Loverboy Return From The Big Black Hole
Canadian Musician Magazine (1986)
Now, with Loverboy ready to roll through the United States after a break from the road of nearly two years and Canadian dates being proposed for the summer, everything seems to be back to normal at Loverboy central and the time is finally right to talk about the big black hole between 1983's Keep It Up and Lovin’’ Every Minute of It.
Keep It Up was the album intended to consolidate the success of the first two Loverboy albums and almost four straight years of touring. It was also an attempt to dig a little deeper into songs of topical content, into ballads and out of what had become recognized as the Loverboy mould, typified by Keep It Up’s “Queen Of The Broken Hearts.”
With that in mind, Paul Dean, Mike Reno, Scott Smith, Doug Johnson and Matt Frenette set off on an eight month, 135 date excursion that ended in March 1984 in Puerto Rico. By then, Keep It Up had failed to live up to its title’s full promise and the band knew it needed to take a rest.
“The main disappointment was that we were counting on getting three singles from the album, but the second single (“Queen Of The Broken Hearts”) didn’t do well and the third single was barely even tried,” says Paul Dean.
“We needed a break, a break for the mind, for the body. We’d been on the road for five years straight.”
Mike Reno agrees, noting that by the time he saw his house again, he’d become cranky, miserable and confused. So, for two months the members of Loverboy turned into rutabagas.
When they regrouped in the spring of ‘84, refreshed and with no immediate plans to return to roadwork, they had resolved not to release a record until they had what they wanted.
“Steal The Thunder” and a very different version of “Bullet In The Chamber”survived the first demo sessions. Both songs are co-writes by Dean and Reno with Davitt Sigerson and Bill Wray. Sigerson was recommended to the band as a lyricist by CBS Records but Wray has a much older connection to Loverboy via manager Bruce Allen.
In 1973-74 when the Allen-managed BTO was where Loverboy is now, Wray was Randy Bachman discovery who signed with Bachman’s Legend label and released a solo LP. Bill Wray has remained in contact over the years and it was in Christmas ‘83 at the LA Forum that he was waiting backstage to suggest a songwriting collaboration with Paul Dean.
“At that time I already was looking for outside influences,” says Dean.
“Especially in writing the lyrics, which I don’t particularly like doing.”
As the songwriting and demo-ing continued, Bill Wray would stay at Paul’s or Mike’s while Sigerson kept in contact via the phone, which occasionally meant calling in lyric ideas, notably for “Lead a Double Life” the last song recorded for Lovin’’ Every Minute Of It.
In another attempt to make a major change from the Loverboy pattern of the three previous LP’s and to anticipate trends in mainstream rock, the group called in Mike Shipley, an engineer who’d worked on Foreigner 4, Def Leppard’s Pyromania and The Cars’ Heartbeat City and who was trying to make his move into producing.
With 40 songs to choose from, that October, Loverboy tore itself from home to take advantage of the Solid State Logic board at Le Studio in Morin Heights.
“We tried something different: we had Matt play to a click track and we sampled the snare and bass drum,” Paul recalls the sessions, “It was real hard on Matt but he got through it. Then, when I talked to him later, he said, ‘Guess how many tracks I like? One.’ And that was it.”
“We wanted the guy who made Foreigner sound so great”, adds Mike. “We wanted the guy who made The Cars sound great.”
“But I knew right off the bat that it wasn’t working. You know how when you’re in school and you look up at the guy at the next desk and he’s got an expression on his face as if his dad has died. That was Mattie.”
Exit Mike Shipley and farewell to 40 roles of scrapped two inch tape, but not before Shipley had made one significant contribution to the LP. It was while at Le Studio and Loverboy had resumed its never-ending search for more material, that Shipley called Robert John “Mutt” Lange, with whom he’d worked on Pyromania, to see if he had any songs on hand. Lange volunteered to write one that night, and the next day, calling from England, he played a brand new demo tape of “Loving Every Minute Of It” over the phone which Paul Dean taped off the line.
Loverboy learned the song from Paul’s tape, which had to be doctored in the studio to bring out the rhythm track for Smith and Frenette, who played to it on headphones. Remarkably, the Loverboy version is essentially the same as Lange’s demo, soccer chant and all.
Once back in Vancouver, where Little Mountain Sound now had a Solid State Logic board of its own, the group had time for a change in strategy and to re-write “This Could Be The Night”, the ballad Paul Dean had begun with Journey’s Jonathan Cain. Around the same time, Davitt Sigerson kicked in with his cassette demo “Lead A Double Life.”
But that didn’t solve the problem of who would produce the album.
“We thought, ‘Hey, let’s get some crazy bugger from England to produce us and put some fu into it,”recalls Mike Reno.
The crazy bugger from England was Tom Allom, whose credentials reach back to engineering the first Black Sabbath album and includes LPs by Def Leppard, Krokus, and Judas Priest. All of which suggested that Loverboy were gearing up to get heavy.
“I think we did get heavier on this album, if you stripped away the keyboards,” offers Paul, whose playing on “Lovin’’ Every Minute Of It” is among the best, and most spontaneous he’s ever managed to capture on vinyl.
“We could never be a metal band with Mike singing songs such as “This Could Be The Night”. He’s too good a singer - he’s not a screamer - and Doug Johnson is too innovative a keyboard player.”
Still, the LP bears a few trademarks of contemporary hard rock/metal LPs notably the stacked vocals on the title track or the Bryan Adams-Jim Vallance contribution, “Dangerous.”
For the recording of the LP, Loverboy had access to both digital and analog recording. In stacking the vocals, the band would dub a bed track onto two channels of 24-track analog and methodically record five voices over-dubbing onto the remaining 22 tracks. The resulting massed choir of more than 100 voices would be mixed down to two tracks and spun into the choruses.
The results can be heard to good effect on the title track, “Steal The Thunder” or “Dangerous”, which Paul Dean heard as a demo several years ago while driving with Bryan Adams to help him buy a motorcycle, later remembered and called in for the recording of Lovin’ Every Minute Of It.
After four and a half months at Little Mountain Sound with Tom Allom the group emerged with an album they were happy with. An album that re-instated the spontaneous playing of Matt Frenette (an integral part of the excitement of the band,” Paul Dean), was identifiably Loverboy but which took the group into newer fields. Best of all, as far as the band was concerned, seven of the nine songs can be featured prominently in the 19 song repertoire that Loverboy is touring with.
“I think it’s a great album,” Paul says enthusiastically, “and it’s going to be great doing songs like “Steal The Thunder” live. The fans love it and we love it.”
“I was ready to go back on the road three days after we started rehearsing,” Mike Reno declares. Reno, who has been jogging seven miles a day and weight-training, has resolved to take everything one thing at a time as it comes up.
“I had a great time making this record. It was hard work but there was no pressure and I loved working with Tom Allom. He’s a gem. He’s so funny and he had a way of making everybody feel great.”
“And I enjoyed our time off immensely. It made me feel as though I can go for another five years straight.”
“And, you know, it made me realize that what I really like is, not walking down the street and people recognizing you ‘cuz you’re famous, is that what I really want to do is to make music.”