We all made questionable decisions during the depths of the pandemic and in the case of Bryan Adams, it was writing a song called “Kick Ass.”
The 63-year-old Canadian opened his concert Monday at St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center with the track, which I guess is supposed to be funny. It began with a lengthy spoken-word bit from John Cleese that said after God created everything, man started making bad music, so he sent an angel (Bryan Adams) down to earth to invent rock and roll. The chorus of the song itself includes the lines “If you love some kick ass rocking music, we’re a kick ass rocking band.” (I am not making any of this up.)
Adams emerged from Ontario in the ’80s and his handsome mug helped him establish a foothold in the early days of MTV, which put the likes of “Cuts Like a Knife,” “Run to You” and “Summer of ’69” into heavy rotation. Even though his cloying smash “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” was No. 1 the week Nirvana released “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Adams managed to survive grunge thanks in large part to the similarly treacly ballads he wrote for movie soundtracks. (More recently, he wrote the music for the “Pretty Woman” musical with his longtime collaborator Jim Vallance. It opened on Broadway in 2018 and ran for a year.)
Monday night, Adams played pretty much all the hits along with a smattering of his more recent material, most of which was far better than “Kick Ass.” For “You Belong to Me,” he brought out Brian Setzer (who lives in Minneapolis) to join him on the 2015 track as well as the newbie “I’ve Been Looking for You,” the Stray Cats’ “Rock This Town” and “I Fought the Law,” a song written by Sonny Curtis that was popularized by the Bobby Fuller Four and (later) the Clash.
The crowd, however, was there for the hits and the slow ones in particular. The temperature in the room shot up with the first chords of “Somebody” and the audience later sang the entire first verse of “Heaven” to Adams, whose voice has largely held up.
Yet another MTV-era star, Joan Jett, opened with her band the Blackhearts. Jett, too, has new material out there and she opened and closed with the fresh tracks “Shooting Into Space” and “Whiskey Goes Good.” A Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Jett still commands the stage at 64. The new songs sounded great, as did her classics like “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll,” “Crimson and Clover,” “I Hate Myself for Loving You” and “Bad Reputation,” the best song the Ramones never wrote.
