A Loverboy Mixtape — Live in Everett

Let me be candid upfront. I love campy eighties music videos.

I watched VH1 religiously back when they actually played music videos and that period of my life (early teens) was when I truly figured out irony. I loved it. The over-the-top synths. The feathered hair.

Subtlety meant nothing to the popular music genres that grew around the visual medium of television: bigger, flashier, more soft-focusy was everything.

Loverboy, a classic example of commercialized teen music-meets-arena-rock are coming to Everett this weekend. A Canadian band, Loverboy in their heyday knocked out four multi-platinum albums. Today they are aging rockers with everything that that cliche entails, but hey, time and decades of Miller Lite happen to us all.

I thought I would brush up on their essential hits, just to prep. Let me get you up to speed with a brief word-mixtape.

1. Working for the Weekend is their most famous song, a tune that will eternally remind me of Chris Farley’s Chippendales SNL sketch. Probably the first track to put in a mixtape of Loverboy songs, just to get warmed up.

2. Lovin’ Every Minute of It is one of those eighties music videos that starts with a gimmick. It came out in 1985, when the MTV craze was at its peak (like, how Michael Jackson was making videos that kept going… and then there was music, almost incidentally?).

The start of the video is pretty cool. It opens in a Las Vegas Holiday Inn, right off the strip. There’s a female-fronted band in pink tuxedos playing a lo-fi surf rock cover of “Everybody’s Workin’ For the Weekend” for bored tourists and Japanese businessmen.

Fake Loverboy. Surprisingly good. Why did no one sign them when they were hot?

The proprietor of the hotel gets fed up with the “lousy” cover and phones the real Loverboy, who conveniently happen to be partying in a nearby hotel room true eighties fashion (you know, objectifying women. Does this stuff still fly in music videos? I’m honestly out of the modern pop culture loop).

It’s funny because fake Loverboy is supposed to be bad, but I actually prefer them to real Loverboy. Fake Loverboy “read” more authentic to this millennial: a woman out in front, pompadours, a jazzy reworking of a campy 80’s hit. That seems highly marketable in today’s market.

Fake Loverboy need a Spotify channel, like, yesterday.

3. Turn Me Loose. For my money this is the best Loverboy song. It actually does pump me up. Solid hook, driving rythym. It’s repetitious as hell but works for that reason, in an arena-rock anthemic way. Lyrically the theme is as old as rock and roll itself: it’s my way or no way.

Put this one on a running playlist, for the sprints.

If you go to see Loverboy at Xfinity expect a good show. Yes, it will be lots of people abusing hairspray, trying to relive an era when Pac Man, cherry Slurpees, and non-apocalyptic malls were a thing.

Nostalgia has its value, so no shade thrown on that account.

But, from what I’ve seen on YouTube Loverboy still has it. Vocalist Mike Reno still has the chops and guitarist Paul Dean and bassist Scott Smith (no relation to the Fauna Shade guy) still do the quintessential 80’s thing where they stand side by side on stage and rock their guitar necks up and down in unison.

So, go and have fun.

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