Canadian songwriter JIM VALLANCE came to be a big name in the 80s as Bryan Adams writing partner. Vallance however, had been writing songs in his teen years. In the mid 70s he joined a band that would become PRISM, as their drummer and main writer on the band’s debut album, under the pseudonym Rodney Higgs. After leaving Prism, he wrote songs for BTO, and met a young musician & writer named Bryan Adams. He co-wrote with Adams throughout much of the 80s, as well as writing (or co-writing) hits for numerous bands & artists over the next few decades, including Loverboy, Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne, Rick Springfield, Alice Cooper, and Scorpions. His name is on plenty of massive hits, huge selling albums, Juno awards….. This interview kinda scratches the surface of Jim’s history and some of the music he wrote and artists he wrote with. When our conversation was done I had a 1001 more things that came to mind! But Jim Vallance has loads of amazing stories and recollections, and I am thankful he shared some here. Enjoy the read.,
*Check out www.jimvallance.com for more on his history in the music business, stories, and lists of songs and artists Jim is connected to.
You have a long relationship with Prism, and then a bit with BTO, and then Bryan Adams, obviously. But you were in groups, and you were a musician before you became more known as a writer, correct?
Yeah, I started playing in bands when I was 13, and all through school, pretty much every weekend, I was playing a dance or something.
And then when I graduated grade 12 in 1970, I didn’t have any interest in college, but my parents insisted I go. So, I did one year of college, and then after that, I just started playing with bands again. I was living in Vancouver, Canada, and there was a very robust club scene at the time.
There were probably 20 clubs in and around Vancouver, and let’s say 20 bands. And so, each band would do a week at a club and then move to the next club. We just all did the same circuit with the same booking agency.
And around and around you’d go, year in, year out, six nights a week at these clubs. I did that for a bunch of years in the early to mid 70s. And then I was lucky enough to start getting some session work. Mostly playing on McDonald’s commercials and that sort of thing, just music for advertising. I did that for a few years. And that’s around the time I started writing songs and joined this Canadian band called ‘Prism’. That would have been mid to late 70s. We got a record deal, made an album and had a bit of success in Canada, but not much else. We didn’t really make any waves outside of Canada.
Vancouver and Toronto must have been the two biggest spots I can see as far as, because I’m in Niagara Falls, so I think Toronto and Vancouver seem to be the biggest kind of center for bands, Canadian bands when there’s, you know,
A couple of exceptions like April Wine, I think were from Montreal. But yeah, for the most part, it was Vancouver and Toronto.
And you had tons of bands come out of there, other than obviously – Loverboy and all the bands that came before and after them that were connected.
The Payolas, and BTO – even though they were originally from Winnipeg, pretty much launched out of Vancouver because their management was Bruce Allen. So, they were West Coast based.
Now, before you got into like with the Bryan Adams stuff, how did you get into songwriting specifically as opposed to just when you dropped out of bands and that? When did you decide sort of to drop out of the playing-performance part of it and just stick to songwriting?
Well, I had been writing songs since maybe I was 16 or 17.
I didn’t have any place to go with them, but I was writing anyway and just, putting them on a cassette tape and that would go on my shelf somewhere. So, when Prism got a record deal and the record started to get some chart action in Canada, and again, a little bit in the USA, we started doing a bit of touring to promote the record. I remember we opened some shows for Heart, who had just started to have some success with their first album, Dreamboat Annie. And we opened some shows for Foreigner, who were also just coming out of the gate with their hit “Feels Like the First Time”. And so that was my first experience touring. Because we were the opening act, there weren’t many perks; it was five guys in a rental car eating microwaved tacos at gas stations. That was kind of our life, staying in cheap motels, two guys to a room. After that tour, I really decided that that was not my calling; that’s not my idea of a good time. I quit the band as a player, continued writing, but pretty much after that, I was no longer a band member and just concentrated on writing. And that’s also around the time I ran into Bryan and met him for the first time. He and I started writing and after that, that’s all I did.
