Loverboy On Location:
Faces Rock Magazine/December 1983
By Jonathan Gross
"So c'mon Paul, what's her last name? Please. Denise who?"
No way. Getting Loverboy's Paul Dean to release the last name of his long-standing live-in was like pulling teeth.
As a matter of fact, Dean was very stubborn about giving away any information about the band's private life during our recent Faces interview.
"We turned down People magazine because they wanted to come to our homes and photograph us with our friends", said Dean, the band's shaggy veteran who, at 37, runs Canada's number one rock band (seven million albums sold world-wide).
"We just want to keep our private lives private. Let people believe or say what they want. If you want to believe we've got wild parties, then fine. But we're not going to go public."
Can you blame him? In a country with no 'star system', where hockey commentator Don Cherry is envied as someone who has 'style', Loverboy is working overtime to protect whatever mystique they and managers Bruce "The Mouth" Allen and Lou Blair have cultivated in the last three years.
Their brand new third album, Keep It Up, does its best to keep up appearances, including the first ever album cover shots by Rolling Stone's Annie Leibovitz, whose work was admired by Dean. Pout for the birdie, guys.
Pretentious? No. The approach, extending to the music which is an equal partner in the overall operation, is too simple and accessible for that. Loverboy is a commercial venture, a partnership where accounting has controlling interest over the craft. Never mind the albums, there's serious corporate sponsorship to deal with. Last year Datsun/Nissan sponsored their Canadian tour to the tune of $1 million in fees and advertising. For a little more than the price of a dealer preparation Dean got himself a 280ZX out of the deal. This year Allen has got the Molson's Brewery handling the Canadian tour and Sasson jeans forking out the denim for the U.S. leg.
"The kids don't care about corporate involvement they just want to come to the show and have a good time. It's more business than it was in the early days because we didn't have any business in the early days," he said earlier. "Like the song goes. 'The kid is hot tonight but where will he be tomorrow?' The next album might not make the charts. You never know."
Another Vancouver band Trooper once wrote a song that contained the line, 'We're here for a good time, not a long time.' For Loverboy, particularly Dean, the good times have been a long time coming.
Insert obligatory 'hard times' story: "In 1970 or '71 I had a band in Toronto and we were so broke we lived free in a condemned house. We had one gig in Ottawa and came back to find that some bikers had taken over the house. Lou Blair, who was managing me at the time, to his discredit, found a mike stand and managed to chase them away. We had no heat and no running water."
Loverboy is his 14th band, his first to land a U.S. deal. He played with a variety of ne'er do well Canadian outfits; the last of which was Streetheart, the management of which asked him to leave in 1978 just when the band was starting to take off. Kind of bummed him out: "That was the worst part of my life, definitely the bottom of the barrel. I almost died. Two days after I was kicked out of the band, I got food poisoning and the combination of heartbreak and stomachbreak nearly did me in. It was very close."
He was offered a spot in the band backing a then teenaged Bryan Adams (also managed by Allen and Blair) but declined, not wanting to leave Calgary for Vancouver. It was there he ran into Mike Reno, a singer just off a stint with downwardly mobile Double A bar band called Moxy.
They commiserated and found common ideological ground: what this world needed was a commercial no-nonsense band that borrowed from both punk and heavy metal. Reno came up with the name while sitting in a dentist's waiting room leafing through magazines. From 'Coverboy' and play on the cover girl fascination, it wasn't a big step to 'Loverboy'.
Auditions were held and the current unit was gathered featuring Dean, Reno, drummer Matt Frenette, keyboard wiz Doug Johnson and bassist Scott Smith.
"We've made a lot of money, but that wasn't why Mike (lead singer Reno) and I started the band," said Dean. "Back in 1979 we hoped that maybe some label would pick us up and we could go gold in Canada. That's all. I still love playing rock and roll. When I'm on stage, I'm 17."
True, the somber expressions in the cover photograph for Keep It Up bear no resemblance to the real band, in person just four happy hosers playing Bowery Boys to Dean's Slip Mahoney. "The rocker" as one Toronto writer put it, "once saw his role to intimidate. These rockers want to ingratiate." Dean is the intense one and sometimes intimidating for it. He runs the band like an overprotective mother, keeps everybody in line. Originally from Vancouver, he's frustratingly uncomplicated and talks about rock the way a construction foreman would talk about union rules.
"In Japan (Loverboy toured there last year) you gotta play when they tell you to play. Show starts at 6 and it's over by 7:30 p.m. We were used to doin' a 70-minute show so we had to bump it up to a 90 and save a few good tunes for the encore. Oh, yeah. You gotta do two encores. Whether you like it or not."
Suffice to say, Dean didn't return from the Land of the Rising Sun with any ideas for an origami album cover. He says "he was a big fan of Foreigner's early stuff" which figures prominently in Loverboy's guitar-oriented sounds. Talk about being 17. But if Dean won't reveal the deep dark secrets of his private life, then the only recourse is to delve under the surface to see if there is anything behind those power pop structures that loom like Hollywood backlot fronts.
Dean, who has a credit on almost every song in the Loverboy repertoire, talks about Loverboy's music like an advertising executive-Never about the product but forever circling it. He's talking "feel" and "the Dougie's keyboards are coming in to give us a little new wave sound." Commercial considerations have become constraints on Keep It Up. Lyrics don't really matter as witnessed on the lengthy liner interview with Dean that accompanies Keep It Up during which Dean glosses over all the lyrics save for Strike Zone, a thin metaphor for threat of nuclear holocaust. Meltdown is recycled love pap and, like the rest, makes early work like Teenage Overdose look like Tolstoy. And on it goes, this mono-syllabic pandering to the lowest common denominator.
"We're not interested in writing anything our audiences can't understand," argues Dean. "Our role is to entertain and part of that is being accessible to our audience."
Ultimately, you like him for his unspoiled simplicity and workaholic ethics. And some magical way, Loverboy has the knack of writing surprisingly catchy hooks. Stand back from a song like Hot Girls In Love and it's infuriatingly mindless. But get close and the hook will chase you down the street.
"Making records is only a way of making music we can use to communicate with our fans in concert. That's what the concerts are and that's what bands and rock and roll is for - reaching people, getting them excited, saying something that a lot of people can understand."
And no, we never did find out Denise's last name.