Pat Travers
Back On The Steet

by Bruce Pollock

In a spiral staircase in the conference room at PolygramRecords, PatTravers lights a cigarette, announcing it's hislast before he quits smoking. "I'll be thirty in a few days," he says, "sowhy not?" A recording artist for a decade, but never a star, the rockerhas more than health on his mind these days, as he nervously awaitsthe release of his 7th album, Hot Shot. "I feel like I'm having to reallyfight my way back now," he observes. "I have an obstacle, a goal to achieve, and although I've never really had super, superstardom, or all the things that I wanted, now I have another chance to get those things."

Though always well-regarded among both fans and players, Travers' ascent toward guitar heaven somehow culminated with the Canadian-born England-signed, now Florida based musician lying mangled in a treetop, miles from nowhere. His last few albums stiffed,his much-touted partnership with Pat Thrall went phffft, his band disbanded, he was several hundred thousand in the red. This was not what he'd imagined all those years ago, lip-synching Beatle songs in front of his mirror in Ottawa.

"My career climbed really nicely right up to Crash and Burn/' Travers remarks. "After Crash I didn't seem to know what I was doing anymore. I wasn't being turned on either by the guitar or the music or the whole situation. I had problems with my manager and the business and owing people money. It was the same old story of getting out there and touring and selling records and earning a lot of money, but not seeing any. And even after that, at the end of the day finding out I was $300,000 in the hole and there was no more money coming in. All that sort of came down on my head.

"One of the reasons why I screwed things up was because when things are going good you tend to ignore the little details, and Then the shit hits the fan then you gotta account for those things, and you're kicking yourself in the ass 'cause you haven't got any money, and you look back at the dumb things you did. The worst is when you don't feel like playing. That's when drugs and booze turn into a big crutch. If you keep trying to get yourself buzzed enough to enjoy playing, it doesn't work anymore. In my case, I played myself through it, and I think the new record reflects that I had some direction about music and that I feel good again about playing. But this period made me realize that there are ups and downs in everyone's life, in everyone's career, and to think that it's just going to continue going up is probably not healthy, because when the bottom falls out, as it does to a lot of people, you get depressed, and go, My life is over and I'm not even thirty."

Luckier than most unemployed foot soldiers in the guitar army, Travers still hadhis record contract and an advance to put together the album, enabling him to push thoughts of washing dishes or programming computers well out of his mind. "Fortunately, my wife Elizabeth is very intelligent and probably a lot more down-to-earth than I am and she helped me pick out accountantsand lawyers. We're a lot more in dependent than we ever were. My manager now does what a manager should, and that's take care of my career instead of paying my taxes, paying my mortgage, doing all thethings that are my responsibility anyway. I think I always resented that; I had the attitude that I'm an artist and I don't have to worry about the mundane things. But that's one of the rotten things about life. Despite all the nice things, the stardom and all that, you still got to pay the mortgage, the garbage has to go out and you gotta buy groceries."

Travers now has a new band, the remains of Riggs, a Warner Brothers act of one album's duration, Jerry Riggs on guitar and his bass player, Barry Dunaway. Travers found himself a drummer, Pat Marchino, after going through a bunch on the new album. "I used three different drummers, three different bass players. I just brought people in as I went along." The new band is responsible for his new attitude. "I feel rejuvenated," says Travers. "I'm the first one at rehearsals, and not just because I'm the one with the keys. I'd rather be in a band. It's a lot more fun if you have a group of guys and it's like us against the world."

The world thus far, apart from several naked gigs with the unmasked Kiss, has not extended much beyond the borders of Florida, smoky rock 'n' roll clubs overlooking the alligator fights, the smell of swamp grass. "You enjoy small places for a little while," Travers allows. "I'm getting tired of it only because you pick up a lot of bad habits: smoking cigarettes on stage, drinking Jack Daniels and Coke, telling a joke to the guys, just generally being a bar band. But it's a lot of fun to stretch out for an hour and a half and do what we want. When we play the larger halls we'll probably be restricted to fifty minutes, so we'll have to compress things and act more professionally."

What hasn't changed is Travers' allegiance to the two-guitar format, despite the Pat Thrall falling-out. We did make some great music and we had an audience," Travers says, "but Pat is a little erratic and jealous. He wanted to be more in control and have his own band. That's fair. When he initially joined up we pretty much had the understanding that it wasn't going to be a forever type thing. If you're going to have a two guitar band, I think it's preferable if the two guys have different styles, even to the point of playing two different guitars. Jerry plays a Strat and I play a Les Paul. The two sound really good together and his style is decidedly different from mine. Mine is more blues-based and his is a little more of a fusion-type style. You've got two instruments so you can do a little orchestrating so you don't just play back-to-back chords, although sometimes that's effective. What you have to do is record a lot of stuff, then listen to yourself back. That way you can find out the good things and you won't get too many wild duos."