You guys had a number of songs on that BTO album, which I have here somewhere. I did put together a bunch of albums. The second one that had Jim Clench.
That’s right.
And Bryan would have been very young at that point, correct?
Well, he was 18 when I met him in January 78. And then it was into 1979 when I was working with BTO. So, Bryan would have been 19. He contributed a song that he wrote called “Wasting Time”, I think.
He wrote that on his own and BTO recorded that. I wrote two songs. One was called “Rock and Roll Hell” and the other one was called “Jamaica”. And those were both on the BTO album also.
That’s an interesting album, obviously because Randy Bachman was no longer there. What was your connection to, I guess, you ended up writing for certain bands? Did you have a connection to them? Or was it more so just the producers?
In the case of BTO, Bruce Allen had managed Prism, and he was managing BTO also. So that was kind of my connection to BTO.
That’s how I got put together with that band. It was through the management.
And then you and Bryan just kind of rolled on from there?
And then by this time I’d met Bryan and he and I were writing. I pulled him into that project as well.
From there, you did a lot of Canadian stuff for the longest time, Canadian bands. One thing you did do, you did some Toronto stuff. That was fairly early on, 1982.
Yeah, there you go. 1982. I can’t remember how that came about. I think I got a call from their record company asking me to write with them.
I’m not sure how I came to be in that, with that connection, because I didn’t really have any ties to Toronto, the city or the band. But I did go back and wrote some songs with Brian Allen and Sheron Alton, the two guitar players in the band. I can’t remember how many songs I wrote with them.
I think there was four or five over this album.
Yeah, four or five. And one in particular, I remember it really clearly.
They were really nice. They were a couple, Brian and Sheron. I remember going over to their house one night in Toronto and they made a nice dinner.
And then after dinner, we went downstairs, they had a studio in their basement. As is the case with so many songs I’ve written, when you go in a room with another writer or another couple of writers, kind of the first thing someone says is ‘do you have anything? Do you have any ideas?’ And on this particular day, I had an idea. It was very minimal. There was almost nothing to it. It was really just a title. And I said, ‘Yeah, I have a title.’
“What About Love” And I said, and ‘I have sort of a melody idea, but it’s just one note. Sort of like John Lennon with “All You Need Is Love” was just one note.’ So, they thought that was okay.
We started working on it. And in my experience, it’s one of the fastest songs I’ve ever been involved in writing. I think by the end of that evening, we had the song finished. We each contributed equal amounts of lyric and melody. We just bounced ideas back and forth between the three of us. I remember one particular line that I thought was really good; I think it was Sheron’s idea – “I can sell you what you don’t want to buy.” I thought that was really good. So, by the end of the evening, we had this song called “What About Love”. And a few days later, we went into the studio, and the Toronto band recorded it. For some reason, the drummer, Barry, who was a really, really good drummer, for some reason, he didn’t think he could capture the feel. So, I ended up playing drums on the recording.
Fast forward a few more weeks, and it’s time to choose 12 songs for the album. I think there were 20 songs to choose from by this time. And the band voted. and “What About Love” was not one of the songs they chose. So, it ended up just ended up on the shelf, I mean, literally forgotten.
Because I hadn’t written it in my studio, I didn’t keep a copy of the tape. Brian and Sheron somewhere have a cassette tape with our original writing demo. But to this day, I don’t.
I think it came out as a bonus track somewhere.
It did further down the road, but at that time, 1982, it was a reject. The song disappeared, and I forgot about it because I didn’t take a tape home with me. I completely forgot about that song. Three years later, 1985, my phone rings and it’s Don Grierson, who’s the head of A&R Capitol Records in Los Angeles.
