In the music industry of old, music execs could help turn artists into superstars, or resign them to the trash heap. But, while their decisions could – and still can, in some instances – reap huge rewards for their artists, not every decision is correct.
Speaking in the latest issue of Guitar World, Bryan Adams guitarist, Keith Scott, says that label manager Jerry Moss warned them releasing (Everything I Do) I Do It for You would be career suicide.
“The record label hated it,” he remembers of the song, which was famously included in the soundtrack to the 1991 film, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
“I believe Jerry Moss from A&M said, ‘Bryan, if you put this on your record, your career will be over.’
“The movie company didn't have any other entrants, so they used the song. They were so embarrassed by it, so it played after the credits. And then all this magic happened, and the song became a hit. We had no clue. We’d shrug our shoulders — ‘Well, we don’t know!’”
Despite being shunted to the back of the film, the song became a surprisingly metoric hit. It topped charts all over the world, selling over four million copies in the US alone.
Speaking of its creation, Scott revealed that part of the surprise was down to the fact that the track came together in virtually no time at all.
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“It literally got thrown together,” he says, “which is saying something because we'd been working with Mutt [Lange, producer] for almost a year. We had a cassette of the great [film composer] Michael Kamen humming, playing along on a clavinet thing for about 30 seconds. That was that. Mutt said, ‘I think there's a melody there.’
“We broke for the weekend, came back, and Mutt came up with this bridge. By the middle of the week, we had the track all programmed. The guitars came together in about a day – we cobbled together the solo in 20 minutes. I heard the changes go by – just [a] simple F to C – and I thought, ‘This is my David Gilmour moment.’”
Sometimes magic happens in the studio without much trial and tribulation (as Lenny Kravitz recently attested to when he discussed writing Always on the Run with Slash and a gallon of vodka).
In the case of the power ballad, it was very much a free-flowing writing process, with Scott excited to emulate his Pink Floyd guitar hero.
“Mutt pushed the button, I did a couple of things, and then he said, ‘I like the first part.’ Then he sang me something, so I did that. Then Bryan did something and I did something else. Within 20 minutes, between the three of us, it was kind of done. Mutt said ‘Eh, not bad.’ And that was it.”
And yet despite the protestation from A&M Records co-founder Moss, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006 thanks to his many (more successful) behind-the-scenes contributions, they pressed on with their plans for the song. The rest, as they say, is history.
Moss passed away in 2023, over 60 years after founding the label, and is therefore unable to further add color to the story, but it goes to show that even the greatest of minds can get things wrong.
To read the full interview with Scott, which sees the Canadian guitarist detailing the gear and the solos that have fuelled Adams’ music for more than four decades, head to Magazines Direct.
