They knew they had amazing on-stage chemistry, amazing musicianship and songs that resonated with all who heard them. But like most up-and-coming bands, they lacked one of the most important pieces of the music industry puzzle required for success – Vancouver-based Loverboy needed a record deal.
After their demo tapes were rejected by every major label in the United States, early in 1980, manager Bruce Allen, who has since become one of the most successful and well-respected managers in all of entertainment, told his charges that he was willing to invest his own money to get the band into the renowned Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver, with the opportunity to work with one of the rising producers of the rock world, Bruce Fairbairn.
Thankfully, at the 11th hour, in late March 1980, according to band lore, Columbia Records/CBS Canada offered the band a domestic deal, on the strength of what they heard on the early demos as well as after seeing the band’s incendiary and raucous live show, which were soon legendary on the vaunted and competitive west coast club scene.
That self-titled album was release in October of 1980 and the rest, as they say, is Canadian rock and roll history. On the strength of massively popular singles The Kid is Hot Tonight and Turn Me Loose, the band rocketed up the Canadian charts, became an in-demand concert act throughout North America, and landed that all-important American record deal with Columbia’s USA HQ signing the band soon after it went platinum in the Great White North.
40 years and more than 10 million record sales worldwide later, Loverboy continues to be a consistently popular and still raucous rock and roll concert attraction, with subsequent albums and hit singles, such as Workin’ for the Weekend, Lovin’ Every Minute of It, Lucky Ones, When It’s Over, This Could Be the Night, and Notorious continuing to receive steady airplay, as well as placement in televisions, movies and other media.
To commemorate the illustrious occasion of the release of their quadruple-platinum debut, Sony Music Entertainment released a special limited edition red vinyl edition of it just before Christmas.
For Paul Dean, Loverboy’s co-founder, guitarist and part of the primary dynamic songwriting duo with headband bedecked frontman Mike Reno, there was something pretty magical when he and Reno joined forces with drummer Matt Frenette [who was previously with Dean during a two-year stint in another classic Canadian rock band, Streetheart, until both departed in 1978], bassist Scott Smith [who died in a tragic boating accident in 2000. His position was amply filled by veteran bassist Ken ‘Spider’ Sinnaeve], and keyboardist Doug Johnson in the studio, and especially on stage.
“It is so unbelievable. Who would have thought 40 years ago we’d still be getting played on the radio? It was such a thrill the first time we heard [lead-off single] The Kid is Hot Tonight on the radio. We were playing a club in Lethbridge, Alberta and we were going from there to the big CHED radio station party back in Edmonton, and here we were this fledgeling band, just out of the blocks with a brand-new record. So, we’re on the road and The Kid Is Hot Tonight comes on the radio for the first time and we were so excited to hear it, and for all of us to hear it for the first time when we were together – it was a pretty good feeling,” said the self-effacing Dean from his home near Vancouver.
“Listen, Loverboy is my 14th band and four or five of those bands prior to Loverboy had done some writing and recording of original stuff in the studio. So, from that, going all the way back into the 1960s, every band I was in, I just figured that this is THE band. We’re going to be the next whatever. This is the kind of bravado you’ve got to have. Failure was never an option in any of the bands I was in, until it was apparent that it wasn’t going to work and then I would go out and try to do it again. I typically give a band three years or so to give it a real shot. If we worked real hard at it and nothing happened, it just didn’t click, we had personal problems or didn’t have the songs, that was it. Move on. There are so many parts to it in making a successful recording act. But we had an inkling right out of the gate that we had something special with Loverboy.
“We were playing clubs from the second we were together. We came right out of the blocks opening for Kiss in Vancouver in November 1979, and that got us established overnight as somebody with a reputation. So, we were really lucky that way, although I think luck was only part of it, because Bruce was so amazing and pulled off so many things like that for us. After that show, and still in our second week of playing, a girl came up to me and said, ‘I am really impressed with you guys. You really have chemistry.’ And I had to think about it for a while. I guess we do, at least to her. I think that’s got to be what it is about us; something happens when we play together, even in those early shows. I guess it really is about the chemistry.”
A huge part of that chemistry was the way Dean and Reno hit creative paydirt from the first moments of their partnership, writing a song, Always on My Mind, which would appear on this first album in their first ever songwriting session together.
“It took a couple of years to put this album together. When I left Streetheart, I got right at it writing new songs. I was going to do a solo thing actually, but then I met Mike and was like, ‘this guy is amazing, to heck with this solo thing. Let’s see if we can make it work.’ And sure enough, that first night that Mike and I got together to do some writing we came up with a song,” Dean said.
“When I talk about all this 40 years on, I still am playing the conservative humble Canadian. But that’s because I truly am humbled by it all and still am humbled by it all. Getting back to chemistry, Mike and I had that which was the most important thing. And Mike is a great frontman, he is funny as hell, he is a really funny, entertaining guy, who also happens to be an incredible singer and songwriter. It’s mostly Mike and I writing the songs, but Doug is also a major contributor too. He usually has one or two tracks on every album, right from the get-go.
“As I was saying about Mike, the very first day we wrote Always on My Mind and we wrote another tune as well called At the Movies, which was released as a demo on an album later on. We were best friends immediately. It just happened like that. We’d hang around each other all the time and go to parties and go jamming in the bars together. We were really tight. Not so much any more because of having families and stuff, and also because of COVID-19. But we’re still great friends.”
