatest hits. But above all, it had balls. In answer to that question – “Where’s the rock?” – it had enough to make it the album of the year in the 1985 Kerrang! critics’ poll, ahead of heavyweights such as AC/DC, Iron Maiden and Aerosmith.
Reckless isn’t just the best album that Bryan Adams ever made, it’s also one of the great rock albums, period. “I gave that record everything I had,” Adams says. “Even now you can feel that. And, you know, a great song is a great song. That’s what stands the test of time.”
1. “”One Night Love Affair”” Adams, Vallance 4:32
2. “”She Only Happy When She Dancin”” Adams, Vallance 3:14
3. “”Run to You”” Adams, Vallance 3:54
4. “Heaven”” Adams, Vallance 4:03
5. “”Somebody”” Adams, Vallance 4:44
6. “”Summer of ’69″” Adams, Vallance 3:35
7. “”Kids Wanna Rock”” Adams, Vallance 2:36
8. “”It Only Love”” Adams, Vallance 3:15
9. “”Long Gone”” Adams, Vallance 3:57
10. “”Ain’t Gonna Cry”” Adams, Vallance 4:06
* Bryan Adams – rhythm guitars, handclaps, lead vocals, lead guitars, piano, harmonica, co-producer
* Keith Scott – lead guitars, rhythm guitars, background vocals
* Jim Vallance – percussion, associate producer
* Dave Taylor – bass guitar
* Pat Steward – drums and background vocals
* Tommy Mandel – keyboards
* Jody Perpick – backgrounds sounds and vocals
* Mickey Curry – drums
* Tina Turner – lead vocals on “”It Only Love””
* Steve Smith – drums on “”Heaven””
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5.0 out of 5 stars An absolute classic.,
Most of the material released by Bryan Adams during his long career has been mediocre at best. BUT… in the mid 80s he made this album and I will always be grateful to him that he did! After 16 years of regular listening, I still love it just as much. Raw energy, unpolished production and good songs all contribute to its magic. Quite simply, this is one of the best albums ever made.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Bryan Adams at his best,
This is Bryan Adams’ finest album and one that is just as enjoyable to hear now as when it came out. The production, arrangements, songwriting, singing, playing are all faultless (with the exception of the silly “”Kids wanna rock””). From up-front rockers (“”One night love affair””, “”Summer of ’69″”, “”Somebody””, “”It only love””) to the incredible power-ballad “”Heaven”” and the mid-tempo “”Run to you””, I can find no reason to criticise this album.
BA may be passing ungracefully into middle age, but this album is his legacy and will stand the test of time.
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5.0 out of 5 stars My favourite album of all time,
This is an all time classic and an lp that everyone should have in their collection. If all artists have one seminal’ work, this is Bryan. It has 10 tracks, 8 of which still feature regularly in his live set lists, and these include the Bryan Adams songs that everybody knows and loves – like ‘Run to You’, ‘Heaven’, summer of 69′ and ‘Kids Wanna Rock’.
Despite being released in 1984 I think it is timeless and doesn’t sound that dated even today, unlike some of his later stuff like Waking up the Neighbours.
For me the highlights of this album are the first two tracks, ‘One night love affair’ and he only happy when she dancing’. These are lesser-known to non-Bryan Adams fans but to me they are the two of the most catchy, unforgettable and brilliantly-written songs not only on this album but of his whole 25-year career.
There nothing ‘clever’ about this album – it is just ten very simple, very melodic, feel-good pop/rock songs which I’ve never tired of listening to over the years.
Bryan Adams is a paragon of conservatism — not political conservatism, but aesthetic conservatism. This guy played the middle of the road better than almost anyone of his rock ‘n’ roll generation. In an era of pop theatricality, Adams went full T-shirt-and-jeans everyman, and he got away with it.
Adams’ durable style — slightly growly rockers with big riffs and sticky hooks and enormous production — might’ve been a missing link between Bruce Springsteen’s mid-’80s working-class stadium-rock heroics and the poodle-haired glam metal overlords that took over the charts soon after. But Adams himself wasn’t a warrior-poet showman like Springsteen, and he wasn’t into stagy preening like the Sunset Strip bands. Instead, Adams got over on down-the-line sincerity, something he was able to sell on MTV. His lack of persona was his persona. It worked out for him.
