Let Us Now Critique the Video for Loverboy's "Lovin' Every Minute Of It"...

Also, that video featured a bandana-less Mike Reno, which was a pretty daring move on their part. This is how it should be, always:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3mQ7j2-w8c&search=Loverboy%20

Revive because the video cover band is better than anything Loverboy has ever accomplished. "Lucifer Sam" desperately needs a twangy B-52's cover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bohVV_KlSHw

I like how all the band members are introduced playing or interacting with their instruments except for the bass player.

poor lounge band.

Somehow have never encountered the video for this before. I loved every minute of it.

Notes: Diggin' the shirtless and beltless look the bass player is rockin'. A very sad time for denim. Lonely keyboardist entertains Liberace fantasies in his free time. Would smang lead singer of lounge act.

Does "Lovin' Every Minute of It" sound like an outtake from Pyromania to anyone else? I never realized it at the time (although I was only 11).

Noticed that the sole songwriter on this is one Robert John "Mutt" Lange.

Yeah it's totally a Mutt song, Loverboy's just the vehicle for it. Since I like both Mutt Lange and Loverboy, I'm fine with that.

I can deal with that. But I still want to know more about that lounge band - a B-52s-style cover of "Lucifer Sam" is genius.

Idea of the video is insane. Of course we're ALL going to run off with the opening new wavers - they know where all the cool shit is! Like we'd really want to hang out with those corporate losers while they each reenact their Song Remains The Same fantasies. I'll bet there's a 3 hour cut of this that goes on and on like SRTS does.

Some respect to Paul Dean for having his fantasy just being working on his guitars.

were loverboy ever lumped in with the new wave/not exactly new wave kind of arena rockers of the early 80s? stuff that was informed by the zeitgeist but not quite of it? "on the loose" by saga, "the break up song," quarterflash, tom petty & the heartbreakers, "jessie's girl," & a bunch of other bands loosely connected by the fact that there was one guy who wore those sleeveless striped or checkerboard pattern t shirts.

i mean, just look at the cover of the s/t debut album. look at it!

cf "hot girls in love," this sounds like an eliminator outtake (with matching video!) with an elliot easton solo slapped on. "queen of the broken hearts" opens with the "vacation" keyboard riff and has a "mr. roboto" breakdown in the bridge.

loverboy never looked or sounded like the cover band in the "lovin" video but maybe it's an indirect way to externalize and shed the new wave tag?

were loverboy ever lumped in with the new wave/not exactly new wave kind of arena rockers of the early 80s? stuff that was informed by the zeitgeist but not quite of it? "on the loose" by saga, "the break up song," quarterflash, tom petty & the heartbreakers, "jessie's girl," & a bunch of other bands loosely connected by the fact that there was one guy who wore those sleeveless striped or checkerboard pattern t shirts.

Maybe for a couple of months? I definitely remember hearing "Turn Me Loose" on new wave KROQ back then, but I always lumped Loverboy in with that strain of establishment arena pop rock/rock pop that Boston, Journey, Styx, and Foreigner all specialized in. Those not quite examples you mention remind me of explorers who venture out into the unknown and end up turning feral with native new wavers. Why not? It's a great way to get gigs and you won't get as much shit for being female/gay/not having "chops"/having gone to art school.

That Loverboy first album cover is straight out of Gary Numan territory (the artist who did it seems interesting) and you do get about 20 seconds of Duran Duran in "Turn Me Loose" before all of Guitar Center is dumped onto to the track to reassure you that Loverboy is most definitely a Rock Band and tonight they're going to rock you tonight. Loverboy was never going to reinvent themselves in the way that The Cars, Rush, or ZZ Top did and they were content to slather the new wave/synthesizers on like frosting on an arena rock cake. A year or two later, Bon Jovi would take the bar-band-with-synthesizers-out-front sound and win the lottery. Producer Bruce Fairbairn seems to be the key guy here. Worth noting that Bob Rock was his engineer.

cf "hot girls in love," this sounds like an eliminator outtake (with matching video!) with an elliot easton solo slapped on. "queen of the broken hearts" opens with the "vacation" keyboard riff and has a "mr. roboto" breakdown in the bridge.

