Few bands have become part of our culture like Loverboy. Over 40 years they have built a resume of hits that still get regular radio play. They have just released a new single called “Release” and are preparing for a major summer tour with Styx and REO Speedwagon. Original keyboardist Doug Johnson recently sat with me for a unique walk through the band’s history and its future.
Please press the PLAY Icon below for the MisplacedStraws.com Conversation with Doug Johnson –
On the new single “Release” – We have a library of parts and pieces and lyrical snippets that are all sitting in this ether of possibility. Paul (Dean) our guitar player just assembled this cool sort of arrangement. “Release” being the kind of the universal sentiment right now with everybody being locked down, and I thought, “What an appropriate way to announce that we’re going to be coming back out again”, and all things being equal with respect to the overall health of the population and herd immunity, and we will ultimately get there. So he put together this track and Mike (Reno) and him worked on melodies, and they came to me and they said, “What do you think for keyboards?” I said, “Well, I think we could probably do a pretty modern treatment of this, and I’ve got a few ideas”. This was all done via the internet because obviously the limitations of getting together and sitting in a confined space are limited these days, so we receive tracks and we went back and forth, and I added my things. At the end of the day, they had lots of things to choose from, and then they ultimately mixed in the parts that they thought were working, and lo and behold, we had this new song. The video is interesting too how we’ve used a lot of archival footage from the golden, halcyon days of touring in the 80s, that’s always interesting to look at and kind of takes people back to that time. I think we’ve evolved into being a nostalgia band for a lot of people, so we are happy to play our songs for people and look out in the audience just so you can see them being transported in a musical time machine. Like for yourself, when you were young and maybe things in your life are different and good, and so that’s a real gift that we are able to share with our fans. :46
On releasing singles as opposed to a new record – The whole concept of (releasing a full record has changed) since we came into the scene back in the 80s, where you had an album of songs that you worked on and there was kind of an underlying thread throughout. So the strategy for putting together a whole record was that, “Okay, we have the songs, there will be some songs that probably won’t get as much airplay, but these songs may or may not get lots of airplay and will draw interest to the rest of the songs”, and so I think that probably still holds today, but at this point in our career, I’m not ruling it out, but it’s kind of unlikely that we would ever do a whole record. I could be wrong, but to me, being able to just release a few singles, as you say, sporadically through the years, seems to be a better model for us. That way we are kind of satisfying our creative urges and also if there are people out there that are still interested in hearing something that we’ve worked on in the moment, that’s great. I’m not really sure if we would ever do a whole record again, to be honest. 3:36
On trying to work new material into a live set – 10 years ago, we had a song that we were all very excited about, called “I’m Alive”, and we ended up recording that. We released a live version of that song, and as much as we enjoyed doing that song, we ultimately decided to pull it from the set because there was just a visceral change in the audience sort of enjoyment level it was like, and I’ve experienced that too, I’ve gone to see bands and what I consider to be vintage bands, and they’ve got a pedigree and they’ll throw in a new song and I’m like, “Why are you doing this? I paid good money to see the songs that I know”. So I kinda relate to that. Sometimes just out of boredom, you wanna throw in something new just to keep it interesting. But ultimately, we’re in the service of the fans to give them a good show, and I think we do that on a pretty consistent level, and there’s pretty decent musicianship in the band, and we have a catalog of songs that our fans love and they wanna hear those songs. So a song has to have special merit if it’s new to place in our set, and whether or not this one will make the grade I don’t know, but we haven’t played for two years. We had a gig lined up in Washington that sadly we had to postpone because somebody in our camp (was sick). (We’re excited) just to kinda get back on the horse again and see how it feels. So we’re really, really chomping at the bit, speaking of horses, to get back out there and play for people. 5:29
