Pat Travers

by Dennis Walkling

"I needed an opportunity to get back in the studio and basically get my recording chops back together," says guitarist Pat Travers of Blues Tracks, his latest release.

For those who've been wondering where Pat Travers has been these last… oh… eight years or so, this might seem like the understatement of the decade.

"We got a little waylaid along the way here," he says with a resigned reflection. "The whole problem started about ten years ago with management and having to do legal battles, and then still trying to make albums while I was doing all of that… and I had a lousy marriage and I drank too much..." he continues, punctuating his tainted history with a period of impending optimism. "All that is gone, all that excess baggage."

'"Our last major release was in '84 with Hot Shot," says Travers, "the last album I did for Polygram." Since then, Travers has continued, if a little less than internationally received....

'We did have an album that came out on a French label called School Of Hard Knocks it was originally distributed by Rough Trade over here. But they went belly-up right at that time, so I think they managed to get about 500 copies out We may re-record a couple of the tunes from it, but that album was recorded right in the middle of a lot of personal bullshit going on in my life. I was very distracted and I don't think it has some of the best performances that could've been."

But those tunes didn't end up on Blues Tracks, mostly because Travers just wanted to have fun again, playing music he liked that he'd never had the chance to do before. Blues Tracks is his twelfth album (counting the 500-seller), and his first for Shrapnel Records. It follows in the Travers tradition, with a heavy blues element coating an underlying rock aesthetic. "I'm just gonna be doing stuff that I really enjoy doing," he says, "and I'm not gonna attempt to be current in any way other than the fact that people will like what I'm doing currently."

Since 1976 Travers has remained true to that philosophy, recording for Polygram and yielding such radio favorites as "Crash And Bum" and "I La La La Love You," and teen anthems like "Snortin' Whiskey" and "Boom Boom (Out Go The Lights)," as well as top 40 albums like Pat Travers Band Live! Go For What You Know, CrashAnd Burn and 1981's Radioactive. In the years following Hot Shots, Travers has had time to clean up his act on all fronts, to get back in the studio, and to get a new outlook on how he makes music. The immediate result is Blues Tracks, and the industry story goes something like this:

The initial impetus to get the project going was from Mike Varney, the owner of Shrapnel Records in New York, who has an affinity for releasing works by guitarists of note.

"Last year around this time," Travers remembers, even before he was approached by Varney, "I had tinkered around with the idea of putting my old band back together for one album, which would've been Tommy Aldridge and Pat Thrall and everything. So I got Doug Thaler involved. He used to be my agent. He now manages Motley Crüe and Winger and a band called Roxy Blue from Memphis. Doug is taking care of the record deal side of things. He set up a thing with Geffen and everything was gonna happen. Unfortunately Pat's mom was stricken with inoperable cancer. It was a terrible time, and that fell apart.

"While I was trying to put something else together I decided to give Mike Vamey a call and see if he'd be interested in doing something."

That something, obviously, turned out to be Blues Tracks. Originally Travers wanted to include guitarists like Jake E. Lee (Ozzy Osbourne) and Michael Schenker(MSG) to play some of the solos on sometunes but because of "weird management" with those artists, that idea fell through. Travers decided to go ahead with the project anyway.

"I got together with a great drummer Joe Nevolo, and this fantastic bass player, Brad Russell," explains Travers. The trio spent "eleven days back in March in a little studio in northern California called Prairie Sun Studios. We just had a list of old favorite blues tunes, obscure blues tunes or tunes that I'd always wanted to do and I've never done. We came up with different arrangements for these things and I also wrote one of my own tunes while I was there. It was a productive ten days and I think it turned out well. The album has a lot of energy."

Blues Tracks contains notable standards like "Statesboro Blues," "I Can't Quit You," "Sitting On Top Of The World" and "Just Got Paid," all done only the way Travers could do them. The record is being distributed by Relativity, the label at one time responsible for Scatterbrain and Joe Satriani.

"This release," explains Travers of Blues Tracks, "is kind of a specialized thing, and I guess you'd really have call it a solo project 'cause it doesn't really include my band."

The band of which Travers speaks-guitarist Jerry Riggs, drummer Kevin Neal and bassist Peter "Mars" Cowling-isn't the one that played on the album, but rather The actual band with whom Travers tours and plans to record with in the future. This is a venture that could prove to land Travers and Co. on the Elektra label.

"We've been playing one song off Blues Tracks and we'll be playing more," says Travers of the band's current rehearsal itinerary. "We're gonna go ahead and do a little audition thing for Elektra because when they saw us we were just basically playing my old set."

What could follow for Travers is his second major label signing, another new record and a more extensive tour in the next year or so.

"We're gonna do a thing in October and November," he hints at his schedule, "where we're gonna go out west We haven't been there for over a year. That'll be about as much 'touring' touring . Everything else we've been doing is just like picking up two weeks, three weeks worth of dates here, then coming back and trying to work on new material and whatnot, trying to get this record deal thing together and just take care of business. Very soon we'll be presented with the opportunity to stop doing that and just purely get creative and write and record."

Despite Travers' self-proclaimed "solo" tag on Blues Tracks, he assures that future projects will not be so individually motivated.

"Mars hasn't had an opportunity to really work and get out there and indulge his full creativity in a long, long time. I'm gonna loosen the reins on him."

He continues. "Kevin Neal... he's the rookie of the band, and this'll be the first time he's ever had an opportunity to work on a big album, and I'm also encouraging him to assert his own personality. And of course Jerry Riggs is a fantastic singer and a great songwriter in his own right. So there'll be some Jerry Riggs tunes, there'll be a lot of his vocals in my songs, and it's just real good."

The band is really smokin' at the moment," Travers closes with more than a hint of enthusiasm. "If you're still a fan or you still like the stuff...or even if you don't...you're gonna like what's coming out. It draws on whatever was interesting about me in the past, and does that, but more. I'm just real excited."

JAM ENTERTAINMENT NEWS (N) / September4, 1992

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