There was one year when every rock band got Jupiter-6s, never got past the default presets, but felt they had to use it somehow. Maybe Roland had a great party at NAMM that year.

loverboy never looked or sounded like the cover band in the "lovin" video but maybe it's an indirect way to externalize and shed the new wave tag?

I think Loverboy were feeling smug about themselves and going "awlright! I'm so glad we're not struggling like those clowns. We're no longer playing hotels, we're trashing them! We're loving every minute of it!"

I suppose that if I was confronted with that scene at the Holiday Inn I'd probably just barf, get back in the car, put on Daydream Nation and keep driving.

i always forget how long loverboy were a successful band, always figure them as peaking sometime early in reagan's first term, effectively done by the time of his re-election. one of those pre-mtv aor bands that hung around some during mtv's early days but were quickly killed off by music video. reo speedwagon basically. instead they managed to make hits nearly as late as foreigner did. so weird such a dorky lame band could have a pretty awesome name and managed one of the great album covers of all time. those first two album covers (first one especially) do read kinda 'new wave' to me also. third one just looks like they'd really like it if you confused them w/ queen.

the first song on the first album includes

And we just heard of a brand new wave
We heard it's heading for an early grave
We'll have to wait and see if there's anything we can save

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j-d1NRTRjs

and the last song turns into a police parody 3 minutes in

man i would love to see a piece (not a listicle) dealing w/ how dinosaur acts and aor types used the police to come to grips w/ new wave and punk.

Seconding that... I'll bet there are some great stories there.

somehow this track from the album actually predates the "Girl U Want" single by a month or two

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmRhJxBFP84

i must have sensed telepathically that this thread was revived. i just posted this to twitter in the morning:

RT if you get viscerally angry that we're meant to laugh at the cool, female-fronted cowpunk band in the "Lovin' Every Minute of It" video

would deffo like to hear more from the cowpunk band.

i seem to have gone years thinking that the get lucky cover was some trashy hip early '00s electronic thing, did someone do an homage or have i conflated it with the teaches of peaches?

"the kid is hot tonight" seems kinds cars-like to me: leads off with a persistently propulsive eighth-note baseline ala "just what i needed," has a breakout into a full "maybe baby" or "touch and go" style giddyup-cowboy rhythm somewhere in the middle section, is interspersed by terse, twiddly little synth and guitar figures. you could pony to this if you tried real hard. the overarching sound is arena rock, the gestalt is buttrock, but there are elements that weren't indigenous to arena rock of that period, i think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS8YD7Tld6A

also not sure if the rebel rebel on the cover art of s/t is a boy or a girl. androgyny has different implications than glam? one confuses while the other underscores?

tbh i'm trying to work out the perspective of the fictional new wave cover band. they supposedly like loverboy, but can't recognize the newly lange-ified version that takes the stage and think their own rendition is a more accurate representation of the loverboy aesthetic as they see it? it would be one thing for the lame new wavers in the video to be objects of contempt if they hated loverboy, but they don't. loverboy is their favorite band; they just can't countenance the current version they're witnessing. i don't know what the takeaway is supposed to be. seems awful fishy.

Loverboy had one boneheaded cockrockin' singer too many to be a new wave band; Saga was one virtuoso bass player away short of being a prog band to be taken seriously. Poor Canada.