And he says ‘Hey Jim, congratulations, you’ve got the first single on the new Heart album!’ And I said, ‘What song is that?”’ And he said, “What About Love” And I said ‘How did you find that song?’ …You know, how did that song come to your attention? Anyway, long story short, what had happened is Toronto’s label, Solid Gold Records went bankrupt, and their entire publishing catalog, all their songs were acquired by EMI Publishing in Toronto. At EMI there was a fellow named Mike McCarty, and Mike went through every song in the Solid Gold catalog, whether the song had been recorded or not, and he found “What About Love”. And he thought it was really good, so he sent it to Don Grierson in Los Angeles. Don Grierson sent it to Ron Nevison, who was producing the next Heart album. Ron Nevison played it for the Wilson sisters, Ann and Nancy. And I didn’t know, I heard the story 20 years later. I finally heard the story, how when he played it for them, they hated it!
Ann said, ‘We’re not going to record this song’, and apparently Nancy even got up and walked out of the room and said, ‘No way! we’re not doing this song’. So, Ron said, ‘Okay, wait a minute. I’ll make a deal with you. Let’s record the song. If you still hate it, I promise I won’t put it on the record’.
So, I guess they recorded it. They must have ended up liking it. And it ended up being their comeback single, because they had a couple of albums that hadn’t sold very well. The record company was going to drop them if they didn’t have a hit. So, this ended up being the hit that they desperately needed.
Yeah, because when they came back, they were using a lot of outside writers and stuff for most of those albums from then on.
“These Dreams” was written by Bernie Taupin.
A lot of people that don’t know that, right!? Especially the Toronto connection. I didn’t know that till about 10 years ago when I picked up the Toronto CD that was on it.
So do you get much in the way of requests like from artists that specifically come to you and say, you know, ‘we’re looking for something specific’ or people that come to you and say ‘we want to write with you’…How does that whole process work?
It’s the only way it works. I’ve tried again and again over the course of my career, even after I’d a bit of success to write a song and send it to somebody. And it, it never works out. I can’t think of a single example of doing that and having the song recorded. It seems to me the only way to get a song on an album is if the artist or the manager or the record company or the publisher approaches you with a request. So that was really how my songwriting career unfolded and continued through the eighties and nineties and 2000s was just, waiting for the phone to ring and, it was exponential.
Once I had one hit song, then two people call you. And once you have two hit songs, four people call you. And the next thing you know, the phone’s ringing all the time. As a consequence, I was very, very busy for a couple of decades writing with hundreds of different artists.
Well, going through this stuff, like just now, I’m a big fan of Uriah Heep and Alice Cooper, Ozzy, a lot of stuff that I go through and you’re on so many of these albums.
You wrote with John Wetton. How did that work out with John?
I did. And again, I don’t know how I came to John’s attention, but he was just a lovely guy. He came to Vancouver. He came over from the UK and we spent a week writing together for a solo album. He had previously been with Asia and had that huge hit with “Heat of the Moment”. And then he’d also been with King Crimson. And I really enjoyed John. The other thing that was great was, because he had an endorsement with Ibanez Guitars, he was allowed anywhere in the world to walk into a music store and walk out with a free guitar. So I drove him down to Longwood McQuaid and he grabbed a Ibanez bass and he used it for the week that we were writing together. And when he left, he just gave me the bass. Now, I’m right-handed, but I play left-handed. And interestingly, John was left-handed, but he played right-handed. So this bass was of no use to me. But 30 years later I gave it to my son and he still has it and he uses it on his records. The thing with John was he was doing a solo album and we wrote, I can’t remember how many songs ended up on the album, but we wrote four or five songs in the week that I was with him, which were, I mean, when you’re writing and you put down, you record a quick demo, you try and capture some of the instruments, you try and determine what the bass is going to play, what the drums are going to play, but you don’t spend a lot of attention on detail. You just record a pretty quick demo.
And then from there it goes in the studio and a proper recording is done. In this case, for reasons I still don’t understand, John may not have had the budget, but he ended up just using our demos on his record. And I was quite disappointed if I had known they were going to be used, I would have spent more time and more attention getting them right. So that was a bit of a disappointment, to be honest. I think they deserved a better recording in each case.
