Back in 1981, Chicago rock band Survivor were struggling to get a hit, until – out of the blue – a phone call from a big movie star changed everything.
Sylvester Stallone contacted Survivor’s keyboard player Jim Peterik saying he loved the band’s song Poor Man’s Son and wanted something similar for his new boxing movie Rocky III.
“I want something for the kids,” Stallone said. “Something fresh and modern, something with a pulse! Can you do it?”
A breathless Peterik replied: “Are you kidding? Damn right we can!”
In quick time, Peterik and guitarist Frankie Sullivan wrote a dynamic hard rock song named Eye Of The Tiger.
In the summer of 1982, Eye Of The Tiger topped the US chart for six weeks and also hit No.1 in the UK. It made Survivor a household name throughout the world.
Three years later, Stallone called again, telling Peterik: “We got Rocky IV. You wanna do it again?”
The answer was of course yes.
As Peterik later recalled in an interview with Classic Rock: “What do you think we’re gonna say?”
Peterik and Sullivan were no fools. If Stallone wanted Eye Of The Tiger Part II, that was exactly what he’d get.
“We wanted that same pulse,” Peterik said. “We had a formula and we weren’t gonna change it.”
But second time around there was one major difference. The guy who sang Eye Of The Tiger was no longer in Survivor.
The band had toured heavily in the wake of that huge hit, and singer Dave Bickler had subsequently developed nodules in his throat due to a combination of workload and partying.
Matters came to a head after the recording of the follow-up album Caught In The Game. Bickler’s voice had deteriorated so much that the band were unable to tour for that album.
In 1984, following Bickler’s dismissal, Survivor appointed a new singer in Mississippi-born Jimi Jamison, formerly of Target and Cobra.
“Very few bands can survive a lead singer transplant,” Peterik said. “But Jimi had the most magical voice I’ve ever heard!”
Survivor’s first album with Jamison was 1985’s Vital Signs, which reached No.16 on the Billboard chart and yielded three hit singles. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest AOR albums of all time.
It was also in 1985 that Survivor cut their second Rocky anthem for Stallone.
Peterik recalled: “We read the movie script, about the Russians and the spy thing and the gorgeous girl, and I said, ‘This is kind of corny, but it’s gonna be a huge hit.
“I read the script sitting around poolside at a hotel. And then Frankie and I went to my room and we wrote the song on an old Wurlitzer piano.
“I wrote the whole lyric right there, but for the title of the song we were in a quandary. In the beginning it was called The Unmistakable Fire, but that sounded like a rip-off of U2’s The Unforgettable Fire.
“We played the song to Stallone in LA and he loved it, but he too wanted a stronger title. He also loved the sound we put into the track – the explosion after the words ‘burning heart’. And so that was our title right there.”
The lyrics in the song were shaped by the movie’s Cold War-era plotline, in which the hero Rocky Balboa fought Russian boxer Ivan Drago. Peterik wrote: “Is it East versus West, or man against man?”
“Every word in that song is chock full of meaning,” he said.
Released as a single on 21 October 1985, Burning Heart was another monster hit. It reached No.2 in the US and No.1 in both Belgium and Switzerland while also hitting the top 10 throughout Europe.
Unfortunately for Survivor, Burning Heart was tied exclusively to the Rocky IV soundtrack album, so was absent from the band’s 1986 album When Seconds Count.
“If Burning Heart had been on that record it would’ve sold a zillion copies,” Peterik claimed.
Instead, that album only made it to No.49 on the Billboard 200, and with that, Survivor’s best days were behind them.
Sadly, Jimi Jamison died in 2014.
Jim Peterik turned 75 in 2025 and remains active in music. His latest album, River Of Music: The Power Of Duets, Vol. 1, was released in December 2025 and was produced by Ron Nevison, who worked with Survivor on When Seconds Count and on the band’s debut album back in 1979.
It’s now 40 years since Burning Heart rocked the world, but Peterik still has more songs in him.
As he told Classic Rock: “I’m a compulsive songwriter. I’m always writing a song, if not physically then mentally. Which drives people crazy – like my wife!”
