I’ve got to admit that leading up to this interview, I was going “a little crazy”. It isn’t everyday you talk to someone whose songs are interwoven in the fabric of pop culture as we know it. 50+ years, 35 Billboard hit singles, and hundreds of millions of record sales and streams later, we’re still getting high on the music of Jim Peterik. We had the honor of sitting down with Mr. Peterik to discuss his latest musical endeavor, Pride of Lions’ Lion Heart, as well as Eddie Van Halen, The Beatles, and the greatest Survivor song that never was.
For most musicians, this year has been a complete wash. But for you, between producing the latest Dennis DeYoung album, and now releasing this excellent new Pride of Lions album, 2020 just seems like another year in the life of Jim Peterik.
Jim Peterik: It’s funny Joe. Not a whole lot has changed for me. What I miss the most is shows and touring with The Ides of March. Ever since I left Survivor in ’96, I put back together my original “Vehicle” band, with the original four members. We’ve been touring our asses off. So I fill in when there’s no shows. I’m writing with Dennis DeYoung again for part two of 26 East. I’m writing with Robert Lamm for a new Chicago record. I’m enjoying the writing and recording aspect of it. I have my own recording studio in my house. I roll out of bed and hit the studio, so it’s not so bad!
Sounds like you’ve got it made! *laughs*
JP: *laughs* Yeah, pretty much. We all have hardships, but I turn 70…it feels like such a big number…on November 11th and I don’t feel it. I feel young at heart and rockin’. I’ve got a great wife I’ve been married to for 48 years now, and a son named Colin who’s a great musician and studio owner. It sounds like I’m bragging. I guess I am. I have two grandchildren: a three year old girl and a two year old boy. I feel very fortunate.
Well you have every right to brag. I’ve listened to Lion Heart maybe three or four times now, and it is rocking and exciting. I’d like to start by going back to the beginning of Pride of Lions. When did you first meet Toby Hitchcock?
JP: That’s a great story. The Ides of March were playing an outdoor festival in 2001. We were playing in Valparaiso, Indiana. Afterwards, this young guy comes up to me and says, “I’m Toby Hitchcock! I’m that singer that your niece Kelly told you about.” My niece Kelly is a singer. Now she’s a mom which takes up a lot of her time. She auditioned for a Dick Clark TV show that never aired, but in the process of auditioning, she might this guy named Toby Hitchcock. She called me after that and said, “Uncle Jimmy, there’s a singer you’ve gotta here. He’s amazing!” So when he introduced himself in Valparaiso, which happened to be his hometown, I said, “You’re that guy my niece Kelly has been telling me about.” He said, “Yeah, that’s me.” Long story short, I said “You’ve gotta come to my house. I gotta hear you.”
I set it up for an audition at my studio and I called Kelly. I wrote a song called “No Long Goodbyes”, which never really saw the light of day. I got him behind the microphone and I got chills. I got goosebumps. I heard all these amazing voices in one voice. I heard a little bit of Dennis DeYoung. I heard a little bit of Jimi Jamison. I heard a little bit of Tommy Shaw. Oh my God. I was flipping out. I called Serafino (Perugino). He’s the head guy with Frontiers Records. He was saying, “Maestro, you must make another album.” “What kind of album? I don’t have a singer.” “Well you must find one.” I said, “Serafino, I’ve found the singer. His name is Toby Hitchcock.” Serafino said, “Well I’m coming to America next week. I’m coming to Nashville. Why don’t you bring Toby down to Nashville and audition for me?” So we flew down to Nashville and rented a studio. We met with Serafino and Mario (de Riso). Serafino looks at Toby, who was 23 at the time, and says, “Toby! You’re just a baby!” Toby was laughing and I said, “Well you won’t think he’s a baby when you hear him sing.”
We just sang live. It’s funny. There’s a song on this album, “Rock & Roll Boom Town”. I had written that all those years ago and finally, as you know, it’s out on this record. Why it didn’t come out sooner, I don’t know. I just forgot about it. Anyways, we sang “Rock & Roll Boom Town” live, in the control room of the studio. They were totally blown away. We did a few more that we worked out. From the first album, we did “Sound of Home”. Serafino’s yelling, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” He’s going absolutely crazy over Toby. He signed me to my first album deal which was of course just called Pride of Lions. It’s the one with the lion painting on the cover. We got to work and that became our first landmark album.
I have to give you my opinion. The album we just put out is the only album I like as much as that first album. You have all those years to amass new material. Ever since I left Survivor, I was putting together new material. That first album had “Sound of Home” and “Gone” and all these songs that I consider gems. I think all the Pride of Lions albums are extremely good, but on this one, I was hitting on all cylinders. I’m really proud of Lion Heart.
