This week, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley launched her presidential bid in an act featuring the famous song eye of the Tigerof the group survivedpopularized worldwide by the film rocky IIIby Sylvester Stallone.
Immediately, one of its authors, guitarist Frankie Sullivan, declared that he will file a lawsuit so that they no longer use it. “Stop using my damn song!”, he exclaimed in front of Billboard magazine. “I discovered it yesterday morning, as soon as I turned on my phone and it was full of messages from people telling me what happened.”
Both Sullivan and keyboardist Jim Peterik have filed multiple lawsuits over unauthorized use of their hit song, in 2012 against Republican candidates Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, and in 2015 against Mike Huckabee. In all three cases there were out-of-court settlements, allegedly for around $25,000.
Even Donald Trump himself had used it at one point Eye of the Tiger and refused to stop using it, a common practice in the former US president: Laura Branigan forbade him to use her shot Glory, as well as artists such as Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, REM, Aerosmith, Panic! at the Disco, Guns N’ Roses, The Rolling Stones, Rihanna and the heirs of Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty and Prince.
an emblematic song
In 1982, Peterik’s phone rang and he was on the other end of the line Sylvester Stallonewhich he called because he had liked a Survivor song called The poor man’s son. At that time the actor was filming the third installment of rocky and wanted to put a song with the same sound in his film.
Jim Peterik was silent, he couldn’t believe that Stallone, who was also his idol, was personally calling him to ask for a song.
Stallone sent them a rough cut of the scene that opens the film, but that scene was already accompanied by a song, which was Another bites the dust, the classic of the band Queen. So Jim said, “Hey Sly, you got a song now, what are we doing? You already have a great song to open the film, there’s no beating Queen.”
What had happened was that Stallone had sent them the wrong edition, it was a test so he asked them to work on the images ignoring the Queen song, since the band hadn’t given him the rights to use it in the film.
At first, the Survivors wondered whether to call her Eye of the Tiger it was too obvious, since the song’s lyrics originally started with that line, and they wanted the song to be called survival because being a boxing film it was the only word they could find that rhymed with “Rival”, but in the end they decided to stick with the strongest and catchiest phrase in the text.
A worldwide success
The version of the song that appears in the film is actually the demo, because it wasn’t fully mixed and was a bit faster than the studio version, and it also had a tiger roar built into it. Finally the song we know today has become a worldwide hit, its video has also started to be broadcast on MTV it topped the world charts in 1982 for 15 consecutive weeks.
It was a record he shared with only two songs during the entire 1980s: Physicist by Olivia Newton-John e Another bites the dust by Queen, who ironically was the first choice for the film.
Source: Clarin
