Oh, Bryan Adams—your parents should have named you Randy, because that’s exactly what you are. Earlier this year, the Canadian-born pop-rocker and occasional goopy balladeer revealed that his beloved anthem “Summer of ‘69” is not a wholesome remembrance of youthful innocence but something much, much dirtier. It’s actually about…well, let’s put it this way: “sixty-nine” should be written as a verb.

That’s right. It’s a double entendre hidden in plain sight, an infantile joke so stupid it almost goes all the way around to become kind of clever. As it turns out, the guy soccer moms thought of as a less-threatening John Mellencamp is really Prince in a sensible everyman wardrobe.

Don’t look so shocked. According to Adams, he has openly admitted the song’s true inspiration since it first became a hit in 1984, and ruffled a few stuffy feathers as a result.

“I was at a radio station in Boston,” Adams recalls over the phone from London, “and the guy says”—he puts on his best corny disc jockey voice—“ ‘So let’s talk about “Summer of ‘69.” Let’s talk about what you were doing in 1969.’ I said, ‘I was going to school, but that’s not what the song’s about.’ When I told him, I heard the program director go, ‘We’re not playing that song again.’”

Detailed View of the Summer of ‘69 Single Cover

On second thought, maybe this realization is a bit surprising. For music fans of a certain generation, Bryan Adams is the dude who crooned the insufferably schmaltzy “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” on MTV as Kevin Costner pranced around a forest firing a bow-and-arrow. He is not exactly the first person that pops into mind at the thought of raw, almost pornographic sexuality—though he is, from an objectively heterosexual (totally heterosexual!) point of view, in rather good shape for a nearly 50-year-old man. He has aged well, but his image is that of the gentle romantic who swoops women into his arms and makes sweet love to them on a bed of roses, not the poon-hound who engages in kinky numerical copulation then writes a chart-topping single about it under the guise of warm-hearted nostalgia.

So this revelation raises an interesting question: Does ironic, hip America need to reconsider Bryan Adams? Because unlike a lot of his singer-songwriter peers, Adams has not been retroactively deemed “cool.” He is the guy who asked “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” over cheesy Spanish guitars; declared along with Rod Stewart and Sting, “It’s all for one/And all for love!”; recorded a duet (a success in England, unheard in America) with a member of the Spice Girls and, again, contributed to the soundtrack of a movie in which Kevin Costner portrayed Robin Hood. That’s not exactly a resume brimming with indie cred.

But what if it were all a rouse? What if Adams is aware of how lame many of his career highlights are, and has been slipping nasty references in under the surface this whole time? Maybe “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” is about anal sex. Maybe “Everything I Do, I Do It For You” equals mutual masturbation. That would make him at least as cool as, say, Kevin Smith, right? Then maybe Ryan Adams would start taking being confused for him as a compliment.

Not that Bryan Adams gives a shit what Ryan Adams, or any of you pretentious assholes, think.

“I don’t really think about it,” he says of his lack of respect from the hipsterati. “I know the songs do have a life beyond what you describe. I look at the audience outside America, and it starts very young and goes to much older. In America, though, it’s been difficult.”

Indeed, this country hasn’t been kind to Adams in recent years. He hasn’t been a major force on the charts here in a while, was dropped from his label and now acts essentially as his own promoter. He admits he has never been very good at selling himself. But this solo acoustic tour he is embarking on— arriving in Portland on Nov. 29 at the Aladdin Theater—is a smart way of reintroducing the crooning Canuck to the states. Stripping the studio varnish off his songs to reveal the craft underneath might remind audiences why they embraced him in the first place. And pushing this new, clandestinely horny version of himself could win Adams a whole new fan base, at least among Judd Apatow followers.

Still, something just doesn’t smell right. None of the lyrics to “Summer of ‘69” indicate anything secretly naughty, unless “I got my first real six-string/Bought it at the five-and-dime/Played ’til my fingers bled” is really euphemistic. And the title is always written with an apostrophe, indicating that sixty-nine refers to the year 1969. The whole thing smacks of self-revisionism, of an artist trying to sharpen an edge onto a reputation that had previously been wholly inoffensive.

But Adams sticks to his explanation. “Nowhere in the song do I say ‘1969.’ The idea is looking back fondly at starting out, at young love and having fun in the summer—the summer of sixty-nine. Somebody asked what it’s about and where I got the idea, and there’s nothing more to it than that.” Adams says there’s more where that came from: “’Run To You’ is about a threesome.”

Bryan Adams plays Saturday, Nov. 29 at the Aladdin Theater. 8 pm. $45.

Seriously…

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