Loverboy's Dean retraces rock travels
Saskatoon (November 2000)
Paul Dean has sampled the roller-coaster rides of rock ’n’ roll.
The Canadian guitarist-writer played with 10 bands before reaching recording stardom with Streetheart, slipped off into relative obscurity for a short spell and then hit the international glory road with Loverboy.
Since 1980, his role with Loverboy has been a rewarding one, considering he had a hand in writing all but one of the band’s 17 top singles and much on the content on seven albums.
Dean, lead singer Mike Reno, keyboardist Doug Johnson, bass player Scott Smith and drummer Matt Frenette will retrace some rock ’n’ roll memories tonight at 8 as headliners on the Saskatoon Prairieland Exhibition’s main stage.
Dean’s pursuit of musical dreams has led him almost everywhere in Canada, living in some cities longer than others, working in a variety of venues in many others.
There have been stops in Saskatoon, of course, some during Streetheart’s rise to fame and then, oddly enough, it was during a time of virtual destitution that he met Mike Reno by chance in a night spot on Second Avenue. And that meeting was the first step towards the invention of Loverboy.
Dean grew up in the Windermere Valley in British Columbia, was going to pursue a career as a teacher but “I became distracted by rock and roll the second day I was in Vancouver and music has been my life ever since. Even in the slower times, I never doubted my ability. And the international success with Loverboy, how could you ever regret going into music!”
One of the first turning points in Dean’s career happened in Edmonton in 1977. He and Frenette had been working with The Great Canadian River Race Band and they were making their home base in Edmonton. One night, they went to see a band called Streetheart.
“We thought they were great and they were doing just what we wanted to do. But their manager, Gary Stratychuk, left me with the impression they weren’t ready for a guitar player in the band and they wanted to be a keyboard-oriented band like Gino Vannelli was at the time. “And then one morning at 5 o’clock, the phone rings and it’s Kenny Shields asking if we’d like to get a band together. I didn’t hesitate. Matt and I hooked up with Kenny, Spider Sinnaeve and Daryl Gutheil and we started to click. I liked the musicianship of the boys, their style, Kenny’s energy and his singing. Just after that was when we started playing the A-Four in Saskatoon, maybe 10 times and then, after the album came out, we moved into the Centennial Auditorium.”
The album was Meanwhile Back in Paris, which sold more than 100,000 copies, and Dean’s favorite cut was Action. “I wrote the majority of the songs, mixed and mastered the tapes, and I was totally jazzed up. It was a great album for its time. Action was the magic. It was like a new rock song structure for us.” But Dean soon left, “mostly because Kenny and Gary didn’t seem to care for my attitude. I always thought we could work it out but we didn’t give it a chance.”
Dean went back to the nightclub scene and remembers he was playing in a trio at Jack’s, a small club just across from the A-Four on Second Avenue as 1978 turned into 1979. “I wasn’t so sure I wanted to work with lead singers anymore. We were destitute, didn’t have any money. And happily, we had our one-week engagement at Jack’s turn into a second week. While we were there, Mike Reno came in to visit one of the boys in the band. We got talking and jamming. I heard Mike sing and I decided I could learn to live with lead vocalists again.”
Lou Blair, who managed a Calgary rock club called the Refinery, saw the makings of a band in Dean, Reno and their friends. But Blair, in his wisdom, demanded some patience. “We wanted to play but Lou wanted us to write. We wrote 25 songs and it wasn’t until a year later that he arranged for us to open for Kiss in front of 16,000 people at the Vancouver Coliseum. We had a load of original material, we had a good dance beat, we were confident and everything grew from the first night,” says Dean.
“With Streetheart, I didn’t feel we were writing the type of songs which were going to be accepted by the public on a grand scale. When Mike and I got together, the stuff that we wrote was commercial and a lot of people liked it immediately.”
In 1980, the first album contained two huge hits, Turn Me Loose and The Kid Is Hot. In its second week on the Billboard charts, Turn Me Loose jumped 85 notches. Part of the success came from appearing on American Bandstand and Solid Gold. In 1981, there were two more hit singles, Working for The Weekend and When It’s Over. And then along came the 1981 Juno Awards where they became the first band ever to win six Junos. “One night we were sitting in a restaurant and Bruce Allen, who was promoting us, saw Dick Clark at another table. He went over and asked if we could appear on American Bandstand. Clark bought it. And I think that was the single most important factor in our bigtime ride. We played the Kid Is Hot and Turn Me Loose and there were 14-million people watching,” says Dean.
They toured with Journey, Foreigner, ZZ Top and Kiss, and then as more hits were produced, they were headlining. “We were doing 300 shows a year. The pace was hard. We’d make a lot of appearances, ball games, golf tournaments, in-store signings, the whole bit. I mean we would have killed to have these opportunities. And when we got them, there was no way we’d refuse to do them. The good thing was that, in 1984, we leased our own airplane.” After the release of a sixth album, Big Ones, in 1989, the five decided amicably to give Loverboy a rest.
“Then, in 1992, we got together again to work a benefit concert for Brian McLeod, a friend and musician who was stricken by cancer. We hit the stage running and we found out we liked the business too much to stay away.”
They released another album in 1997, another called Secrets in 1998, then chose the best live performances for their first-ever CD, and now in 2000, they have released their first live album as a celebration of the band’s 20th year in the business.
The advances in technology now allow Dean, even while touring, to sit down at a computer in his hotel room each day and write. He admits “I think I was born to create songs.” Dean’s onetime sidekick, Shields, is having some problems with his heart, is a candidate for a pacemaker, and many friends contibuted to a benefit concert for Shields in Winnipeg on July 23.
Dean also has another cause close to his heart. “Our four-year-old son, Jake, has full-blown diabetes, is insulin-dependent, and any other concern I have day-by-day pales when compared to what I see him going through. We’ll be part of a diabetes benefit in Vancouver at the end of November,” says Dean.
Through a hectic career of music, Dean’s wife, Denise, has been a powerhouse. “I met her when she was selling jeans at a store in Calgary. She often travelled on the road with us. But there were times before Loverboy when she worked as a waitress to support me and keep my dream alive. We’ve been together 30 years and you can’t measure what she has meant to me,” says Dean.