SPILL FEATURE: WORKING FOR THE WEEKEND – A CONVERSATION WITH PAUL DEAN OF LOVERBOY

WORKING FOR THE WEEKEND

A CONVERSATION WITH PAUL DEAN OF LOVERBOY

Mike Reno and Paul Dean of the legendary Canadian rock band Loverboy, known for the rock anthems “Hot Girls In Love,” “The Kid Is Hot Tonite,” “Turn Me Loose,” and “Working For The Weekend,” are set to be inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame at Massey Hall in Toronto on September 26th. Ahead of their induction, I chatted with Loverboy co-founder and guitarist Paul Dean.

“It’s a very cool honour, and we’re really happy about it,” he states. “It takes a lot of people to get us there – really, thanks to our fans, to our management, and to our record company back in the day.”

Loverboy’s irresistibly catchy blend of hard rock, new wave, disco, pop, and arena rock produced multiple hit songs and made them one of Canada’s most successful bands of the ‘80s. Dean shares that each member brought their own unique flavour to the band. “Matt [Frenette] in his high school marching band was the snare drummer,” explains Dean. “Doug Johnson, the keyboard player, is a classically trained genius on the keyboards. He can play anything jazz or classical, and in our case, pop. He came up with great riffs like ‘Lady Of The ‘80s’ and ‘Teenage Overdose’ in particular. I’m kind of a pseudo metal player. I play clean a lot, but I also like to crunch. Our dearly beloved late bass player, Scott Smith, he came from Lisa Dalbello’s band. Mike and I saw him play, and there was definitely an R&B flavour in that band, and he was the perfect choice. Then on top of that, you’ve got Mike Reno, who is basically a blues singer. You put all that together, and that’s Loverboy.”

When reflecting on the moment he realized Loverboy had something special, Dean pinpoints it to when they started getting noticed on the radio. “We were playing with Toronto, actually in Edmonton, just shortly after the first album [Loverboy] was released, and we were driving from Lethbridge – ‘The Kid Is Hot Tonite’ came on the radio, and that was the first time we had heard it on the radio. We were really excited about that. It’s a pretty great feeling. You just do what you think is cool to yourself and you put it out, and you hope it can reach other people, and they can appreciate what you are talking about and feel the same way.”

One of Dean’s favourite memories was a prank Reno pulled on Frenette when Loverboy was cutting the Lovin’ Every Minute Of It album. “Matt was in a drum booth completely separate from everybody else, and Reno had this cheese plate somehow, and we stuck it in his booth and put a cover like a sheet or tablecloth over it, so he didn’t notice it,” Dean recalls. “We were there for two weeks, and I think after a week it was starting to get pretty thick in that room. We had a good laugh over that.”

“Working For The Weekend” is one of Loverboy’s biggest hits and is one of the most well-known songs of the ‘80s. To this day, it receives tons of airplay on classic rock radio stations. It has also been featured in countless movies and television shows, including Click, Zoolander, Hoppers, and Loki, among many others. Why has it become a timeless tune? “I would imagine it’s the lyrics [and it being] the working man and woman’s theme,” Dean states. “The high energy part of it is a big element. The melody and chord structure is pretty much part of our signature sound with all the modulations and key changes… Maybe it’s just the three cowbells that go off at the beginning.”

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Another one of Loverboy’s huge hits was “The Kid Is Hot Tonite.” The song was heavily influenced by the rock band Cheap Trick and originally did not have the iconic “The kid is hot tonite / Where will he be tomorrow?” line. “Big fan of Cheap Trick and I’ve always been and always will be, especially their melodic structure,” Dean reflects. “The name of the tune was ‘How Do You Like Him So Far.’ I thought that was a pretty catchy title, so I had the complete song but didn’t have ‘The kid is hot tonite / Where will he be tomorrow?’ but I had the rest of it. Bernie Aubin, a good friend of mine, came up to me at a club one night and said, ‘Dean, I’ve got this song title. It’s The Kid Is Hot Tonite,’ and I said, ‘That is great,’ and he said, ‘See what you can do with it.’ I basically pasted it into the rest of the song, and it made sense lyrically, especially with it saying, ‘Where will he be tomorrow?’ and the story of a pop star, any important person, or anybody really that had a bit of success.”

The power ballad “Heaven In Your Eyes” was featured in the iconic ‘80s movie Top Gun. “That was really cool that we got on that and what an amazing movie,” Dean says. Mae Moore and John Dexter originally wrote the song. “They had a demo and came to Mike and me, and we liked it to a point, but it needed a bit of work. It probably needed a few more lyrics, maybe another part, or a bridge. I can’t remember what it was we added to it. We took it to Bruce Allen and Lou Blair, our managers at the time, and we went to the studio in L.A. where they were shooting it or editing it or whatever. Mike and I sat in the lobby while our managers took the tape that we had of it and took it back, and twenty minutes later they came out all smiles, and they decided, ‘This is a great song. We are going to put it on the soundtrack in the movie.’”

“This Could Be The Night” is another one of Loverboy’s power ballads. Dean shares that it took years to finish and that a little help from his wife, Denise, and a pivotal songwriting collaboration with Jonathan Cain of the rock band Journey really helped Loverboy complete it. “It had so many different song titles and different grooves, and I was just scratching my head going, ‘How the heck are we going to make this thing work,” Dean reflects. “I started two songs on the same day. One was ‘Teenage Overdose,’ which made it to the first album [Loverboy], and the other was ‘This Could Be The Night.’ I remember saying to my wife Denise, ‘I’ve got this line: ask any girl what she wants and she’ll say?’ and she said, ‘Make it last forever,’ and I went, ‘OK. Great! Thank you!’ That was the beginning of it. At least I had a line in the verse, but as I said, I just couldn’t figure it out. We went on tour opening for Journey on the Get Lucky Tour, and Jonathan Cain offered his amazing songwriting talents if I wanted to come to San Francisco, where he lived, up to his house in his home studio, so I did. I went there for a weekend, and we took it a long way. He came up with that intro, and I just thought, ‘Wow! What a great intro.’ He came up with this groove, and he said, ‘What’s this song about?’ We talked about it, dug deep into the emotional world, and figured out what I was trying to say. We got a lot of the lyrics and a structure going, but we still didn’t have a title. I think we got the title as we were recording the Lovin’ Every Minute Of It album.”

Alternatively, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora helped co-write the song “Notorious.” “I had met Jon at Little Mountain Studio, and he was with Bruce Fairbairn, who was also our producer,” Dean explains. “He gave me Jon’s number, and I called him and said, ‘Would you be interested if we could write some songs together?’ and he said, ‘Come on out to New Jersey,’ and I did. I stayed at his house, and we wrote two or three tunes. That was the only one that really stuck. I remember the first line I had to it was ‘Every mother’s nightmare / Every schoolboy’s dream.’ That was written on one of our fans’ T-shirts outside of a gig we were playing.”

Along with being inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame, Dean has other exciting news. His new solo album is set to release soon! “It’s going to be a pretty rocking album,” he says.

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Main Photo Credit: AJ Roccaforte | Background Photo Credit: David Michael Kennedy