Unfortunately, you won't find any of their wild duos on Hot Shot, as Travers handles all the guitar work here by himself. "As much as I'm excited about this album," he says, "I'm even more excited about the next one." On Hot Shot Travers wanted his solos to be extensions of the melody, functional rather than flashy. "If you listen to the solos they more or less take on an improvised version of the vocal melody. That's pretty much the way I've always looked at solos. "I'm not a real fast player. Basically, I beat up my guitar. The reason I have a reputation is that I can get into playing live. I do what I want—and that doesn't necessarily mean having a whole lot of technique or finesse. I think one of the reasons I probably always will be a musician is the freedom—the fact that you really are free to do just about anything you want, under the right circumstances. Sometimes it gets a little scary, 'cause you find out how crazy you really are. You go, Whoops, I may have crossed over the line. But then you pick out what's good about it and incorporate it."

Helping Pat Travers incorporate just about anything into his sound is a fairly sophisticated rack system. "I havea Lexicon Super Prime Time, and a PCM 41—just with thos two devices it's possible to get an infinite amountof things going. And then I have a couple of stereo flangers and some other little things that are real old, an MXR blue-box hooked up to an MXR phaser 100. The two by themselves sound terrible, but hooked together—I've got them on one switch—it's my growl sound. It's great for screaming through the pickup, too. On Women on the Edge of Love, I play a solo and at one point it sounds like someone with a whammy bar; it's actually me picking up the guitar and screaming into the pickup—that's a neat little trick." Let no one accuse Travers of being anything less than State-of-the-Art. He has nothing against, for instance, playing lead synth. "The only thing I don't like is that they're too available now. The programs come preset and nobody really has to work at it. In the old days people really had to struggle to get sounds out of those things, and when you did you had your own style. All of a sudden you were an individual. Now it's very difficult to tell, especially with the Simmons drums."

Yet Travers won't deny the benefits such technology bestows upon the user, his own songwriting efforts being a case in point. "I play guitar along with my drum machine," he says. "Then I'll overdub possibly a synthesizer bass or a real bass myself. Then I have a nice little bed to work with. If I have a vocal idea I'll put that down right away, and then put a second guitar over that. Once I get something a little more solid I'll try some other embellishments, maybe a little keyboard. When I get that done I'll play it for the other guys, so they can contribute their ideas. I'm fortunate enough to have my own rehearsal studio a mile and a half from my house, so I can go' there day or night. I find if I don't go to the studio every day I feel guilty. Usually I have
four or five things going at once and I'll work on one song until I run into a wall, then I'll move to a different one.

"Doing an album is so concentrated. You're just locked in for five six months. Time expands, especially when you're recording. What takes a couple of seconds—60 inches of tape—seems to go on for minutes. It's incredible. And then when you get your perspective back, after six months or a year, you suddenly realize that one part just goes zoom, and it's gone and probably
public just doesn't like. But a good sign with this record is that I can still enjoy it even after working on it solidly for five months."

Pent up for so long, it's not surprising that Travers is gnawing at the bit, eager to get his band on the road for real. "I just wish you could see us," he says, and he's one rocker who really means it. "No matter how much you practice, when you get out and play live it's a different level of physical energy. You end up with little cuts, skin flying all over the place."

Whether he ultimately recaptures his position atop the Mount Olympus of metal mongers, the rocker's nirvana, or instead slinks twanging into the void, Pat Travers is confident of his own style, in a world of flash and trash. "Even in my bar band days, when I did cover tunes, I would always try to learn the essence of what made a song tick," he recounts. "Then I'd just go and do my own thing. Just do whatever I wanted, to the point where I couldn't sit down and play you a Hendrix song or solo note-for-note the way a lot of guys can. 'Cause I never picked them up."

Is that sacreligious, blasphemous, ungodlike? Maybe so. But it's Pat Travers, pure and simple.

"I always tell people who want to learn how to play guitar that it's very important to learn some basic rhythm, and all that other stuff . . . but you should also spend some time doing what your conception of playing the guitar would be, even to the point of standing in front of a mirror and just flailing away at it. I figure, if we could set up a Stratocaster and a nice little fuzzy amp in here, with some echo and a wah-wah pedal and a whammy bar, you could pull anyone into this office and get them in the right mood and they could probably make something that would sound reasonable." •

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