BAM BAM-BAM-BAM!

The tale of Survivor, Rocky Balboa and the song that shook the world and became a global hit.

He played the message on his answering machine several times before he believed what he was hearing. “Hey, Jim!” said a voice in a New York Italian-American accent. “Gimme a call! It’s Sylvester Stallone.”

It was late 1981, and for Jim Peterik, keyboard player, songwriter and founding member of Chicago rock band Survivor, life would never be the same again.

Immediately, Peterik phoned Frankie Sullivan, the guitarist with whom he had formed Survivor in 1977, and told him that one of the biggest movie stars in the world wanted to talk. “Frankie didn’t believe it either,” Peterik recalled with a laugh. “But he came straight to my house, and we made that call together.”

First, Stallone told them of a mutual connection. His brother Frank, a singer, was signed to the same label as Survivor, Scotti Brothers Records. Second, he said that he loved Survivor’s song Poor Man’s Son, the band’s first top-40 hit. Third, he gave them a shot at immortality – he said he needed a theme song for his new movie, Rocky III – the third instalment of the blockbuster franchise in which he starred as boxer Rocky Balboa. And he wanted Survivor to give him an anthem just like Poor Man’s Son.

“I want something for the kids,” Stallone said. “Something fresh and modern, something with a pulse! Can you do it?”

“Are you kidding?” Peterik replied. “Damn right we can!”

The following day, Peterik and Sullivan received a video tape containing three minutes of action sequences from Rocky III in which Stallone and co-star Mr T duked it out in the ring to the sound of Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust. “It was just amazing,” Peterik says. “The energy!”

He and Sullivan had to replace the Queen track with something that would match that energy. The answer, a thudding staccato riff, came to Peterik while he was driving. “I saw the punches in my mind: Bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam BAM!”

The title for their song was lifted from a phrase in the movie spoken by Rocky’s trainer, Micky Goldmill, played by Burgess Meredith: “Rocky, you gotta keep the eye of the tiger!”

This resonated powerfully with Peterik. He told Sullivan: “Man, that is the greatest title in the world!” Stallone informed them that the phrase derived from ancient Chinese. “‘The eye of the tiger’ is the killer instinct,” Peterik said. “It’s the will to survive, to exceed your roots, to go beyond what anyone thought you could do.” The lyrics he wrote were wonderfully evocative, and, shrewdly, included the name of the band.

When Stallone received the finished track, his response was emphatic: “You guys really did it. It’s a smash!”

But it was a bigger smash than he or the band could ever have imagined. In 1982, Eye Of The Tiger hit No.1 in the US, the UK, Japan and six other countries. And three years later, Peterik got another call from Stallone. “We got Rocky IV,” he said. “You wanna do it again?”

By that time, Survivor had a new singer in place of Dave Bickler, who sang on Eye Of The Tiger. The most famous dude to wear a beret who wasn’t either French or Che Guevara had been replaced by Jimi Jamison.

The song that Peterik and Sullivan wrote for Rocky IV was essentially Eye Of The Tiger Part II. “We wanted that same kind of pulse,” Peterik said. “We had a formula and we weren’t gonna change it.” For this song, Burning Heart, Peterik’s lyrics were inspired by the movie’s Cold War-era plotline, in which Rocky fought Russian boxer Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). Peterik wrote: ‘Is it East versus West, or man against man?’ Jamison sang that line, and indeed the whole song, as if the whole word hung in the balance. Another rock classic was born. And in February 1986, Burning Heart reached No.2 in the US.