I think you got four songs on there, but it was kind of, sound-wise, it was a bit of a letdown compared to the Battle Lines album that he had prior to.
Yes, for that very reason. He didn’t take the time or the expense to do it properly.
The one album you did with Ozzy, you had a few songs on. The one song that I really like on there is “I Just Want You”. Did you actually go and work with Ozzy or how were you doing things?
Ozzy came to me. Ozzy lived in Los Angeles and he flew up to Vancouver and we had just a lovely week. He was such a nice man. We had a lot of fun. I mean, I don’t know how we got work done because he loves to make people laugh. I think we spent more time laughing than we did writing. It was really a lot of fun spending time with him. But we did get two songs written.
Ozzy and I were both quite disappointed with the final result. We loved what we wrote, but we didn’t love how it ended up sounding on the record. And Ozzy’s said that a few times. In fact, when the songs got recycled on a Greatest Hits package, I think they first came out on the album Ozzmosis, and then it appeared later on Prince of Darkness, I think it was a box set.
And for the second time around Ozzy used the demos that we had done in my home studio. And again, not quite enough time was put into getting the demos right because they were never intended for release. But Ozzy still preferred the demos to the master recordings.
Well, “I Just Want You” was probably my favorite track of that era, in the 90s. I think he had Rick Wakeman play on it.
That’s true, yeah. That’s a plus, I guess.
You didn’t reconnect with him again after that?
We didn’t write together again, but we kept in touch over the years. Whenever I was in L.A., whenever Ozzy was in Vancouver, we’d get together. So, we remained friends. And again, I can’t say enough about him. He was such a lovely man.
The songs you wrote with Alice Cooper, you wrote a few on Hey Stoopid. Do you remember much of those?
One was called “Die For You”, and the other one…”Dirty Dreams”.
I like “Die For You”. It was a busy album. There’s a lot of different writers and players.
Alice and his wife Sheryl came to Vancouver for a week and had a really nice time. Me and Alice and Sharon and my wife went out for dinner a few times. Alice has the most amazing stories because he knew everybody.
His group of friends included Groucho Marx and John Lennon. I mean, he hung out with the most eclectic group of people and had the most amazing stories. So again, I really enjoyed Alice.
A lovely guy.
One album that I found interesting to find you on is a British band I really like that really never got any traction over here. And that’s Magnum.
Oh yeah.
You wrote “What Kind of Love Is This” with Tony Clarkin!?
Again, I don’t want to sound like a broken record here, but these were all such nice people to spend time with. Tony was just a gentleman. He came over from the UK to Vancouver and we spent a week. I think we wrote more than one song, but only one of them ended up on the album.
I think that was the album the record label tried to break them over here, but it didn’t. They never really caught on.
Which is unfortunate.
You’ve also done some arranging and producing as well.
I think so. You’d have to remind me.
The one thing you, it’s funny because there’s a song called “Love Stealer” and you did some stuff with Ian Lloyd. Oh, yeah.
I have that record. And “Love Stealer” was written by a guy named Phil Wainman, who I actually corresponded with a few months ago about that song, because that was a song that got recorded by a lot of acts. So, yeah, he did some stuff with Ian Lloyd.
That was, again, around 1979, I think. (I’m trying to remember). Quite some time ago. Ian, a great singer; he had one of those gravelly voices, sort of in the Rod Stewart-Bryan Adams’ style. Bruce Fairbairn produced the album, and I think I wrote a couple of songs on it, and played on it, and did some of the arranging on it. One of my memories is we did some of it in New York, at the Power Station, and there was an Ian Lloyd album, and there was another album under the band-name ‘Fast Forward’, and one of the songs (“Slip Away”). But what was a thrill for me was, because I was a huge Cars fan; they’d already had their first album released, and it had done very well, and their second album hadn’t been released yet, but it was ‘any day now’. So, Ric, and Benjamin Orr came to the studio, Ric played guitar, Ben played bass, and I played drums – so I got to be a ‘Car’ for a day, so it was very exciting. And then when the session was over, they played us their new album, which was ‘Candy-O’. So, me and Ian were among the first to have heard that album, a week or 2 before it came out.
