Right Name for Rock Fame
Seventeen Magazine (February 1993)
“My mother used to call me loverboy when I was a teenager,”recalls Paul, a sturdy six-footer with blue eyes, blunt features, and a head of light brown ringlets, during a recent visit to New York. “I can’t remember whether she was teasing me because I was always trying to pick up girls or saying, ‘Come on, Loverboy, it’s time to wash the dishes.’” It’s the unexpected twist that converts a random recollection into an idea whose time has come--as when Paul found himself glancing through a girl friend’s magazines while searching for a name for the band. “On every one,”he says, “there was a beautiful cover girl. ‘Cover girl...Cover boy--that’s not bad,’ I thought. Then the light came on! Loverboy! People are going to hate it or love it!’” But Paul--cofounder of the group with singer Mike Reno--had struck the right note. Despite early misgivings that the name would invite sarcastic remarks, it’s been thumbs up all the way.
Based in Vancouver, the quintet (the other members are drummer, Matt Frenette, keyboardist, Doug Johnson and bass player, Scott Smith) has toured North America with such headlines as Journey, Kansas, and ZZ Top; appeared on TV’s Solid Gold and Dick Clark’s American Bandstand; and even played in a fictional soap opera disco on CBS-TV’s daytime drama Guiding Light.
“The music scene in Canada is really coming of age,” says Paul’s musical sidekick, Mike Reno, referring to the emergence of such Canadian rock teams as Rush, Triumph and April Wine, which have also been enthusiastically welcomed in the United States. In his late twenties, Mike has the kind of good looks, often found in lead singers, that can help win audience approval. But his complementary dry humor makes him much more than just a pretty face. “People have the feeling that everything happens in the U.S.,” he says. “We’re both on the same continent, separated by an invisible line, but because there are ten times as many people in the States as in Canada, events seem to have more grandeur here.” Size doesn’t faze Mike. “You may have a different approach from someone in a big town when you come from a small place,” he adds wryly, “but dinnertime is dinnertime everywhere.”
Paul finds a curious difference between Canadian audiences and those in the United States. “In the States,” he explains, “kids come to rock, not to judge you--although they’ll let you know if they think it’s lousy. In Canada, you play in small cities, pulling six or seven thousand rock fans out of one hundred fifty-thousand people, and they stand around as if to say, ‘Okay, I’ve seen it all before, impress me!’”
Paul describes his band’s music as “the common ground between heavy metal and new wave, sometimes with a bit of tongue-in-cheek,” adding, “We’re not an outlaw band or on the fringe of self-destruction--although we’re reckless, physically and emotionally, onstage; that’s when rock really happens. Off-stage, however, if you worry about maintaining an image, you have to live that image all the time--act totally berserk like Ted Nugent [a highly colorful rock star] whenever you’re in the public eye, wear stage makeup all the time like Kiss, or give the idea that you go to bed with your hat on like Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen. That’s all great--but it’s not me, I don’t need it. In real life, we’re in the music business, whether we’re dealing with the recording company or accountants. Or girlfriends.” One of his and Mike’s favorite adjectives or themselves is “sensible.” For example, Paul explains, when the band was put together, he felt the musicians had to be able to play and sing--“That came first,” he says--but with an eye to such developing factors as video cassettes and cable TV, he felt “they had to look fairly good on TV, too.”
Still, it all starts with a song. “If that’s no good, “ Paul remarks, “it doesn’t matter who you are.” He feels many lyrics from other bands are wimpy. “They’re about nothing--‘I love you, I want you, I need you.’ We talk about boy-girl things, but I like to put a twist into it. A little irony, ‘I love you, but I hate you.’ We try to ring a common note, although I don’t want to go over anybody’s head or write about things that only older people are concerned about, like car payments and mortgages. I always try to think like a kid of fifteen, seventeen, eighteen. I’m thirty-six, but I think I can relate to teenagers as if I were one of them.”
