Bryan Adams: vocal, backing vocal, guitar
Jim Vallance: drums, bass, organ, backing vocal
Keith Scott, lead guitar

Produced by Jim Vallance and Bryan Adams. Recorded (in 1984) by Jim Vallance at Distorto Studios, West Vancouver, Canada.  Mixed (in 2014) by Adam Greenholtz at Warehouse Studios, Vancouver, Canada.

This is a 16-track demo of the song "Teacher Teacher" recorded in 1984 at my home studio in West Vancouver, Canada ... never intended for release.

Bryan included this demo as a "bonus track" on the Reckless 30th Anniversary Edition, in November 2014.

Here's some background info on the song:

In June of 1984 Bryan Adams and I got a call from film producer Aaron Russo, asking if we could write a song for a film that was currently in production ... a dark comedy titled "Teachers", starring Nick Nolte.

Aaron invited us to fly to Los Angeles so he could show us a rough cut of the film, after which we'd go back to Vancouver and hopefully write an appropriate song.

If the film was about teachers then we hardly needed to see the rough cut. Like everyone else on the planet, Bryan and I had interacted with a multitude of of teachers during our school years. Some of them inspirational, others ... not so much. I was fortunate to have had a number of teachers who encouraged the study and pursuit of art, music and literature.  I also had a few teachers who were determined to shut me down ... like my Grade 9 French teacher who wrote in my report card:  "Jimmy can't drum his life away".

Well, I did drum my life away!

Anyway, back to the story ...

Bryan and I had a few days between Aaron's phone call and our flight to Los Angeles. Even though we hadn't seen the film, we wrote a song anyway. 

Bryan had always liked the song "Bad Case Of Loving You" by Moon Martin.  The song starts with the lyric, "Doctor Doctor, give me the news". We used the "repeated word" idea as inspiration for "Teacher Teacher".

Of course, now-a-days you'd just email an MP3 file, but this was 1984 ... before email, before the internet, before digital audio. We kept our appointment and flew to L.A. with a cassette tape in our pocket.  And anyway, it was always nice to get away from rainy Vancouver.

We arrived at LAX on a beautiful California morning.  We rented a car at the airport and drove to Aaron's office on the famous 20th Century film lot. One we were in Aaron's office we handed him the tape of our song, which of course he wasn't expecting. We waited nervously while he popped the tape in his cassette machine and had a listen.  He was thrilled.  He liked the song immediately, and he agreed to use it in the film. Needless to say, we were thrilled too.

I think Bryan would have done a great job if he'd sung the song in the film, but Aaron already had another band in mind.

"Teacher Teacher" was released as a single and spent 12 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart, peaking at #25 the week of Nov. 24, 1984. 

Click on the audio above to hear the demo version we played for Aaron.