Uriah Heep recorded “Lonely Nights”, which was odd as Bryan had a hit with it not too long before.
I don’t know how that song got to them. Bryan might’ve had something to do with it, but I have no recollection of it.
Have you heard Jorn Lande’s version of it?
No. (ed: talk briefly about Jorn, Jim makes a note of it).
(Showing Into The Fire LP) I’ve got most of Bryan’s albums up until the end of the 80s, and the one album I never thought got enough attention was this one (Into The Fire). Was that a hard album, having to follow up Reckless?
I have a lot of thoughts on that album. First of all, I’m surprised how many people tell me it’s their favorite Bryan Adams’ album, because it’s not my favorite. We had just come off the huge success of Reckless, a number one album in Canada and the USA, a number one single.. Can’t remember how many copies it sold, 20 million or something. And it had been a long slow climb over a period of 6-8 years. The first didn’t do very well, the 2nd didn’t do any better, then Cuts Like A Knife put Bryan on the map, and then Reckless was a huge hit. At that point we had a choice of doing something bigger and better than Reckless, and weren’t sure we could, Or do something different than Reckless. And around that time Bryan had been doing concerts like ‘Live Aid’, and touring with U2, Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen, and Sting. And all of those artists, their lyrics are more sophisticated than what we had been writing; our songs were all sort of boy-girl relationship lyrics. U2 and Peter Gabriel were writing more, if not political, at least more topical subjects. So, we had a talk about it, and Bryan decided we needed to be a little more topical in our songwriting. We sat down with that idea, and started writing songs like “Native Son”, which was about the injustices inflicted upon native Americans by the early settlers. We wrote a song called “Remembrance Day”, which about the first world war…and that’s kind of how it went. We spent the better part of a year writing and recording that album, and the analogy I like to use is by this time the 2 of us had spent the better part of 10 years together, in a small room with no windows, writing songs. And during the course of that album we just finally started getting on each other’s nerves a bit. So, it was a difficult album to write for a bunch of reasons. Musically and personally, I don’t think we were on the same page, for a number of reasons. And by the end of the album, we pretty much burned each other out and decided to take a break after that. And the break we took was 5 or more years. So, I don’t have fond memories of that album, for all the reasons just mentioned. But again, some people think it’s Bryan’s best album.
Well, with Cuts Like A Knife and Reckless, those albums were so big. Every day on MuchMusic you saw the latest video repeatedly. For me, it was a different album, and maybe that’s why I liked it.
Obviously, you’ve got a lot of stories behind (the songs. Have you ever written or put together any of your memoirs or anything?
No, people ask me all the time. My website is my book, really. I don’t know if you’ve seen my website, but there’s a lot of stories on there.
Yeah, I’m kind of on it right now. I’ve gone through that and Discogs the last few days. You’ve got a great setup because there’s obviously references to the songs and samples and stuff like that.
I’ve tried to. I mean, I love stories.I love reading about the Beatles and the Beach Boys and the stories behind the songs. So, I’d hope to do a little bit of that with my website.
I like finding out stuff behind songs as well as album covers. I’m big into looking for people that have done album covers and talking to them. So, speaking of Bryan, aside from the albums and the songwriting, did you have much else to do with him as far as any other arranging or deciding on what went on in the album or anything?
Well, arranging for sure.
Every song Bryan and I wrote, we recorded a very meticulous demo in my home studio. So, every part, like I would play bass and drums and keyboards and Bryan would play guitar and do the vocals. And we’d spend as much time arranging and recording the demo as we did writing the song.
We considered the parts, piano, guitar, bass and drums to be as important as the song itself. And that’s what Bryan’s band would hear and they would learn their parts from the demo. And then obviously, Mickey Curry, Bryan’s drummer, would pretty much play the parts that I’d written for the drums, but he would just play it way better than me.