The Pride of Lions sound has a lot in common with the big, arena rock style of the 80s. It’s similar to Survivor, 38 Special, and other acts you were associated with. Do you have a particular approach to writing these types of songs?
JP: I put myself in a frame of mind when I’m writing with anybody. The Ides of March, I know what that is by heart. It’s the horns and soulful thing. For Dennis DeYoung, you put a slightly different head on. On that record, the first thing I showed him was “Run for the Roses”, which is one of my favorite songs on that record. So I try to put myself in a frame of mind of what Dennis would sound great doing. The same goes for any of the bands. With Pride of Lions, I know Toby’s voice so well, and I know my own voice. When I first put together Survivor, the original plan was for me to share vocals with Dave Bickler. It never came to pass. Frankie (Sullivan) was very instrumental in saying that we need just one lead singer. I was very disappointed, but I took one for the team. I realized we had a great singer in Dave Bickler. I stepped aside to do the background vocals, songwriting, keyboards, instead of guitar, but I always missed playing guitar and singing, or at least co-singing.
When I put together Pride of Lions, I said, “Well, this is my chance to do what I originally wanted to do with Survivor: share lead vocals and do a hell of a lot of guitar work on my own.” Pride of Lions was my chance to shine and hear my voice, but I have no self illusions. I know my voice does not have the range of a Toby Hitchcock or a Jimi Jamison or a Dave Bickler. The format is I’ll generally take the verses and maybe the pre-chorus. Then I turn it over to the real tenor, Toby Hitchcock, and he takes it through the roof.
Absolutely. Toby is one of the finest voices, not just in the melodic rock world, but the world in general right now.
JP: He’s such a humble guy. He’s got a lot of self esteem, but he never comes off as a bragger or an egomaniac. He’s just a regular guy. I remember being in the control room when he sang “Sleeping with a Memory” and going, “Holy crap!” I’ve always loved the power ballad. It’s kind of a cycle. Every Ides of March album had one power ballad. We had a song called “Diamond Fire” which started the trend toward writing that one power ballad. When I started Survivor, there was always one song like “Ever Since the World Began”, or “Man Against the World”, or the big one, “The Search is Over. It’s a cycle where I’m always determined to write a great power ballad because I love that form.
I know you have a vast collection of guitars. Were there any in particular you gravitated towards while recording Lion Heart?
JP: It’s kind of a potpourri. I have a Les Paul that I had refinished in sparkle tiger. It’s just a spectacular guitar. I used that on “Lion Heart” and “We Play for Free”. Then I have this British flag Epiphone, where the whole front is painted like a British flag. It’s made in China, but it’s one of my best guitars! I paid $600 for it. I have all these mammoth guitars that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. I have a flying V, original Les Pauls, etc. I end up playing a Chinese guitar! *laughs* It’s such a good guitar that I had to use it a lot. My favorite brand is Minarik. I have seven of them. There’s one carved like a flame on the back. People say, “You’re not a heavy metal guy!” You don’t have to be a heavy metal guy to play a weird looking guitar. That’s another one that made a lot of appearances on this album.
It’s been 17 years since the first Pride of Lions album which is absolutely fucking crazy. It’s still the same band of musicians. It’s Ed Breckenfeld on drums, just a slamming guy. Although Colin, my son, played drums on the title track. His bass player, Kevin (Campbell), played too because my rhythm section wasn’t available that day. But normally, it’s Ed on drums, Klem Hayes on bass, Mike Aquino on guitar. I call him my Swiss Army knife because he can play any style of music. There’s Christian Cullen on keyboards and me on guitar. I do a lot of the leads, but if you hear something really fast and fancy, it’s probably Mike. *laughs* I’m a good melodic player, but I leave the fast notes to him.
Well it helps to have a Swiss Army knife in the band!
JP: Like I said, he can play any style of music. We were talking about my various styles. I would say I like melodic rock better than anything else as with Survivor, Pride of Lions, 38 Special, Sammy Hagar. Other than country and rap, which just doesn’t speak to me, I enjoy all the other genres, including what they now call “yacht rock”. It’s funny. I’m writing with Chicago right now and there’s a song that we wrote that’s yacht rock. It doesn’t mean it’s lame. It just means it’s kind of mellow and groovy.
There are so many great songs on here. The lead off single, “Carry Me Back”, has a super nostalgic 80s vibe in both the music and lyrics. Can you tell us how that song came to be?
JP: That’s one of my favorites. It took me back to when I wrote “High on You”: something unabashedly pop and melodic. I came up with the melody first. It was really a challenge to find the right words. It was a melody before it was even a song. Then I started singing “Carry me back to the lights of the city. The long hot summer back in ’83.” I was gonna say ’73, but Toby wasn’t born then, so we made it ’83. Toby says, “Jim! I was only two years old in ’83!” “Well it’s a good number!” *laughs* so we stuck with ’83. When I came up with the words, and the words matched with the melody, I knew I had something really special. It’s really about a relationship. You can interpret whether that relationship with the girl is still current or if this guy is looking back at someone that he dated and never went further with. He’s thinking back of those magic times when they were together. For myself, I can relate to the former, having been together with one lady for 48 years. Sometimes we just reminisce and that’s what this song is about. It’s about reminiscing to the best time of our lives.
