Like Bryan, Ryan Adams digs the ‘Summer of ’69’

Bryan Adams and Ryan Adams are not the same person.

While it may be obvious to many that the Canadian crooner and the American singer do not share much more than a rhyme and a last name; to others, there is no clear sign of where one begins and the other ends.

Ryan Adams has had a long history of being heckled while on stage to perform Bryan Adams’s hit song “Summer of ‘ 69.” In a New York Times essay this week, reminiscing on his personal growth, in music and maturity, the singer discusses how he learned to stop worrying and love Bryan Adams after delving into his contemporary’s discography after discovering over time that not all people are “cruel.”

In 2002, however, while performing onstage in Nashville, an audience member began to chant “Play ‘ Summer of ‘ 69’!” At the time, Ryan Adams felt “angry” and “humiliated” at the suggestion, to the point where he stormed offstage, confronted the drunken fan, gave him $40 from his own pocket and informed him, “Hey man, if you were trying to ruin the show you succeeded, but I need to try and finish this — it’s my job. Here is your money, please take a taxi and leave here. Go home and take an aspirin. Please. Leave.”

But Ryan Adams eventually became a new man, just not in the form of Bryan Adams — except for one little quirk.

“I became the person who would send an email every year to the genius writer of that song on his birthday, which is also mine,” Ryan Adams writes, revealing that the two in sync singers have shared a date of birth all. This. Time.

“I would l earn how to show empathy, or fight for myself, or make fun of it all, and shine some love on that lonely, crazy person we have all stood next to before, screaming into the night from the shadows. I toasted the last drink I ever drank to that heckler the day I cleaned up.”

And, perhaps we can all assume, it was the soothing music of one Bryan Adams that brought him there.

Concluding his moving essay, Ryan Adams writes, “But looking back, in all honesty, I would have shouted something else. I would have screamed Bryan Adams’s ‘Run to You.’ That song is my jam. And after playing ‘Summer of ’69’ a decade later in the same venue, I must admit that is one hell of a challenging bridge. But as fine a bridge as I have ever crossed."