And same for the bass and the keyboards and so on. But the actual demo recordings were the template for what would end up on the record. As far as deciding what would go on the record, I mean, for the most part, at least for Bryan’s albums, we hardly wrote any more than 10 or 12 songs anyway.
It’s not like we had 30 to choose from. We pretty much wrote what would end up on the record. And interestingly, “Summer of 69”, which ended up being one of the big songs from the Reckless album, we recorded that in my home studio at least three different ways. Three completely different arrangements to get it right. And we still didn’t think we got it right and we very nearly left it off the album. Same with the song “Heaven”, which ended up being a number one single on the Reckless album.
A record company fellow told Bryan, “Don’t put Heaven on the album. You don’t need a ballad. It should all be rock songs.”
And so I don’t know if Bryan ever considered leaving “Heaven” off the album, but it was at least discussed. And then “Run To You”, another big hit off the Reckless album, we’d originally written for Blue Oyster Cult and they didn’t record it. And as a result, Bryan didn’t initially think of it as a song for him because we’d written it for somebody else. So that song almost didn’t go on the album. And the only reason it went on is Bryan’s producer, Bob Clearmountain, said ‘we need one more song’. So “Run To You” just happened to be kind of kicking around.
I read that story about Blue Oyster Cult not recording it. Did that have anything to do with the similarities to any of their own songs?
Well, we actually went out of our way to craft a guitar riff that sounded a little bit like “Don’t Fear the Reaper”. We thought, if we do that, Blue Oyster Cult will love our song. They’ll consider it just one of theirs. Now, what’s really interesting is, we wrote the song to specifically market it to Blue Oyster Cult and then we heard they didn’t like it. And this would have been 1983, I think. I didn’t know until last year, 2024, I got an email from Joe Bouchard, original bass player for Blue Oyster Cult. He sent me an email and he said, “I just want you to know the story is that we turned your song down.” He said, “In fact, we never even heard your song. Either the record company or our manager or somebody else heard it and didn’t pass it on to us. We never even heard it.” So, I thought that was an interesting sort of, bookends to the story.
Yeah, because that would have been the last album Joe was on, That was Revolution By Night.
OK….Well, Joe said, had he known, he definitely would have recorded it because he loves the song, but he says he never even heard it.
I’ve seen Joe and corresponded with him for years. He’s got a lot of really good solo albums out.
I’ve met him a few times now as a result. He’s an interesting character. They all are.
I was a big Loverboy fan in the 80s. It was the first band I ever went to see in concert. I know you did “Jump” and “Dangerous”.…Did you have a lot of connection with them being on that Vancouver scene?
Not so much. I mean, by the time I do remember meeting Mike Reno during those club years that I was telling you about, he was in another band, another local band. But no, surprisingly, because the Vancouver bands all kind of, work the same circuit, but they weren’t working the same clubs at the same time. So, we very seldom ran into each other. We were always working different clubs. So, I didn’t know any of those guys until after they had some success.
Bob Welch recorded his own version of “Remember”, which I thought was an interesting choice.…I remember watching that video for “Remember” of Bryan’s when it came out. How did that first album actually do? The purple one.
It didn’t do very well at all. I think out of the gate, it might have sold 25,000 copies in Canada. So yeah, it didn’t do well at all.
But for the second album, that was A&M Canada, on the first album. For the second album, Brian moved his contract down to A&M Los Angeles, and they put him in touch with Bob Clearmountain, who was an up and coming producer and engineer at the time. He went on to work with Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, Roxy Music, Pretenders. So, you know, Bob made a huge difference on the second album. It just sounds light years ahead of the first album.
You used Jim Clench on that album as well, which obviously you must have known Jim from BTO on that. Did you know much of Jim?
I didn’t know him very well. I mean, just again, through the BTO album, I spent a bit of time with him while we were doing that record. And I was certainly aware of his contribution to April Wine for BTO. But no, I wouldn’t say we were friends.
