Loverboy: Sexual Dealing
(Music Express Magazine, Aug/Sept '83)
Loverboy needs no introduction. Paul Dean loves it that way. He wants to be known by the sound alone. He wants a few notes leaking out of a swiftly passing car to be instantly identified as a Loverboy tune. And with the arrival of the group’s third opus, Keep It Up, the cake’s about ready for the eating.
What once were devices now are habits. Never mind the stylistic aberrations of It’s Never Easy and Passion Pit - - the meat of the matter is full-blown crotch-rock, joyously free of the indecisions that made Get Lucky seem a tentative quickie in the park.
Even the anti-nuke ditties, Meltdown and Strike Zone, are dressed in the familiar Loverboy guitarist aesthetic. Anti-nuke: Aesthetic? Actually, it’s about what you’d expect, given this is Loverboy’s “album of maturity.” And Paul Dean, guitarist extraordinaire and musical director, is a mite edgy. It’s like he’s watched the record get all dressed up - - and he’s wondering whether anyone’s going to walk it home. Certain things will go unsaid. But as ever, Dean has lots to say on the subject of Loverboyishness.
“Now, that’s one thing that pisses me off still. You talk about sex and image - -listen, we get more press with the just five nice guys thing. We don’t feel we have to kill animals on stage, but we’re not boy scouts either. Maybe we should bust up a hotel room or something . . . We all have fairly regular lives in Vancouver, except for Matt. He hangs out a lot . . . but when we’re on the road we have a behind-the-scenes life which I’m not going to tell you about. We just don’t talk about it.”
Right. Don’t have to. When a group of Loverboys makes albums called Get Lucky and Keep It Up, featuring tunes like The Kid is Hot Tonight, Hot Girls In Love and Passion Pit, the air is thick with innuendo. At the very least.
“Yeah, I guess we’ve got a sexual image but I don’t think we’re rude about it. When we first came out, we got a lot of stick from the feminists but we don’t even notice it now. When you look at the songs, you’ll see we’re not concentrating on sex. Rock ‘n’ roll is about the straightforward things that everybody enjoys, like partying and music - - and sex. We try to keep things simple, we don’t want to write over anybody’s head. It may seem like the lyrics are simplistic but we try to put a little something more realistic than the never-ending party into each of the tunes.”
“It’s just that we write such great chorus lines people latch onto those and don’t pay as much attention to the rest. Everybody knows “The kid is hot tonight, but they forget the very next line is ‘Where will he be tomorrow?’
“As for the sexual controversy, it’s always gonna follow up, I guess, but I think a bit of controversy doesn’t hurt. It kinda goes with the game.”
Fair enough - - there’s always a bit of muck alongside the luck and over the last three years, the Loverboys have been busy carting away the goodies that come with rock stardom. And with an exceptionally clear conscience, having paid all the dues there are to pay, and then some. Not an overnight success, as they constantly remind us, but they sure can act the part with relish.
“I don’t feel a smidgen of guilt, not for a moment do I ever think I don’t deserve this. It’s the same with all the guys - - our success now is just paying off for all those years we played in bathrooms and broom closets. We’ve been right down there with the scufflers.
“One time in Toronto we found this house in the Islington area that was going to be demolished in a few months and we just moved in. It didn’t have any heat or water but it was close to a gas station where we got cleaned up and people would bring us food. Hey, we were really living. Then one night we came back and found a bunch of bikers had moved in and taken over.”
“None of us really lives the excessive rock-star life. We know how hard it is to come by, we know how quickly it can go. We have houses and a few toys to play with, but that’s about it. The greatest thing is being free of financial pressure, not having to worry about just paying the rent and generally keeping your act together. Just that day-to-day stuff can be so draining!”
The practice of rock ‘n’ roll on the other hand, is a life-giving experience. Energy begets energy, or so Paul Dean believes, and his band is in the business of delivering massive dosages of energy at increasingly frequent intervals. Selling lots of records is all very well, but what Dean has in mind calls for a constant showing of the flag in the flesh, the tour that never ends. What the man sees for the future is nothing less than total world domination on the stadium level. Right from the start, Paul envisioned this band as the logical successors to arena giants like the Who and the Stones.
Having proved its vinyl durability, Loverboy’s turned to touring far-flung corners as a strategy for world conquest. Now all the rest of the world has to do is co-operate like those well-drilled Germans who accorded the band a thunderous reception on its recent visit to that country. Similarly, the Japanese were politely blown away on their first encounter with Ruvverboy, although there the weirdness was a two-way street.