...and now I have discovered the white supremacist folk sing calling herself Saga, and I feel worse for the failed prog band than ever.

why even put something like that in your own video? "hi, loverboy is our favorite band. we suck."

self x-post

my thesis was that most stuff perceived as new wave that actually got airplay was of the almost but not quite variety. like actual new wave was just background radiation that got filtered through mainstream acts in weird ways but somehow created an alternate "new wave" aesthetic that was its own thing. iirc, certain sectors of people thought "owner of a lonely heart" or "the spirit of radio" were new wave and they hated it.

loverboy weren't new wave either but the way the cover band in the video is portrayed seemed like a "methinks he doth protest too much" situation and i figured there was some of that influence in their past that got in that they were trying to distance themselves from, or at least the perception among hard rock fans that that shit was in there.

i could definitely imagine new wave aspects of early loverboy being handed down from the label and the smugness on display in 'lovin every minute of it' being a 'fuck you, we're huge, YOU WORK FOR US SUIT' thing.

thanks to rob sheffield in the spin book iirc for a minute people thought the mike dean of loverboy was also the mike dean of x-ray spex

paul dean, sorry

of the food network

gotta say, nothing on the writing credits of a mid-'80s loverboy album suggests the suits worked for them rather than the other way around

songs on '85s Lovin Every Minute Of It and '87s Wildside
"Lovin' Every Minute of it" (Robert John "Mutt" Lange) - 3:30
"Steal the Thunder" (Paul Dean, Mike Reno, Davitt Sigerson, Bill Wray) - 4:09
"Friday Night" (Patrick Mahassen, Wray, Dean, Sigerson) - 3:33
"This Could Be the Night" (Jonathan Cain, Dean, Reno, Wray) - 4:56
"Too Much Too Soon" (Dean, Sigerson, Wray) - 4:07
"Lead a Double Life" (Doug Johnson, Sigerson, Ted Johnson, Wray, Dean, Reno) - 4:20
"Dangerous" (Bryan Adams, Jim Vallance) - 3:29
"Destination Heartbreak" (Scott Smith, Wray, Reno, Dean) - 4:42
"Bullet in the Chamber" (Dean, Sigerson, Wray, Reno) - 5:11
"Notorious" (Bon Jovi/Todd Cerney/Dean/Reno/Sambora) - 4:39
"Walkin' On Fire" (Todd Cerney/Dean/Rhodes) - 4:17
"Break It To Me Gently" (Dean/Reno) - 4:37
"Love Will Rise Again" (Todd Cerney/Rhodes) - 4:29
"Can't Get Much Better" (Todd Cerney/Dean/Perodeau/Rhodes/Tracey) - 4:05
"Hometown Hero" (Adams/Todd Cerney/Dean/Rhodes) - 4:13
"Wildside" (Reno/West/Douglas) - 3:31
"Don't Let Go" (MacLeod/Reno) - 3:36
"That's Where My Money Goes" (Deam/O'Brien/Zappacosta) - 4:14
"Read My Lips" (Johnson/Reno/Shilkin) - 5:03
"Don't Keep Me In The Dark" (Dunne/Reno/Roberts) - 5:56 [bonus track on CD]

Only one track without the assistance of an outsider pro, where the previous albums were primarily band compositions (though on Keep It Up Bruce Fairbairn started taking some credit).

if you want to bombard the director with questions, his name is rick rosenthal and he can be found at whitewaterfilms.com. warning: embedded music.

from the get lucky wikipedia page: The wearer of the leather pants was the 14-year old daughter of the photographer.

good lord

omg!!

my one Loverboy story is that I had some friends who were recording an album in the late 90's and the guys from Loverboy were recording in another studio room. The washed up lead singer dude tried (badly) to ingratiate himself with the young hipsters in an attempt to find weed, was rebuffed.

yeah it's kinda amazing that the album after this flops and then they're done until a comeback attempt in the late 90s (prompted by journey's half-comeback in the mid-90s?).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI2LfzK0K7o

the single from paul dean's 1989 solo album, a number by Desmond Child & Kiss that didn't make the cut for their Crazy Nights

whatever sadness i felt from learning the truth about the cover to get lucky has been erased by the phrase 'paul dean's 1989 solo album'.

tbh i'm trying to work out the perspective of the fictional new wave cover band. they supposedly like loverboy,

We don't know that for certain. New Wave cover band could just be deconstructionists like the Flying Lizards - touring around hotels and covering anthemic hits. Bruce McDonald or Jim Jarmusch would have used them in a movie.

