The 1981 Listening Post - Loverboy - Get Lucky

 Loverboy - Get Lucky

#497

By Brian Kushnir

October 7 1981

Loverboy

Get Lucky

Genre: Loverpop

Allen’s Rating: 4 out of 5

Brian’s Rating: 3 out of 5

Highlights:

Working for The Weekend

When It's Over

Lucky Ones

Take Me To The Top

Who Wants The Guy in the Hot Red Leather Pants?

After the success of their 1980 debut, Loverboy was a contender. They had a hot and sexy band based solidly on the lover archetype and ownable red branding, riding in on a Canadian power pop goose and seemingly going straight up to the top with their sweet, fiery and inspiring sound. Question was, with their second album “Get Lucky” in late 1981 could they continue their cupid streak?   

Loverboy wastes no time in making their saucy case, and with three swift knocks of a cowbell we’re galloping straight into one of their biggest ever hits, “Working For The Weekend.” Loverboy knows what they are and immediately places you at the center of a tantalizing romantic vision, YOU are off the deep end, YOU are in the show, YOU want a piece of Mike Reno’s sugary sweet heart. It's an anthem of anthems and just thinking about it here you are compelled to sing along and join them in their romantic quest to get to the weekend that everyone including YOU have been working for. Are we there yet?

Unfortunately, while the tunes all sparkle with catchy hooks and Bob Rock engineering sheen, “Get Lucky” heads mostly downhill from there, because the kid who was once hot tonight and seemed like a kind of James Dean lover/hero is now someone who’s been on the road too long, gotten himself into multiple overlapping relationships, been dumped a few times, and is jaded, pissed, and likely hungover to boot. 

Who ever said it was easy being Loverboy!?

The “Get Lucky” songs are like a series of Joan Didion shorts slouching around the unspoken sordid drama at the intersection of love, fame, and violence. Trying to get someone in the sack by convincing them that their current lover is a jerk. Lovers sneaking around while cheating on their other lovers. Finding the ‘sexy’ in being mugged by a gang. Haters hating on you for making it almost to the top of the rock game. Fighting and cheating your way through your unhappy relationships.  

Only in “Take Me To the Top,” the last track on the record, do we finally have a song of uncontrollable Loverboy lust and unbridled carnal desire, with a slinky groove that slow-burns its way to an inevitable peak, hearkening back to the original Loverboy promise. 

“Get Lucky” Loverboy sounds like a band coming again and again out of a department-store dressing room with different outfits each time, almost never satisfied with how it is looking. We all know they chose the tight red leather pants for the cover of the album, which was spot on for the band, but what you actually get with the music on “Get Lucky” is more like patched-up jeans. 

I’m left with a couple of unanswered questions: 

Does The Weeknd ever think about releasing  a cover of  “Working for The Weekend?” 

What really may have happened when legendary promoter BIll Graham brokered a “sit-down” between Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson and Loverboy’s Mike Reno backstage at Day on The Green #2 in Oakland in July of 1982, when Iron Maiden opened up for Scorpions, Loverboy and Foreigner? George Montgomery and I were both at the show (unbeknownst to each other at the time) and I have intel that the conversation would have gone something like this: 

Bill Graham (hereafter, BG)  “Listen you motherfuckers, we have 55,000 people here today who are expecting a good time, a massive show to put on and I will not tolerate any crap from any of you.”

Bruce Dickinson (BD) “All I can say is that Iron Maiden are the band that fucking gallops and there’s only going to be one fucking galloping band on this stage here today. In Oak Land.”  

Mike Reno (MR)  “I will concede that we have a few songs in our oeuvre that may include some galloping riffs. That said,” he said while raising one eyebrow, “don’t you like my tight red leather pants? We all have them.”

BD: “Real rockers don’t wear underwear! And have you met Eddie, our 10 foot tall zombie-demon mascot who shoots lasers from his eyes and treats Satan as his puppet?”

MR: “Oh, hi Eddie....”  He takes a sip of beer. “Actually I always get new underwear before each show, it’s one of the ways I get in touch with the local fans in each market so…”* 

BG: “Get the fuck out on stage you motherfuckers.”

*h/t Andrew Anthony

https://open.spotify.com/album/6oZb0svo8JG9mVxZmHjPxE?si=LXCGb7V_TE2JrOwuHRyj_g

The 1980 Listening Post - Loverboy - Loverboy

 Loverboy - Loverboy

#478

By Brian Kushnir

Loverboy

Loverboy

Genre - Archetype Rock 

Allen’s Rating: 4 out of 5

Brian’s Rating: 3

Highlights: 

The Kid is Hot Tonite

Turn Me Loose

OK, Loverboy. You called your first album “Loverboy” which is also the name of your band and  I’m calling it right here and right now - your debut is an inadvertent concept album, in which the concept was to explore a slice of the “Lover” archetype. Did you know this at the time?  Would you even reveal it if it were true?  I feel like a gamer who has discovered an easter egg in Monopoly and is now tasked with revealing it to the world.  

Mike Reno and Paul Dean were 1970s Canadian cover band rockers when they figured out how to mine a vein of rock gold by digging deep into the color red and the universally understood Lover character. Is “Loverboy” a song cycle? A rock opera? Part one of a 3-record trilogy? For gosh sakes people it is none of these! But before you say Kushnir have you lost your rocker, just know that Loverboy out red-rockere’d the Red Rocker himself when they figured out that at the dawn of the 80s there was no-one out there taking red to its Loverboy extremes. 