When Adams finally had his first moment atop the Billboard Hot 100, it wasn’t a happy accident. It was fully calculated. Adams had paid attention and watched what was succeeding on the charts, and then he made his own version of it. This was a canny choice, though I can’t say it made for a great song.
Adams was only 25 when “Heaven” hit #1, but he was already a music-business survivor with a handful of hits to his name. “Heaven” itself was nearly two years old. Adams was born in Kingston, Ontario, but he didn’t grow up there. (The #1 single in the US on the day of Adams’ birth was Bobby Darin’s “Mack The Knife.” Adams was 10 years old in the summer of ’69, so that song is either about someone else or something else.) When Adams was a kid, his father, who’d spent time in the British and Canadian armies, worked as a UN peacekeeping observer, so a young Adams lived in Lisbon and Vienna and Tel Aviv before settling in Vancouver.
When Adams was 15, he became the new singer for the Vancouver glitter-rock band Sweeney Todd. (Sweeney Todd’s original frontman was Nick Gilder, who had left for Los Angeles and who soon hit #1 with “Hot Child In The City.”) Adams recorded one album with Sweeney Todd, and he was 16 when he left the band. Shortly afterward, Adams met Jim Vallence, the former drummer of the Vancouver rock band Prism. Vallance had left Prism because he wanted to make it as a songwriter. He was seven years older than Adams, but the two decided to start up a songwriting partnership anyway.
In 1978, Adams signed with A&M Records for a one-dollar advance, and the label remixed his debut single “Let Me Take You Dancing,” releasing it as a disco song. Adams came out with his self-titled debut album in 1980, and he cranked out his first three albums over a four-year stretch. The first two of those albums didn’t do much business. During that run, Adams and Vallance also wrote songs for people like KISS, Bonnie Raitt, and Vallance’s old band Prism. (Adams and Vallance wrote Prism’s highest-charting US single, 1981’s “Don’t Let Him Know,” which peaked at #39.)
Everything started to click for Adams after he came out with his third LP, 1983’s Cuts Like A Knife. The album made the top 10 and went platinum in the US, and it hit triple-platinum status in Canada. The single “Straight From The Heart” was Adams’ first real US hit, and it peaked at #10. (It’s a 7. The follow-up single “Cuts Like A Knife” peaked at #15, and it remains an absolute rock-radio banger to this day.)
Adams spent much of 1983 on tour, opening for Journey. A year earlier, Journey had scored their biggest-ever hit with the power ballad “Open Arms,” which peaked at #2. (It’s a 7.) But Adams was more into the newest Journey power ballad. While they were on tour together, Journey had come out with the single “Faithfully,” which eventually peaked at #12. Every night, Adams watched crowds losing it to “Faithfully.” He wanted to write a song like that. Before long, he had an excuse.
That summer, producer Gene Kirkwood was finishing up a movie called A Night In Heaven, which I had literally never heard of before I sat down to write this piece. (Turns out it’s a romantic drama about a male stripper, played by The Blue Lagoon‘s Christopher Atkins.) Kirkwood had hired Danny Goldberg, the former rock critic and future Nirvana manager, to produce the soundtrack, and Goldberg had the idea to bring in Bryan Adams. Adams had seen the script for the movie, and he thought it looked bad, but he agreed to record a song for the soundtrack anyway. He and Jim Vallance spent a day writing “Heaven” in Vancouver, and they recorded it in New York during a couple of days off from the Journey tour.
Adams co-produced “Heaven” with the awesomely named Bob Clearmountain, a master of big-’80s sounds. Clearmountain had mixed Tattoo You and Sports and Let’s Dance and Born In The USA, and he’d co-produced “Out Of Touch” with Daryl Hall and John Oates. While they were working on “Heaven,” things ran long, and drummer Mickey Curry had to leave before recording, since he also had a session with Hall and Oates that day. So Adams called up Journey drummer Steve Smith, who was staying in a nearby hotel, and Smith came in to play on “Heaven.” On tour, Smith and Adams had become friendly, and Smith would warm up every night by sitting under the stage and playing along with Adams’ set. When you’ve intentionally set out to rip off another band’s song, it must be an amazing luxury to have a guy from that band come in and play on your record.
A Night In Heaven came out in November of 1983. Critics hated it, and it lost money. At the time, Adams didn’t release “Heaven” as a single, though a lot of rock stations played it anyway. (“Obsession,” another song from the Night In Heaven soundtrack, would later become a #6 hit for Animotion. That song is an 8. Jan Hammer, who did the score for A Night In Heaven, will soon appear in this column.) Adams didn’t like “Heaven” much, and he initially wasn’t going to include the song on Reckless, his next album. He changed his mind at the last minute, and the song made the cut.