The Loverboy album was helmed by the aforementioned Fairbairn, who went on to international acclaim for his collaborations with the likes of Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Poison, AC/DC, Van Halen and many more, before his untimely passing in 1999. Assisting him was another future legend, Bob Rock, as well as the mixing of Mike Fraser who, like his colleagues is an acclaimed and much in-demand wizard behind the mixing board to this day.
“Bruce Allen, who was managing us at the time, was also managing Bruce Fairbairn and I am pretty sure he was managing Prism at the time too. Bruce Allen gave me Prism’s Armageddon album and I was blown away by the production on it and it was that same production team of Fairbairn. Rock and Mike Fraser. So, it was on the strength of that and the fact that they really have their shit together and that they worked locally out of Little Mountain Sound, that clinched it for us. We decided, yeah, absolutely, let’s go for it with these guys,” Dean said.
“We were all really excited to work with those guys. But listen, we were really excited just to be in the studio, and we knew that these guys knew what they were doing because we had the proof, and the proof was in the grooves of that Prism album. So, we were pretty confident and relaxed about the process. I am a real perfectionist, and always have been. I am pretty sure that’s what Bob Rock thinks because he admitted to me that I challenged him. Actually, he just called me recently about the 40th from Maui, and it blew my mind, because when I think of Bob Rock, I think of all those huge albums he did with Metallica and Bon Jovi and especially Motely Crue. I mean, what a career that guy has had. And then for him to phone me up 40 years later saying that he owes me so much. I was like, Bob, the feeling is totally mutual. That was a very gracious call from Bob.”
Dean believes one of the reasons why the songs on the first Loverboy album still resonate with fans, still sound potent and powerful is because of the importance they placed on good riffs, melodies, authentic and emotive lyrics of the compositions. But the sound of the album, the sonics, the engineering and way it was laid down on vinyl is also crucial, as he explained.
“A lot of it is the sound, the actual technical sound of the album. To actually make sure a song would sound good on the radio, I carried a little mini-ghetto blaster tape recorder. We would record a track or two to cassette and I would take it out and pop it into my little portable unit and make sure that you could hear the bass, that it was cutting through properly on a small speaker like that. Because that’s what we wrote all the demos on. We wrote all the songs and recorded them on a tiny little tape recorder, plus I had another little tape deck, about the size of two cigarette packs and I would plug my guitar into that, and that’s how I wrote on the road. But anyways, getting the bass just right was a big part in creating the Loverboy sound. The bass is the hardest instrument to get right on a track. I spend half the time on the bass when doing a mix. That was the thing about that bass part at the beginning of Turn Me Loose. I worked with Scott so much on that one and Scott was amazing in delivering what I was looking for.
“And that really all stemmed from when Mike and I, just the two of us, opened for the Little River Band. What happened was, we had just moved to Vancouver and I got a job at the CFOX radio station as the fox mascot. So, I had on a big fox outfit with the station logo, strapped on my guitar and went out in between the acts and riffed for a bit to get a little hype for CFOX. Mike was my roadie and we got $200, which was much appreciated because neither of us were really working. We did our part, and I came out front and listened to the Little River Band and was blown away by the bass sound. Because I had backstage access I went up after the show and looked at the guy’s rig and talked to one of the roadies because I was amazing at how I could hear every note. He told me how they did it and I kept remembering it when Scott and I were working on the bass sound of Loverboy and with his help, we remoulded that bass sound. And then, are you kidding, having Matt Frenette playing drums took it to another level. You had his energy and the precision and tight bass sound and Doug Johnson’s New Wave/classical keyboard parts, those super hooky parts, some guy on guitar and Mike Reno, one of best singers ever on top of it all. What a combination of guys.”
By all rights, Loverboy would have concluded a very successful 2020 with a kick ass New Year’s Eve show somewhere in Canada. But because of the global pandemic, almost all of their proposed 60 or so shows scheduled for the year were put on hold. Many optimistically rescheduled for 2021, others cancelled outright. The band did a couple of virtual concert videos for use for some charities, including the Varity Club and Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation [Dean has a son living with Type 1 Diabetes]. But thanks to placement of songs like Workin’ for the Weekend and Turn Me Loose in some other modes of entertainment, there is still a decent income stream for the band.
In fact, some of the new music being written by Dean’s solo project as well as material being worked on in conjunction with Reno and the rest of the Loverboy lads is going to not only be released as singles and albums for music lovers, but also pitched to the movie and TV production houses.
“For most of the tunes I’ve written, I honestly don’t know what drove me to write those tunes, but wherever that muse came from, I am pretty grateful. Loverboy has always had tunes in movies and commercials and TV shows. That’s what I am really looking at doing with my own stuff as well as with some of Loverboy’s new stuff as well. I released two singles and I’ve got a bunch of other tunes in the can. I don’t know what I am going to do with all of them, but there is a really great market out there for established guys like us because of things like Netflix and HBO and those kinds of things,” he said, adding that he also like putting out new music for Loverboy’s fans.
“The material still has to be good and it still has to sound like us. Putting out new singles and albums is really for our fans, but if we can get a few new fans or a few million new fans, great. But I am just doing it because I love to do it. I can’t help myself. I love to write music,”
For more information on the new vinyl re-issue of the debut Loverboy album, other news and possible forthcoming shows, visit https://loverboyband.com, https://www.facebook.com/loverboyband, or https://twitter.com/loverboyband.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for nearly 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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