Tina Turner: vocal
Bryan Adams: rhythm guitar, vocal
Keith Scott: lead guitar
Dave Taylor: bass
Tommy Mandel: keyboards
Mickey Curry: drums

Recorded April/May 1984. Produced by Bob Clearmountain and Bryan Adams. Associate producer, Jim Vallance. Recorded and mixed by Bob Clearmountain.

"It's Only Love" would have been a solo Bryan Adams performance were it not for Bryan's persistence in pursuing Tina Turner.

Her single "What's Love Got To Do With It" had just started taking off at radio, and she was finally emerging from years of obscurity! If Bryan had approached her even a few weeks later, chances are Tina would have been too busy to participate.

After splitting with her husband (and band-leader) Ike Turner in 1976, Tina spent several years playing night-clubs, corporate conventions, and any other work she could find to support her four children. She was half-a-million dollars in debt, and at one point she had to resort to food stamps to feed her family!

When I was playing drums for Tom Jones in 1980, Tina appeared on Tom's television show as a guest. She sang "Proud Mary" ... and she was amazing!!

Around the same time as the Tom Jones appearance Tina met a young Australian manager, Roger Davies. He was trying to "make it" in the USA music business. Roger took Tina under his wing and helped her record the "Private Dancer" album. That album was an enormous success -- in fact, success came so quickly that Tina found herself caught between two very different worlds: "top dollar" requests were arriving daily for stadium concerts in support of her hit single "What's Love Got To Do With It", while at the same time she had a commitment to perform at a McDonald's Restaurant manager's convention, booked several months before.

To her credit, she honoured all of the small engagements before turning her attention to the "big time".

The structure of the song, in terms of feel and chord movement, is loosely based on the Lee Michaels single "Do You Know What I Mean", which reached #6 on the U.S. Billboard chart in September 1971. I've long admired the way Lee's song delivers two simple lines of rhyming lyric, followed by the title.  The pattern repeats over and over for the duration of the song, with a brief "bridge" section at the halfway point. Very simple, and very effective:

     Been 14 days since I don't know when
     I just saw her with my best friend
     Do you know what I mean?
     Do you know what I mean?

I was also thinking about Bryan's brilliant guitarist Keith Scott while we were working on the song's arrangement. I thought "It's Only Love" could serve as a showcase by featuring a "Keith solo" after every verse, similar to Jimi Hendrix's recording of "All Along The Watchtower" ...

Verse / guitar-solo / verse / guitar-solo / etc.

And that's exactly what we did.

As mentioned above, Bryan's 1984 recording session wasn't the first time I'd worked with Tina. For most of 1980 I was the drummer on a Tom Jones television series, filmed in Vancouver and featuring guests like Chaka Khan, Dusty Springfield, Paul Anka ... and Tina Turner.

Check out the photo on the right. That's me on drums, hidden behind Tina.