oh crap, that changes what i was going to post but i'll post it anyway unedited:

wait, the cover band in the video are lying, right? "this is a song from one of our favorite bands" is pretty much what cover bands say before every song they play. that band didn't know squat about loverboy, was the point, and that's why they couldn't recognize them or play the song "right," not all that convoluted business about them representing old loverboy vs. new loverboy that i posited.

still, that's how i feel at this point myself. that "little girl" song is great, great, great: exactly the "not quite" kind of pastiche that for me works just as well but in a different way than a version the undertones or nerves or whomever i'm pulling out of the air to make a point would work up. i can't connect that with the same band that did "lovin' every minute of it," no sir.

it still vexes me that the b-52s think they're experts on what loverboy should sound like

It's funny... I just posted this to my Facebook for shits and giggles and then came here only to find this thread...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bohVV_KlSHw

I wound up in an '80s YouTube clickhole and came across this video, which I had previously never seen. It's not cool to admit liking Loverboy and hasn't been for years, but I remember this song as a teenager who was absorbing anything with a guitar in it - mostly courtesy of the radio. (You'll notice I still haven't admitted liking it.)

But the video... Wow. It makes me wish Rembert Browne would explain it like he did so many other '80s relics in his series on Grantland. But since I can't afford him, I'll explain it, even though I lack the millennial inexperience that made his columns so charming:

The clip starts off in some nondescript Holiday Inn where the cliche of a covers band playing an off-the-beaten interstate to disinterested travelers. I don't think that cliche is true anymore. Do covers bands hole up for residencies in hotels outside of Peoria anymore?

In what I swear could be a very modern take on the band's biggest hit "Working For The Weekend," the female-led group plays about a minute of the track, turning the beer commercial rock into wry twee that I swear Pitchfork would approve. (Seriously, if, say, Beat Happening launched their comeback with a limited 7" that sounded like that, the praise would be deafening.)

Of course, this is the mid '80s, way before Sebastian Bach, let alone Belle and Sebastian, so some schlub in the crowd just happens to have Loverboy's hotel room number and calls them to come out and save the day.

Of course, Mike Reno (sans headband; which reminds me that Mike Reno's Headband would be a great name for an '80s tribute band) and the gang are having a par-tay, surrounded by hot chicks and hot licks, answers the phone (how could he even hear it? Maybe he just saw the flashing red light ubiquitous on hotel phones of the era) and he conga-lines the whole shindig while singing the minor hit.

Pit stops are made: He grabs his guitarist who is airbrushing a new six-string (while a hot girl shimmies in the background), he interrupts another Loverboy playing strip poker right as his royal flush gets the hot girl with the losing hand to remove her... extremely bulky camouflage jacket? Then they find the keyboardist imitating Liberace (by playing a white baby grand surrounded by lit candelabras, NOT by being gay - there is nothing gay about this totally heterosexual experience) who joins the traveling revelers, packing an elevator way beyond it's legal limit.

(It should be noted that there were way more dudes without shirts than you would expect, especially since even the strip poker girl still had her jacket on. Some of the girls were scantily dressed, but they were obviously classy dames and it sure was nice for Loverboy to provide some eye candy - of sorts - for their Lovergirl fans.)

The band and their posse finally make it to the lounge where they ingloriously evict the cover band and rock out as only Loverboy can while the cover band looks on disapprovingly.

As Loverboy receives adulation for their rollicking performance from the crowd of partiers, strip poker players, hanger-ons and the like, a hipster (he has a soul patch!) from the covers band ends the video with the long overdue punchline:

"Who do those guys think they are anyway," he shrugs. "They don't know how to play Loverboy. Not even close."

This video encapsulates everything amazing and horrible about the '80s in less than five minutes, while also predicting an ironic indie pop future! Who'd have thought Loverboy had it in them? Probably not even them!

1) There is almost exactly one minute of the band doing "Working for the Weekend".
2) The video is "Lovin' Every Minute of It"
3) EVERY minute of it?
4) You really mean that?
5) Hm!