I heard a guy play with Wilson Pickett who played a
Telecaster through a Standel amp & I've never heard a
guitar sound so amazing. It was the first I ever heard a
distorted guitar & this was before Hendrix or anything
else. This guy was a real pioneer & I couldn't believe It,
so the next day I went out & bought a Telecaster, figured
out I actually got a hold of an organ player, had the same
kind of sound coming out of his rig. I asked ‘how did
you do that sound?’ He said, I don't know, I don't think
I want to tell ya. I said, come on man, I'm not going to
be competing with you, I'm a guitar player, not an organ
player. He said ok, here's what you do… so I coughed all
his electronic wizardry & I launched into that sound,
you know the distorted, bluesy; same sound I have now
basically.
Alexxis: Very cool. So now, you met Mike Reno back in
‘78 at the Calgary Refinery Nightclub?
Paul: That's right. The story, I was playing bass actually,
I had maybe 2 or 3 gigs playing bass in a power trio. We
were doing basically AC/DC covers & stuff like that &
the guitar player used to play with Mike , & Mike had
just left his band Moxy from Toronto. He came back to
Calgary where I was living. He came back to visit Craig
the guitar player in the band I was in & I heard Mike
singing & said ‘oh man, this man has an amazing voice’,
so i talked to him after. You know, i was, they were in
another room jammin, hangin out & I heard Mike sing-
ing, so we got together the next day, he said yeah, let's
try it out & see where it goes. We wrote a couple tunes,
we wrote “ Always On My Mind” & “ Meltdown”, which shows up on a couple albums & yeah we hit it off right
away. Yeah, he was working construction, it was in the middle of winter in Calgary, so you can imagine those
days it was -30 below for weeks at a stretch, it was brutally cold before global warming. So anyways, he was work-
ing outdoors, I'm not sure if he was hauling cement in the wheelbarrow or hauling lumber up to the fifth floor on
the rafts, he was doing something like that. He was just trying to make a living & he just left his band so he came
down after work so we whipped up a couple tunes & just sort of stayed together for four years almost.
Alexxis: Very cool. So, I guess it was like a year later when you actually formed Loverboy in ‘79?
Paul: Actually, we formed Loverboy, the way I see it Mike & I formed Loverboy when we first met. We didn't
actually come up with this crazy idea Loverboy, but yeah, we just automatically hit it off & started writing songs.
I had a record deal in place that I was committed to with my previous band Streetheart, but it wasn't a great deal,
they didn't promote it or anything or get it on the street or I didn't feel it anyway. So, we were obligated, we had
to send them demos & had them ok it, so Mike & I wrote the worse demos you ever heard, probably sang it out
of tune & out of time.. horrible. The cheesiest tunes we could think of just to fulfill my obligation, so we sent it
to them.. thankfully they passed on it. They said,’ Sorry guys, we have to pass, we said, that's ok no problem. So
at least we were free & negotiate whatever we could in the future. It took a couple years to get the song’s & the
rest of the band together, to shop a deal around. We were actually playing live, we've been playing about 2 or 3
months before we actually got a deal, even then it was only a Canadian deal.
Alexxis: Right, I was going to say that you were turned down by the US labels Right? Initially.
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