In The Studio with Redbeard

Tag: “Jump”

  • Loverboy 45th Anniversary- Mike Reno, Paul Dean

    Loverboy 45th Anniversary- Mike Reno, Paul Dean

    In 1980, the Canadian rockers Loverboy went from the throwaway pile outside my office door to the #13-selling album on Billboard Album Chart, no thanks to one of the all-time worst album covers ever. Reportedly a self-portrait Polaroid of the graphic artist hired to lay out the album cover, it could be the least representative of the straight ahead rock music inside since John Hiatt‘s debut, where he looked like a cadaver.

    Simply titled Loverboy, their American debut  in October 1980 suffered from an almost fatal album cover and virtually no promotion, but working late one night in  my ROCK 103 Memphis office, I found that first Loverboy  album in a throwaway pile and stumbled onto “Turn Me Loose” and “The Kid is Hot Tonight”, easy one-listen obvious hits. So when their sophomore effort Get Lucky came out in Fall 1981, these Canadian rockers were the right band at the right time.

    The first time we saw them around Thanksgiving  ’81 live at the Memphis Orpheum Theater opening for Point Blank, Loverboy started their tightly rehearsed set with a great song about “…everybody’s workin’ for the weekend…”. But this great song which they had just performed had not appeared on that first release. Bewildered, I rushed backstage immediately after their set to inquire,”What was that great song you opened with?” And who then could have possibly imagined that, over thirty years and 4,000,000 copies later, “Working for the Weekend” would be the soundtrack to the popular Radio Shack Super Bowl tv ads a few years back, seen and heard by over 100 million? North American rock radio was waiting in anticipation for it, along with “When It’s Over”, “Jump” co-written by fellow countryman Bryan Adams, “Gangs in the Street”, and “Take Me to the Top”. Get Lucky by Loverboy also was highly significant for its produced sound, which had a huge presence that really cut through on the radio, and it wasn’t long before the bands who would define Eighties rock including Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, and Metallica were all making the pilgrimmage to Vancouver’s Little Mountain Studio to work with Loverboy’s studio brain trust, producer the late Bruce Fairbairn and engineer Bob Rock, who themselves had been musicians in Prism and The Payolas, respectively. Lead singer Mike Reno and guitarist Paul Dean recall how nice guys don’t necessarily finish last in this  In The Studio  classic rock interview.   –Redbeard

  • Van Halen- 1984- Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, Michael Anthony

    Van Halen- 1984- Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, Michael Anthony

    To this day I remember waking up on New Years Day 1984, flipping on the TV to watch the Rose Bowl football game from Pasadena CA, and whenever the network took a break, they were already playing a brand new Van Halen song, “Jump”, from a new album 1984. That’s how  mainstream Van Halen had become.

    To truly comprehend just how massively popular this album was, it helps if you actually write it out numerically: more than 12,000,000 copies of Van Halen’s sixth album, 1984, were sold in the U.S. alone in the four decades since it was released. Propelled by Van Halen’s very first #1 hit “Jump”, three million of those were sold in America in the first ninety days! Already America’s most popular hard rock band prior to its release, 1984   propelled the Pasadena quartet of innovative guitar whiz Eddie Van Halen, drummer brother Alex, bass player and unmistakable harmony singer Michael Anthony, and showman extraordinaire David Lee Roth into the stratosphere of rock’s elite with additional songs “Panama”, “I’ll Wait”, “Drop Dead Legs”,” Top Jimmy”, and the video which made even MTV blush, “Hot for Teacher”.ut as any high-flying throttle jockey can attest, the view from the top is exhilarating, but the dizzying height is disorienting and there’s no air up there to breathe. Like water on pavement, celebrity seeks out every crack and crevice in a relationship, and when relations turn from chilly to frosty, the cracks can quickly expand into chasms. The 1984  album and subsequent sold-out tour closed that chapter on the original band, with the Van Halen story becoming a never-ending soap opera that was constantly controversial.
    While the facts contained in this interview remain true and accurate over time, the opinions expressed here by Eddie, Alex, and Michael clearly are a snapshot of just one of the many seasons in this saga, at a time before David Lee Roth was invited back into Van Halen, as well as before Michael Anthony was dismissed and Eddie Van Halen would perish from throat cancer.- Redbeard