Bryan Adams, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
Smart Financial Centre
June 28, 2023
There are odd hierarchies in the music world. Jimi Hendrix opened for the Monkees, Simon & Garfunkel were a support act for the Doors, and Pearl Jam was the second band on the bill in Lollapalooza ’93 (after The Jesus and Mary Chain and before Soundgarden).
Looked at from a 10,000 foot view (corporate-speak for “high level”), a bill combining ’80s and ’90s hitmaker Bryan Adams and punk icon Joan Jett makes sense. Adams has a lengthy discography that includes AOR mainstays and recognizable soundtrack staples (“All For Love,” “Have You Ever Really(^5 ) Loved A Woman?”), while Jett may be the baddest woman in rock.
How did it work? Pretty well, honestly. It was an Adams crowd, but Jett got most of them off their asses by the end of her set.
Jett and Adams are essentially the same age (she was born in 1958, he in 1959), but their backgrounds differ significantly. His father was a Canadian diplomat and as a kid Adams spent a lot of time overseas. Jett’s family moved to California when she was a teenager, where the glam culture of the late ’70s had an outsized influence.
Adams is touring in support of his 15th studio album, So Happy It Hurts. It’s unsurprisingly upbeat (the man has never been much for exploring dark themes), and the crowd was distracted during the set change by a replica of the car featured on the album’s cover floating over the Smart Financial Centre crowd.
Incidentally, the bumper music between Jett’s and Adams’s sets included songs by The War on Drugs and Panic! At the Disco, and I’d really like to know who was in charge of finding as much music as possible that this crowd had likely never heard before.
“Kick Ass” opened the show. The song features a spoken word introduction by Monty Python’s John Cleese, and it’s … weird.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth, then he created the waters and the land, and then he created man. But man degenerated and descended into the black hole of creating bad music.
To sum up; Adams is an angel sent by God to rescue the world from, I don’t know, Kid Rock or something. To his credit, Adams seems in on the joke, though the earnest “Let there be guitar! Drums! Bass! Piano!” intro and the band’s blue jeans and black shirts aesthetic aside gives one pause.
Adams knows how to get a crowd going, encouraging dancing in the aisles for “You Belong to Me” (I guess fire codes are only for hip hop concerts) and wrenching out maximum GenX fervor for the likes of “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You,” “Summer of ’69” and “Heaven.” Many songs were the ones that earned him the soundtrack crowd before it was usurped by those darned Goo Goo Dolls.
Not for “Here I Am,” though. Guess there weren’t a ton of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron fans out there.
He may have been out of the mainstream eye for a while, but last night impressed upon everyone at SFC how deep Bryan Adams’s catalog is. When four of your six closing tunes are top 20 singles, you could be forgiven for resting on your laurels. Adams doesn’t do that, however, and the SFC faithful were glad for it.
What About The Opener?
“The opener.” Shut up.
If Dolly Parton is the queen of American popular music, Joan Jett is its scheming duchess. From her days with the Runaways to breaking into the mainstream with the Blackhearts, Jett has been an uncompromising presence on the music scene. Never mind that she’s sometimes subjected to opening for inferior acts, Jett is as rock and roll as it gets.
So it was more than mildly disappointing that it took several songs to goose the SFC crowd into action. “Do You Wanna Touch Me” did the initial job of getting them off their asses (all the more pathetic considering the preceding cut was f*cking “Cherry Bomb”).
The Blackhearts have a new EP called Mindsets, and the cuts included were well-received, all things considered, especially “Rear View Mirror,” opener “Shooting Into Space” and closer “Whiskey Goes Good.”
More than anyone, Jett knows about the duplicitousness of the music industry, which inspired “Fake Friends.” And there was probably a story to tell about every song in her set, but more than Adams, sadly, she seems to be slowing down. Yet while the freneticism of her early days may be behind her, Jett still reminds us why she isn’t to be trifled with.
Personal Bias: I have loved every iteration of Joan Jett, but never saw her live before (probably because I always thought she should be playing in a dive bar in front of a bunch of my fellow degenerates). Always was ambivalent about Adams, but actually caught him playing halftime at ArenaBowl XIX in Las Vegas in 2005.
That may be the only thing I remember about that trip.
The Crowd: I guess those Magellan fishing shirts are rock and roll now.
Overheard In The Crowd: “Adams’s guitarist looks like Lord Farquaad.”
Random Notebook Dump: “He’s a spirited performer, but do not throw the horns for Bryan Adams.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