Reckless turned out to be a huge album, a total stadium-rock calling card. There are 10 songs on Reckless, and six of them became top-20 hits. Lead single “Run To You” peaked at #6. (It’s an 8.) Adams followed it with “Somebody,” which peaked at #11. “Heaven” was already blowing up on the radio before Adams finally released it as a single. He shot a couple of videos for the song with director Steve Barron, the more famous of which is the melodramatic saga of a girl who leaves behind her drunk-driving boyfriend, wanders into a Bryan Adams show, and locks eyes with the singer. Adams then runs offstage to try and find this girl, which makes me question his professionalism. You’re at work, buddy! Finish the show!
I can understand why Adams didn’t want to put “Heaven” on Reckless. Reckless is a gleaming, streamlined mid-’80s rock album, but it’s a rock album nonetheless. “Heaven” is not a rock song. It’s almost defiantly wimpy. Adams growl-coos over watery keyboards and dramatic synth-strings, and even when the giant drums come crashing in, it remains pretty washed-out. Adams, with his big chin and his sincere eyebrows, could sell longing and devotion, and his vocal is a fairly majestic version of the standard white-soul bellow. The hook from “Heaven” is strong enough to get stuck in your head, and the arrangement does all the classic things that power ballads need to do, building from the soft opening to the fiddly-guitar climax. But I never get the sense that the song expresses anything urgent, that it has any real reason to exist.
The problem, I think, is that Adams and Vallance clearly wrote “Heaven” for a movie, right down to the way they clumsily build the thing around a word from the film’s title. There’s no central conflict to “Heaven,” no sense of heartbreak or story arc. It’s a love song of Lionel Richie-level simplicity. Adams remembers long ago, when he and someone else used to be in love. And then he says: Hey, look, we’re still in love. He doesn’t say anything about fighting and making up, or about getting through hard times together. It’s just: We’re in heaven.
Adams, for whatever reason, sounds deeply pained when singing “Heaven,” even though there’s nothing pained about those lyrics. It’s like he’s trying to imply a sadness that just isn’t there on paper. It doesn’t work for me. I tend to like “Heaven” better when other people sing it.
Even though “Heaven” had been around for more than a year before Adams released it as a single, the song took off. It helped push Reckless to quintuple-platinum sales. The album’s next single was the totemic “Summer Of ’69,” which peaked at #5 and which lived on in rock-radio rotation forevermore. (It’s a 9.) At the end of 1985, Billboard named Reckless the #2 seller of the year, behind only Born In The USA. Bryan Adams was a made man. He’ll appear in this column again.
BONUS BEATS: In 2001, the Spanish producer DJ Sammy, along with the German DJ Yanou and the Dutch singer Do, released an extremely silly Euro-house version of “Heaven,” which became a major international hit. Here’s the video:
(In the US, DJ Sammy’s version of “Heaven” peaked at #8. It’s a 7.)
BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s the Queens duo Nina Sky interpolating DJ Sammy’s version of “Heaven” on their 2010 song “Beautiful People”:
(Nina Sky’s highest-charting single is 2004’s “Move Ya Body,” which peaked at #4. It’s a 10.)
BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: The second-season American Idol winner Ruben Studdard teamed up with Boyz II Men to sing a glossy R&B cover of “Heaven” on his 2009 album Love Is. Here it is:
(Ruben Studdard’s highest-charting single is 2003’s “Flying Without Wings,” which peaked at #2. It’s a 2. Boyz II Men will appear in this column many, many times.)
BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: In a possible nod to OG male-stripper movie A Night In Heaven, there’s a scene in the extremely entertaining 2015 movie Magic Mike XXL where Matt Bomer entertains a party full of horny women with his rendition of “Heaven.” Here’s that:
(As far as I can tell, nobody in that scene has ever had a charting single. Donald Glover, who will eventually appear in this column, is one of the strippers, but he’s not in that scene. But Big Sexy Kevin Nash is a former WWF Champion and a five-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion, so that’s pretty good.)
BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s the affecting moment in the pretty-great 2019 indie film Her Smell where Elizabeth Moss sings a solo-piano version of “Heaven” to her daughter
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