On not being able to celebrate the band’s 40th anniversary live – We were disappointed that we weren’t gonna be able to have some sort of a commemorative backstage pass or something on the ticket, “Since 1980”, that kind of thing, or 1979, whatever time mark, you wanna anchor it to., But we just move forward and the whole 40th anniversary, yeah, that would have been kind of fun to say, but I think 42 is not bad either so we’ll stick with that. 8:17
On whether there was a feeling of doing something special when recording the first two records – You’re always hopeful. I’m quite a pragmatist, and so I kind of go at it with the approach of the songs are solid and they’ve been tested, we had played those songs a lot in the nightclubs, and we had really kind of trimmed the fat and found out what worked. So we tested them dutifully on a live audience. So we had this basically a 20 song category when we first started playing in the nightclub scene, after a very first gig with Kiss, that was the first time we ever played live anywhere, opening up for Kiss in 1979, I think it was November the 23rd or the 30th something. So that was our first exposure in front of 14,000 people who didn’t know who we were, didn’t know our songs because we played all original music opening up for Kiss, how insane is that? We did it in any way. S the following months, we started playing the local nightclub scene here in Vancouver, and we tested a lot of songs that we’ve been working on, and so the songs that we figured made the grade we took with us into the studio. Bruce (Fairbairn) was a great guy because Bruce was the kind of guy who was like a father, big brother, babysitter figure. He knew each of us very well, and he knew how to play to our strengths, and I think that is what made him great produce. He was really diplomatic and a very good communicator and able to tell people in gentle terms what needed to be done and what might be excluded, that kind of thing. So he was a great guy to work with. But the over-arching feeling was that “Okay, we’ve got a record deal, this is so exciting, and let’s just put these songs down, certainly there’s gonna be some people that like it, and let’s see what happens”. So that’s kind of what we did, we went into the studio, Little Mountain Sound, which became like the mecca for a lot of 80s iconic records, and Bruce Fairbairn and Bob Rock were a big part of that. We went in there for a better part of two weeks, and then we mixed it, sent it off, and then out it went. “The Kid Is Hot Tonite” was the first single, and “Turn Me Loose” was the next single, and then I think “Lady the 80s”. That’s what really started to get us exposure so that we’d be able to open up as an opening out for bigger bands. I had a plan if this didn’t pan out, then I was gonna go back to university and get a degree and carry on. 9:32
On if there was pressure by the time of Keep It Up – There is pressure because now you’ve become something that there’s a great expectation and you wanna live up to what you’ve done previously and also maybe surpass it. So it’s a good synergy because ultimately, it all comes down to the pressure you put on yourself. The outside pressure is all very much just a function of how you think about it, and do you have to get somebody’s approval, do you have to get back to make sure the fans are gonna like it, because originally, it came from a place of, “Do I like it? Do I think this is good?” So if you can stick to that core “Do I think this is good?” Yeah, that’s great. Okay, so it passes, I think it’s really good. I’ve been influenced over the last four years by my experiences on the road by new music, I’ve listened to, all that comes into this alchemy of creativity that you then move forward with, and hopefully, the fans that have enjoyed your previous stuff are also gonna resonate with your new material. So to that end, yeah, you feel this kind of “I wonder how it’s gonna go?” You put this new stuff out there and you kinda hope that people are gonna respond to it because it’s so much fun when they do. But it’s life as a crap shot, right? You put music out there and you hope somebody can resonate with it or in some ways, empathize with what the music is about. At the end of the day, that’s all you can do, and that’s what we try to do. So going into the studio on the third record was nice because how it worked is record companies are kind of like a bank. They lend you money according to your assets that you have in their bank already, which is two successful albums. So now going into the studio, they advance you a certain amount of money, which affords you then more studio time and more time to work things out in the studio than otherwise would have been if you hadn’t have had that, so that’s a nice advantage to have, too. But the creative process always comes down to just you sweating it out. You just sit there, you write songs. I can remember when I got my first Fostex multi-track cassette machine, it was a little four-channel mixer, and so way before digital, just as MIDI was coming in, the musical instrument digital interface, which is now kind of standardized, that’s even becoming obsolete now with Blue Bluetooth