POP MUSIC REVIEW : Adams Goes for the Hook

Bryan Adams is a romantic. His “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” smash, performed halfway through his Forum show on Friday, is a classically hokey make-out song, designed to trigger mass swooning. No doubt there were scenes being played out all over the Forum like the one just a few yards from the stage, where a teen couple was engaged in some very public necking, intensifying about the time Adams sang “I would die for you,” no doubt consumed in fantasies of their own blissful martyrdom.

Bryan Adams is also a cad. This can be garnered from hit songs like “Run to Me,” the catchiest pro-adultery tune ever written that isn’t a country song, or from his latest album’s amazingly cavalier “Hey Honey, I’m Packin’ You In!” (This number he had the good sense not to include in his Forum set, sparing the male halves of the thousands of couples in the date-night audience a potentially embarrassing sing-along.)

Actually, Adams may be either or neither of these things; none of his lyrical role-playing, be it as super-sensitive boyfriend or macho rocker, is especially convincing. What he is, first and foremost among any latent character qualities, is a craftsman . Adams scores a zero on the vision thing, but the man does know how to write a hook.

He and his co-writers could go corporate: Anthems R Us. The Forum concert was an impressive show of might, if nothing else, just in how the vast majority of its 130-minute length was devoted to successful singles; Adams’ stockpile of hits is so deep now he hardly has to resort to album tracks, even when it comes to the latest LP, “Waking Up the Neighbours,” which has produced four hits already.

And quite a good percentage of those have choruses ready-made for joining in on, from “Cuts Like a Knife” to “Summer of ‘69” to the Foreigner-like ballad “Thought I’d Died and Gone to Heaven.”

Enthusiastically leading all this, Adams is the all-American Canadian boy. In his trademark plain T-shirt and jeans, with or without a guitar and sans too many rock-star poses, Adams cut an unpretentious figure, at one point expounding sincerely and rather endearingly on how nervous L.A. makes him.

The Bryan Adams we see now is an Adams who seems to have made peace with his own banality. There was a time, after his consciousness was raised on an Amnesty International tour, that he wanted to be more meaningful.

But after his slightly deeper “Into the Fire” LP turned out to be his first commercial disappointment, and the follow-up album never even got released, he decided to give the kids (as in “everywhere I go, kids wanna rock!”) what they want again with his latest, most mediocre effort. It’s paid off handsomely. You might even say it’s more him , however flavorless it might seem to the non-kids among us.

For the first “wanna keep rockin’?” encore, at the height of the dumb fun, Adams and band showed up on a mini-stage in the middle of the floor, U2-style, to sing the rockabilly perennial “C’Mon Everybody” and his own “She’s Only Happy When She’s Dancin’,” illustrated, predictably enough, by females invited onto the platform. In a week when Bob Dylan is also around town doing a series of shows, it’s hard to work up much praise even for the comparatively hard-working, amiable-seeming Adams; it feels like going to a Barbara Courtland book-signing knowing Tolstoy’s doing a reading across town.