Springfield,
Illinois -
by Richard Hogan
Springfield,
Illinois -
Inside the half darkened Prairie Capital Convention Center, a crowd of thousands bows before the power chords of Krokus and waits for Pat Travers to take the stage. Outside in a drizzling rain, a swarm of teenagers still buzzes around the concert hall. Fans hang along the arena wall, hoping for a glimpse of a cab or lime bearing one of the two guitar gods of the evening-Travers and Ritchie Blackmore. No one notices a leather-jacketed man clutching a cased guitar and striding briskly towards the stage door. The guitarist, four other men and two Illinois blondes disappear into a maze of subterranean corridors.
Aided by the cover of April rain and a short haircut, Pat Travers has just strolled undetected to his own concert. Eventhough still groggy after an overnight bus ride from Iowa, he'd dismissed a cabbie waiting for him at the Springfield Hilton a few minutes earlier!
"Pat's so easygoing," says assistant tour manager Richie Fisher, "that he'd just as soon walk to the gig as be driven. The whole band is like that." Travers doesn't speak at all, but heads straight for the tuning room with long-lime friend and bassist Mars Cowling.
45 minutes later, 30 solid rows of raised fists greet Travers, Cowling and new drummer Sandy Gennaro as they bound onto the raised stage and tear into "Hooked on Music." From a band's-eye view, the crowd looks like a human wheat field. There's probably more blond hair in this one audience than in the five boroughs of New York City combined.
Travers is in high gear: sweat drips from his brown bangs and boyish face, and soaks through his white T-shirt. Clad in white bowling shoes, his feet find the pedals that help him fill the vacuum of sound created by the absence of former second guitarist Pat Thrall. Travers propels each song along with his Gibson Melody Maker while Cowling counterpoints the lead lines and Gennaro anchors the beat. Newer numbers like "My Life is on the Line" and "New Age Music" have the pointed incisiveness of musical barbed wire.
After 70 minutes, the audience is bobbing and stomping to the last stanza of "Snortin' Whiskey," the biggest crowd pleaser from Travers's best-selling Polydor LP, Crash and Burn. Pat, Mars and Sandy exit stage right, exhausted but smiling as they vanish from sight into the gym-like atmosphere of a white tiled, neon-lit dressing room.
The Pat Travers Band has been playing in halls like this all spring; more of the same are to come this summer, with the Tangerine Bowl and a tour of Japan both strong possibilities. (In less than two weeks in late March, Travers, co-headlining with Rainbow on all but one show, played nine concerts that grossed a total of $717.018--a tidy sum for 10 hours work. All five gigs that last week of March were standing room only.)"This is the most successful Pat Travers tour ever." declares David Hemmings, an expatriate Englishman who manages both Travers and the Inmates, "You have only to look at the weekly grosses to see that."
Yet, in one of the most paradoxical situations in contemporary rock, the very LP that Travers has been touring to promote -Radio Active- isn't living up to expectations. While it's a solid Top 40 record. it lacks the trademark three chord Travers boogie rockers that catapulted Crash and Burn to #20 last year. Management and record executives alike are trying to figure out what's gone wrong, for it's obvious from the tour that Pat's career has far from peaked.
"It's ironic that the album is called Radio Active," grumbles Jerry Jaffe, National Artist Development Director and Vice President of PolyGram Records, "because it's the least radio active of any Travers LP made in the last two years. Except in Washington, Boston and Philadelphia, radio seems to have typecast Pat as a good-time, heavy metal, party-type player, and this record has gone right over their heads." On Radio Active, Travers plays everything from soulful ballads to Pink Floyd inspired instrumentals; his predictability quotient, is definitely low.
"Unfortunately for Pat," claims Jaffe, "all radio wants to know about are self-fulfilling prophecies -- REO Speedwagon, for example." If an album goes to #l, Jaffe is saying, radio plays it three times an hour to prove it's #1; as a result, little outside the Top 10 gets airtime. "The response to Radio Active has been a disappointment to me.
"We're hoping that the new single. 'My Life is on the Line,' will help," adds an anonymous promotion man. "But if you want my opinion I thought Crash and Burn was a better album.
Pat Travers, 27, remains philosophical about his predicament. "We've got everything we want." the Orlando. Florida musician points out, "Three years ago we weren't staying in the Springfield Hilton; we were in some fleabag hotel down the street. They didn't even have dials on the phones there." Travers taps the bottom of a pack of cigarettes, and catches the one that flies out in his upturned mouth. "We don't, have to go into the `B' markets as much as we used to. Radioactive is the seventh album, you know. I think we've reached the stage where we could put out a duff album and survive it. It'd be nice not to have to worry about every record being better than the last one."
Worried or not, Travers must tread a narrow line between the spurning of rock radio ("They never play more than one cut from your album") and the propagation of its ways; it was largely radio that got him started on his singing career. Born in Toronto on April 12, 1954, Pat settled in Ottawa with his family after his dad died in '65. "That's where I started playing music," he remembers with a shake of his Irish head, "I used to drive around in my car when I was sixteen, screaming along to all kinds of things on the radio. I wanted to sing so badly that I just envisioned myself a singer. and I wasn't going to be put off, even if I didn't have a great voice.
In '75, Travers left Canada and the Ronnie Hawkins Band, where he'd been playing rhythm guitar, and new to London. He hooked up with manager Hemmings, bassist Cowling ("Nobody else would work with him!" he says affectionately) and producer Dennis MacKay. While drummers, guitarists and session men have come and gone from Travers's band, that four-man nucleus has remained basically unchanged since 1977's Putting It Straight, Pat's third album. Travers compares the spare sound of his new band with that of Patting It Straight. "There I'd finally started to learn not to put so much on the records, so it sounded better. With just three of us again, I thought the sound was going to be a little too sparse; but it just hasn`t been the case. It's a little harder for me, with all the button pressing, but I'm getting used to it. "The Springfield show was our thirty-first gig on the tour, so we're tight now.
Travers makes the rounds of those dreaded radio stations when he has days off, disparaging FM for being so limited (as he did in a syndicated Robert Klein interview taped in May), at the same time that he sensibly submits to reading local station ID's to help the promotion of his record along. He's had a couple of weeks in June to spend with his girl friend, Elizabeth ,at their new house in Orlando, before going back to work at the July 4 Day on the Green in Oakland, California. ("I've never played an outdoor gig that wasn't great; you can see all the faces.") Though he enjoys making the concert rounds, Travers hopes he can reserve a little more time for himself before the prospective August blitz of Japan. His planned June diving vacation in St. Martin's has already had to be postponed.
"The pressures greater now." he says. "As you get more successful -- and this tour is successful -- you get a bigger following, and people want more from you all the time. That's something," he sighs, "that I'm trying to fight. It's sometimes hard to keep in mind that a particular audience hasn't seen you yet, because you've done the same thing night after night. As soon as it becomes a job, that's when you want to back off."
Appeared in Circus Magazine July 31, 1981