and all that. But way back when we all had these little cassettes and we put our ideas down and we would come to band rehearsal and I’d go, “I have an idea for the beginning of a song”, they would go, “Yeah, that’s pretty cool”. And so I have this idea, so the technology facilitated a little bit more creativity as we went on, but at the end of the day, we were left to a very much a democratic process to see which songs made the grade. I would get one in there once in a while, maybe two on a record. Paul and Mike collaborated a lot together, I was more of a lone wolf kind of doing my own thing then I would say, “Hey, I’ve got this idea”, and then they would go, “Okay, that’s pretty weird, but maybe we can somehow fuse it together with our identity musically, and make something of it”, so that’s kind of how we worked. 13:05
On changing producers and writers for Lovin’ Every Minute Of It – You have to be humble. You have to kind of be open to other possibilities. Obviously, when looking back now on that whole process, I can say that a lot of us were just tired of being on the road and of not really having a normal life. As much fun as it was when you’re on the road for 180 days a year, touring, and then the pressure of having to come back and put another record out and doing the whole thing the following year, you tend to, at least I can only speak for myself. I know that I went through this period of, “I’m tired of all this. So I just need a break”. But our record deal was basically, we need to have another record out, and so I kind of poured myself into starting to learn about soundtrack writing and movie scores and that sort of thing. I don’t know, I just kinda went through this phase where I wasn’t really that interested in doing another record and so as I say, I can’t speak for the other guys in the band, but I think there was also a kind of a visible drop in energy in terms of creative output. In order to bolster that, they brought in some people to say, “Hey, you know, you guys have had a good run, would you be open to hearing some material or collaborating with some other guys?” That’s kind of how that all went down, and they were like, “Yeah, I think I think the grist for our mill might be drying up a little bit, and so if we wanna keep this thing going, then let’s be open to that”. So we brought in Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora had a song, which became “Notorious”, and then we had Billy Wray, we had a couple of other people that were very competent pop writers, arrangers that came in and we worked with them, and so that helped the whole process for that record. So I wouldn’t say I have a negative view of that process. It’s just what was required because everybody was pretty, I would say depleted, creatively and probably physically too, I know I was. 18:04
On how they’ve kept the same lineup for 40 years – Possibly because we’re completely unemployable in any other realm. I don’t know. We’re suckers for punishment. We get on quite well. We’re very different people, we’re like brothers and you have your path of life, and we’ve all been through four weddings and a funeral together on our journey, and we know that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, I guess you could say. So what we have to offer collectively is an experience for people to really enjoy, and I think the fact that we can still do this and enjoy the experience together, says a lot, and I think that we still got some good miles ahead of us too. 21:34
On the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame leaving out bands like Loverboy, Styx, and REO Speedwagon – I have no animosity about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s choices. They have criteria that I guess they use and all the power to them. I mean, that’s just life. At the end of the day, it comes down to, Do you like what you do? And we do, and we get a lot of enjoyment out of it, whether or not we qualify to be members of this group, to me, that’s almost irrelevant. It’s always nice to get the accolade, we’ve certainly been bequeathed many accolades along the way, and for that, we’re grateful, but you don’t do it for that. You do it because there’s some meaningfulness in the experience of your music and how it impacts your fans when you go out on stage and to look out, as Bon Jovi says, the sea of faces, and to see people singing along with your music, that’s the reward right there. That’s all I need. I don’t need to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I don’t need to be held up among my peers, I’m happy where I am. So I’ve been there, I have been, we’ve been invited ironically, “Come on down. You’re not in it, but come on down”. That’s fine. That is absolutely fine. There’s no hard feelings. I love going through there Because you get to see all the minutia. I really recommend it to anybody who’s in the Cleveland area at any point, but no animosity, no hard feelings. It’s all good. And we’ve got a lot to be thankful for. 23:21