I was good friends with Fred Turner. He and I would spend time together away from the studio.
You did a number of songs with the Scorpions, which I thought was an interesting match.
It was. I enjoyed that.
Again, they came over to Vancouver from Germany and we spent a couple of weeks writing. Me, Klaus (the singer), Rudolf (the guitar player), and Herman (the drummer). The four of us co-wrote however-many songs that were on that album. I can’t remember how many I contributed to.
That was the late 80s there. So, they were kind of going for more of an almost, like a radio friendly sound at that point, right?
I think it was, it ended up being their most successful album (Crazy World) up to that point, I think.
And 38 Special, I know you did some stuff with them, who I never saw as a Southern rock band because they always came off as an AOR band to me.
I know. I mean, they had a Van Zandt brother in the band, so that gave them the Southern rock credibility. But otherwise, they were a pretty straight ahead rock band.
And the other most interesting one I see you wrote with was Rick Springfield.
I love Rick. He was in Vancouver, because he was an actor, as well as a musician. And he was in Vancouver for a month, doing a film. He had quite a bit of downtime, so whenever he was not on the film set, he’d be over at my place, and we’d write some songs.
Do you keep in touch with any of these guys?
Rick and I are always in touch. I saw him. I live in New York, so I saw him the last time he came through here performing. He did a show in New Jersey, and I went to that.
And we’re both huge Beatles fans. So, whenever there’s any Beatles nugget that comes up on the internet, I’ll send Rick a note, or he’ll send me a note.
It’s interesting that people have that perspective, that perspective of him as being the actor, and then having those hits in the early 80s, and then kind of drifting away. But he really, his history went back to the early 70s, right? He had a couple albums back in Australia.
He started off as a musician then in Australia. And when he came to America, it was acting that put him on the map, with his role in the TV show General Hospital. And then back to music after that again.
One song I like of yours as well is the one, it was recorded by Ted Nugent, as well as Paul Dean, and that was “Draw the Line”.
I wrote that with Bryan, and I thought Bryan was going to record it, but he ended up giving it to Paul Dean first for Paul’s solo album, as far as I recall. And I’d forgotten that Ted Nugent did that one.
And you did all sorts of stuff with Aerosmith when they, obviously, that’s an older chapter, there’s a long list of Aerosmith songs.
Yeah, I wrote, they recorded 12 songs of mine. But I think I wrote more than that. There’s probably a few still on the shelf somewhere.
Great. I mean, Steven and Joe were the band members that I spent the most time with. So, we got along great. I mean, Steven is crazy; he’s a crazy genius. He’s got just the most amazing ideas lyrically and musically. And Joe Perry is an amazing riff guitarist. He just comes up with endless guitar riffs and every one of them sounds like a song. So that’s why many Aerosmith songs start with Joe’s riff. Really the heart and soul of Aerosmith sound is Joe’s guitar.
I’m kind of in awe of all the bands you’ve worked with, because it’s just an amazing list. And obviously, you could spend hours talking about them. Do you have any favorite things that have been surprise hits for you or?
Everything’s a surprise. I mean, never once in my whole career did I ever say, ‘today, let’s write a really bad song/.
I mean, something that you gave to somebody and suddenly it came out more than you expected.
Probably in every case. You try and do your best work, you can never tell when you’re writing it, if it’s going to be a hit or a miss.
One of the first big successes was “Cuts Like a Knife”. That was one of Bryan’s first hits. And we put the same effort into writing that song as we did, the album before that didn’t do as well. So, who’s to say why suddenly that song, you know, found a place on radio and became a hit. And then when “Heaven” went to number one, that was a great surprise. We couldn’t have predicted that.
No, anytime a song does well, I’m delighted and surprised because you really can’t, you can’t plan, you can’t predict. So those are just gifts when they, unexpectedly go to the top of the charts.
Are you still, do you still write a lot?
No, I’m kind of done, I think. I’m 73. I did it every day for 50 years.
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