“It was very strange playing there. In the first place we felt so helpless not speaking the language or being able even to read signs. We were dependent on an interpreter for the simplest things. Then we’re on stage and there’s Reno knocking himself out, laying on all the vocal tricks - - and meanwhile, you know they don’t understand a word he’s saying. But they’re grooving right along with the music and you can forget you’re in a foreign country. the song’s over, there’s about three seconds of the place going wild, then abruptly, it stops. It doesn’t trail off, it just stops dead. And they sit there and wait quietly for the next number.”
Japan’s definitely on the list for a return bout. Apart from the rock-crazed teens, the boys have made numerous converts in Tokyo’s raunchier geisha houses - - which offer considerably more than tea and sympathy. In Britain there’s oceans of tea but the sympathy is a long time coming. Two previous albums have been released to massive indifference and the band has yet to play there. Therein lies the reason the Empire has not yet fallen. The Brits are probably the pickiest market in the world - - a trunkload of rave reviews from the corners of the world won’t get you no bangers ‘n’ mash in Blighty. They have to see the thing in the skin, and Loverboy’s reluctance to play the small venues open to them over there has hurt record sales. On the other foot, they’re not big enough to play the stadiums, and won’t be until the records pick up momentum. It’s a Catch-22 of classic proportions, and it keeps getting catchier. A series of openers on the Supertramp tour fell through, a couple of showcase dates at the Marquee were rescheduled and now hang in lifeless limbo.
“Breaking in Britain is not a big priority right now. We’ll play there at some point and we’ll blow them away. We don’t have any doubts about our abilities, so we don’t have to bother about trends or what’s fashionable. Our songs have universal appeal because we deal with very basic life experiences.” Dean says. “You can extend that to include the anti-nuke songs. We’re all living day to day with the threat of the Big One, even as the party rolls on. The song Strike Zone is totally literal. I was talking with someone backstage in Boston and it came up that if the nearby navy yards got nuked, we’d go up too. Right at that time we were standing in the strike zone.”
“Then when we were in Franfurt it seemed every time I went outside the Green Party people were having a demonstration. It’s very visible over there ,but the meltdown’s coming to get us all. I just thought the time was right on this record to get a little serious about it.”
Lest you have a hard time swallowing Loverboy-as-social-commentator, Dean assures us ‘tain’t nothin’ new. As far back as Teenage Overdose and Gangs In The Street, the lads have been getting real. We’ve all been too busy sweating up our leathers to take notice, that’s all.
No neo-faddists these, never will be. The Fairlight and Vocorder synthesizers that appear on Keep It Up are indicative of nothing more than they were new studio toys the guys played around with and liked some. You’ll see a Canadian dollar worth 100cents before you’ll see a Paul Dean endorsed synthesizer. So he’s right on the case in clarifying that the rank romanticism of It’s Never Easy and the get-down funkifying of Passion Pit have nothing to do with trend-hopping, even though the charts are littered with money-spinning examples of just those genres.
“I’ve never written a song to fit a certain market. I wouldn’t know how. You keep insisting I must keep an ear open to the market, but honestly, I don’t. The only person in the band who might have that kind of awareness is Matt, because he hangs out a lot and gigs around with other bands.
“But we write the only music we can write, really. What you hear on a Loverboy record is something that we’ve all had a hand in putting together.
“Now, with Passion Pit, you could say that’s mainly my passion. I’ve always liked that heavy funk sound and I was noodling around, warming up for a show one night and we fell into the groove that bottoms that tune. It’s Never Easy is sort of the same thing - - we’ve always wanted to do a ballad, we just had a hard time finding one that everybody liked. The melody for that one had been kicking around for a while, but we couldn’t find the words until Reno sat down and tore them out at one sitting.”
You have to know that this particular cut carries mucho clout with the band on account of it’s a genuine, close-to-home slice ‘o’ life. Seems when Reno jotted down those trenchant lyrics, it was one from the heart. His love relationship of many years duration was coming undone, which, as any minor poet’ll tell ya, is the best time to get creative.
Call me irresponsible, but knowing all that, I still had to tell Paul I thought the ballad was a dog. To his credit, he only got up in my face about it briefly, then earnestly wanted to know what specifically I didn’t like about it. I don’t have enough space to lay out my reply but after sparring awhile, Paul capped it up.
“You know, I don’t think it would have mattered what people told us about that song, we would have put it out anyway. We all saw Mike too many nights on the bus with his head down.”
We felt what he was going through.
“We always get asked what it’s like being a star. But that’s only sort of a part-time thing. The rest of the time you’re a person like everybody else. To be in a rock band you don’t necessarily have to be a career teenager, but when you go out to perform, you become one. At that point, as much as the audience is, you’re living for the music.”
“Other than that, say, when I’m out riding my bike, I don’t think, ‘Hey, I’m a rock star!’ I’m just riding along thinking about nothing or about the things that everybody else thinks about. I’m just happy to be in a line of work that I enjoy.”