“Summer of ’69” is one of those songs that for years many people heard as pure nostalgia for 1969, while Bryan Adams himself later made sure to flip that reading on its head. When it came out through Reckless in 1985, it became one of his most durable songs, one of those tracks that lived far beyond their own era. On the surface it feels like a return to a youthful memory, to school bands, to summers that seem endless, to loves that promise eternity. But the history of the song is more tangled than that. On one side it has real elements of life, childhood and teenage memories, people who existed, images grounded in reality. On the other, Adams himself insisted that the “69” is a metaphor for sex and not a literal reference to the year.