“Loverboy” with natch red album cover has two bona-fide classic rock staples that you will have heard and may even have fond memories of from your musical formative years; the rest is filler but I give them credit for front loading these songs, and then staying broadly on theme with the concept, working their one shtick pony to this day.  

“The Kid is Hot Tonite” grabs you from the start, with a rockin’ beat that echoes The Ramones.. Bass and guitar locked in precision riffing, later even getting some galloping going in the second verse. And a whiff of modernity coming from the synth on top. Reno’s vocals are crisp, sweet and clean, talking about a “Brand new way” that you’ve heard of. All of this conspires to cause your ears to perk up. “He” has opened “a brand new door.”  He rocks and he rolls. The band is daring you to imagine this character. Maybe The Kid from the song is the Loverboy that everyone is talking about. It’s anthemic! He is The Kid (da da!!!!) and he’s Hot Tonite!  We don’t know where he’ll be tomorrow, and that may be of some concern, but in the meantime, he is hot tonight and that is all that matters! Who is he? Is it BIlly the Kid? The Cisco Kid?  Kid Creole? Kid Congo Powers?  You are left to wonder and your teenage mind is prone to fantasy. Naturally you think, could The Kid be me? Could I be the Loverboy?!?! It’s a pleasant enough thought to fantasize about for a few seconds.  Let’s follow this Kid for just a bit shall we?  

The second track in the maybe-a-concept album that is “Loverboy” is “Turn Me Loose,” and it is arena rockin’ disco, a 4-on-the-floor number perfect for the feathered hair set at your 1980-something high-school dance. If it wasn’t written in 1980 I would say the lyrics may have been generated by an algorithm - the main character was “born to run,”  “makin’ love to whoever I please.” He unfortunately meets up with someone who has the audacity to “try to tie (him) down,” which set’s the song’s unfortunate sequence of events in motion, because of course the Loverboy has to ‘flyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy, my way….”  and he has to be torn loose. Set free. amd doing it "my way."  Do not try to keep the Loverboy in chains. Our friend The Kid, the Loverboy in this song is the opposite day Burger King - if you’re with him you absolutely can’t have it your way.  

The rest of the album is filler, filler that stays on theme for the most part mind-you, but still, musically and lyrically, a let down following the double-barrelled hit-making prowess of the first two songs. A few highlights: “Always on My Mind” finds our hero in a wistful mood, pining for a girl he met in high-school when they were seventeen. We don’t know where he is now or at what age he is writing this but he is still seeing her every night in his dreams, because she is in fact, “Always on My Mind.”  And driving him so craaaaaaaaazy, he feels the need to express this by raising the pitch of his voice to super great heights.  

In “Lady of the ‘80s,” once again he is being driven crazy, wild, by someone who turns him on, and makes him go hazy. “Long, lean and oh so beautiful,” she is his “latest lady,” his “Lady of the ‘80s.” Which is fitting for a song released in 1980, it would be strange if he was singing about his Lady of the 20s or 90s at this point in musical history. And even though he’s declaring this situation about his crazy Lady of the 80s woman to you, dear listener, he also wants you to know that you better leave her alone.  

“Little Girl” suggests a creepy side of the Loverboy where our Kid channels Humbert Humbert as he asks for help with strategies for how to make the “little girl” of the title “feel it,” “need it,” “lose control” and love him when she is in fact, “too little...to fall in love…”  

After this point, things take a bit of a turn as the final 3rd of the album slides toward the dark side of love with “Prissy, Prissy,” “Teenage Overdose” which finds our Loverboy with ‘one foot in hell’ where he really shouldn’t be, “DOA” where the Loverboy’s girl “is not looking well” and has a potentially fatal attraction, and finally “It Don’t Matter.” 

In the grand scheme of things, it don’t - but they had two big hits and were trying to create a band out of an archetype. Points for trying. 

https://open.spotify.com/album/3dDzAVWr5gjvJIOTEuS309?si=KMkVpYtKTH-DJ2YK_d9P7w

The 1985 Listening Post - Loverboy - Lovin' Every Minute of It

Loverboy - Lovin' Every Minute of It

#309/944

August 1985

Loverboy

Lovin’ Every Minute of It

Genre: Rock

3.25 out of 5

Highlights:

Friday Night

Look, I can not and will not make excuses for how many times I’ve sung the words “Lovin’ every Minute of It” when something good is happening in my life. 

No apologies.

That said…hoo boy, that’s not only not a great song it’s also a blatant attempt to sound like Def Leppard. It’s unabashed in how badly they want to get some of this space. And it should come as no surprise that it was written by Mutt Lange. I mean, it’s SO Mutt it might as well be called “Mutt’n Every Minute of It”. Also that they hired the producer of Leppard’s On Through the Night. 

Anyway.

Like Heart this is an album of mostly songs that the band bought from others. Unlike Heart most of them crackle with that mysterious Canadian energy and production. 

https://music.apple.com/us/album/lovin-every-minute-of-it/270884470

The 1983 Listening Post - Loverboy - Keep It Up

Loverboy - Keep It Up

What starts out fun runs out of ideas save for Mike Reno’s scream singing.

#105
June 1983
Loverboy
Keep It Up
2.5

Highlights:
Hot Girls in Love
Queen of the Broken Hearts