Survivor

One day in 1982, in a house in Chicago, the telephone rang. On the other end, an unmistakable voice: "Hi, Jim. This is Sylvester Stallone. We need to talk." Jim Peterik, guitarist in a rock band that until then hardly anybody cared about, thought it was a prank. It was not. Stallone was putting together "Rocky III", he needed a song for the training scene, and he had decided to call these unknowns. Out of that phone call came "Eye of the Tiger", one of the greatest motivational anthems ever written, and one of those songs that ended up more famous than almost everything else.

The song Queen could not give

Here is the detail almost nobody knows. Stallone did not want a new song in the first place. He wanted to use "Another One Bites the Dust", by Queen, for his film. He could not get the rights. And then, instead of giving up, he did something better: he looked for a band to write him something tailor-made. He sent Survivor a copy of the film with a temporary music track, and asked them for something with that pulse, that punch, that grit. Frankie Sullivan and Jim Peterik sat down to write while listening to Rocky's fists against the bag, and came up with the riff everyone recognises in four beats: dun, dun-dun-dun.

Think about it: one of the most universal anthems of human perseverance exists because Queen said no and Stallone refused to give up. Had those rights come through, "Eye of the Tiger" would not exist. The history of music is full of these doors that close so a better one can open.

Bigger than the band

"Eye of the Tiger" was number one in the United States for six weeks, won a Grammy and was nominated for an Oscar. And it completely transcended the film and the band that made it. Today it plays in every gym, in every marathon, in every moment when somebody needs to gather strength to do something hard. It became a universal language: when you want to say "come on, all in, don't give up", you put on that song. Nothing needs explaining.

That is an extremely rare and enormous achievement. Survivor had other hits —"Burning Heart", also for Rocky, "The Search Is Over"— but "Eye of the Tiger" moved into another category: that of songs that stop belonging to their author in order to belong to all of humanity, as the soundtrack of its effort. To write, on commission and against the clock, something that half the planet would use for decades in order not to give up, is a colossal feat of craft.

What to remember

Survivor were a rock band that was not taking off, until one day Sylvester Stallone himself called them to ask for a song for "Rocky III", after failing to get Queen. They wrote "Eye of the Tiger", which went to number one, won a Grammy and became the universal anthem of grit and perseverance, bigger than the film and than the band itself.

Remember it this way: the next time you need strength for something hard and that riff plays in your head, there is a band that took an impossible phone call and wrote, to order, the song the whole world learned not to give up with.

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Sources

Survivor, American rock band formed in Chicago in 1978, with Frankie Sullivan (guitar) and Jim Peterik (keyboards, guitar, songwriting) among its founders, and singers such as Dave Bickler and Jimi Jamison. "Eye of the Tiger" was commissioned by Sylvester Stallone for the film "Rocky III" (1982), after he was unable to obtain the rights to Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust"; written by Sullivan and Peterik, it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks, won the Grammy for best rock performance by a duo or group and was nominated for the Academy Award for best original song. The band later wrote "Burning Heart" for "Rocky IV" (1985) and had other hits such as "The Search Is Over". Queen has its own profile in this series. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, Louder, Guitar Player, Yahoo and other coverage.