During an appearance on Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk, Bryan Adams talked about the two songs he co-wrote in the 1980s with Jim Vallance and KISS’ Gene Simmons.
“I was 21, and I released my album called ‘You Want It, You Got It,’ he said. “And I got a call from a guy called Michael James Jackson, who was a producer at the time, and he called me to say, ‘Hey, I really like your record. And I’m actually working with this band KISS. Would you like to write a couple of songs with them or for them?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. What? Is this for real?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’”
“And so they flew me to Los Angeles and I met Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley and Eric Carr, who was the drummer at the time,” Adams recalled. “I sort of sat down with each one of ’em individually and wrote songs with each one. I wrote a song with Paul and I wrote a song with Eric. And with Gene I didn’t write anything, but Gene had a really good bassline that I sort of recorded on my cassette recorder. And I took it back to Vancouver, and I was telling my usual songwriting collaborator, Jim Vallance, that I’d done this thing, and ‘Check out this bassline of Gene’s.’ And we listened to it, and within an hour or so, we’d written this song called ‘War Machine’ around it. So that’s how ‘War Machine’ came about.”
Adams also recalled that for the song ‘Rock and Roll Hell’ Vallance had originally written it for himself but ended up reworking it to fit KISS’s style better. “And then just to drag Jim into it further, he had a song that he wrote by himself called ‘Rock And Roll Hell’. I said, ‘We should retool that song’ — ’cause it didn’t do anything — ‘we should retool it for KISS.’ And he said, ‘Okay, let’s give it a go.’ So I came up with a verse idea and then the two of us sort of came up with a lyric idea and we finished the song and sent it down there. And that became the second KISS song. Gene wanted a third verse, so he wrote a third verse for it.”
Last month, Adams released music videos for his versions of ‘War Machine’ and ‘Rock And Roll Hell.’ The two songs originally appeared on KISS’s 1982 album ‘Creatures Of The Night.’
He put out ‘War Machine’ and ‘Rock And Roll Hell’ as a limited-edition double A-side single on August 30 through his independent label, Bad Records.
“I was thrilled to work with them back then. I was a broke songwriter, it came at the perfect time,” Adams previously said of his collaboration with KISS. “While sitting with the band, Gene played me this fantastic bass riff, which ended up being the backbone of ‘War Machine.’ I was trying to think of a theme that could possibly match the riff and came up with the title, which was actually an homage to a comic book character.”
‘Creatures of the Night’ was KISS’ way of returning to rock after their earlier experiments with pop, disco, and prog didn’t work out. It was the closest they got to metal and was their second album with drummer Eric Carr after Peter Criss left.