“We write about honest feelings,” Mike says. “Turn Me Loose came about because of an earlier band I no longer wanted to be in as well as a long time relationship I had with a girl that I didn’t think was fair to continue. I still love her very much, and she’s one of my best friends, but I’m hardly ever home, and I didn’t want to tie up somebody that way. Now I’m sharing my life with everybody in the world as well as the guys on the road.”
“One of our tunes, War Bride,” Paul remarks, “is about a girl so heavily into women’s lib that she’s enlisted--and I’m stuck at home looking after the kids. Or Meltdown. It’s not about nuclear plants, it’s about a relationship melting down. I like to make people think of what they may be doing to the person beside them.”
“Paul writes with a dark side,” Mike says, “and I always see the positive, so we meet in the middle.”
The pair met in Calgary, Alberta, at the end of 1978. “When I heard Mike sing,” Paul says, “I thought, ‘Well, his voice isn’t going to get in the way of my guitar, and I can back him up and stay out of his way.’ We sat down and wrote Always on My Mind that first night and started talking about how we’d both been burned so many times before in the business and how next time we wanted to do it right. We hung out writing songs but never really decided to put a group together until some record people showed interest in a demo we made.”
“Once you’re committed to a group,” Mike adds, “and the bookings start, you can’t get sick, you can’t take any time off. But it’s what I really want: Being with a group of people who all have the same attitude. We really get along; we never even have to look at each other onstage to know what we want to do.”
Paul began playing the guitar when he was fourteen. There were few musicians where he was raised, on a resort his folks ran in the mountains. Whenever he could, he would get to Calgary, the nearest city of any size, where he would hang around music stores all day, trying guitars, eyeing amplifiers. He had his own band at fifteen. After high school, unable to get a job in TV, the only other area in which he felt any interest, he went to the University of British Columbia. His parents thought he should train for some kind of business. The day school began however, he ran into a friend playing with a band. Their guitar player had just quit; Paul got the job. He went to class by day, practiced at night, and played on weekends. School definitely took second place. At the end of his first year, he quit and took odd jobs. “All I thought about was music,” he says, “trying to figure out what I really wanted to do with my life.” Playing six nights a week, he was fired from a day job for falling asleep. “That was the best thing that happened to me,” he says. From then on, he stuck to music. Loverboy is his thirteenth or fourteenth band--there have been so many, he’s lost count. As a guitarist, he played country blues, power funk, acid rock, country swing, and rhythm and blues, until he realized he was most at home in the style known as heavy metal.
Mike bought his first set of drums when he was twelve, paying with money earned delivering a morning newspaper. He did everything on his own. “I had help from my folks if I needed it,” he reflects, “ but I always wanted to be able to say of something, “It’s mine, thank you.’” Through junior high and high school, he was playing with groups. School functioned mainly as a social headquarters. “I used to hang out with four guys,” he says. “We called ourselves the Immediates. One of us would always be telling the others, 'Tonight! My Place!’ We’d go to parties together and leave together.
“The process of school taught me discipline,” he says, “but I didn’t have the patience to learn stuff I knew I’d forget or study the intestines of a pickled pig.” He developed an inclination for singing after an older brother, also a musician, persuaded him to practice back-up harmony on songs like Monday, Monday. Mike has no regrets that he gave up drums. “Sitting behind the drums is a little restricting,” he explains. “I like being out front, relating with my hands and my arms and my voice.” He finds what he’s doing totally gratifying. “I write a song, feel good about it, get to sing it, and people pat me on the back. I’ve got no complaints. Not only do I get satisfaction, but I get paid. And I see the world!”
“We’ll take all this as far as we can,” Paul adds. “I can’t say we’ll never outgrow our audience or have them outgrow us. Some bands have two albums, then disappear.” He reflects a moment. “The very first tune on our first album says it all: The Kid is Hot Tonight–but where will he be tomorrow? That’s been my philosophy all along, right from the old days when Mike and I were nothing and started putting the band together. “What it comes down to,” Paul concludes, “is that we’re having a good time.”
So are their fans.