I know you had mentioned earlier “Rock & Roll Boom Town”, which is my favorite cut on here. How long ago was that written? Was it originally meant for the first Pride of Lions album or does it go back to Survivor?
JP: This was early Survivor! Before we even had a record deal!
Wow!
JP: I showed it to the band. I don’t know why it never got cut. I think we played it for Ron Nevison for the first Survivor album. I don’t know. He just passed on it. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I don’t like that song.” It just got buried by other songs on that first album like “Somewhere in America”. It was almost for the best because it lay in a trunk for all these years. I said, “It’s time for this song.” I brought it out, like I said, for that first audition for Toby and Serafino. But it got buried again! That is until I was making this album. I said, “Damn it! I’m gonna cut the fuck out of that song!” It wasn’t quite done either. I ended up finishing it off for this album. I only had one verse and I was repeating a verse. I didn’t have a bridge, so I wrote a bridge. It came full circle with this album.
A lot of young people ask, “What is the Rock & Roll Boom Town?” It can be whatever you want it to be. For me, it’s those magic days of Los Angeles. I was 19 years old. We flew to Hollywood with The Ides of March. We had a #1 hit called “Vehicle”. Suddenly, we were on The Dick Clark Show and the Mama Cass Show. We were living the dream. There were the palm trees and the billboard signs with the next big Bob Seger album or whatever. That was the rock & roll boom town. The records were selling and the platinum was flowing. 8 years later, when I wrote the song, it was going downhill. There were bums on the street and pollution in the air. In those songs, I’m talking about the early 70s when it was just an amazing city.
It’s funny. The next question I was going to ask was, “When did you first visit Hollywood and what impact has it had on you?“
JP: That was our first trip to L.A. For a lot of the guys in The Ides of March, it was our first airplane ride. It really shaped our lives. We didn’t want to come home to Berwyn, Illinois. I was still living with my parents. It was such an exciting town. We were free and there were the girls and all the recording studios and the Capitol Tower. It was just so exciting.
Speaking of Hollywood, last week we lost one of the most prominent figures of the Sunset Strip scene, Eddie Van Halen. Did you ever cross paths with Eddie over the years?
JP: Yes, but only briefly. First of all, he’s one of my all time heroes as a guitar player and band leader. I met him at party in Hollywood. I was there with some of the Survivor guys. At the time, we had “Eye of the Tiger” out. He came up to me and complimented the song. He said, “That’s a great riff man. How did you come up with that?” I said, “You’re asking me? You got the riffs man! You’re amazing!” He was totally modest and really cool. Then he said, “I love your songwriting. That’s what I like about you guys. You write real songs.” We talked for about 10 minutes and that was the only time I ever talked to Eddie. He couldn’t have been nicer. He may have had a few drinks at the time, *laughs* but he was coherent and cool. I was hoping for more music from him, which is not gonna come now.
It really is hard to imagine. He had such an impact on everyone in the rock and metal world. And here I am a week later, still unable to process it.
JP: He really wrote the book for, not just metal, but melodic playing. Yeah, he could shred the shit out of it. But he also had melodic lines. Whatever fit the song, he did. He didn’t have to showoff. Then when he hit the keyboards on “Jump”, he was just as brilliant on the synthesizer. He was a musical cat. You could hear classical influences in all his music. The world has lost a genius.
Pride of Lions has largely been a studio project. Is it possible we could see a Pride of Lions tour in the future?
JP: Absolutely. Before the COVID thing, I was talking to Serafino. We were going to headline the Frontiers Festival in April and structure a tour around that. Not only Italy, but England. Any country that was within driving distance, we were gonna do. We were planning on seven dates. I don’t know what the current status of that is, not just with COVID, but the economy. So right now, it’s more of a dream than a reality. Fingers crossed that things change. It doesn’t have to be this Spring. It could be the following year or Fall of 2021. But we need to get out there. We need to make that impact. We’ve got a band that’s tighter than a drum and we’re ready to go. We’ve played Belgium twice at big, big festivals with 20,000 people. It’s reflected in the Live in Belgium DVD that Frontiers Records put out a number of years ago. We can really deliver live. Toby is great onstage. He jumped into that audience in Brussels and was singing to everybody. He was going down the walkway, getting in peoples’ faces, and singing the songs. He’s a showman. I want people to see that.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the biggest songs, not just of your career, but ever, The Ides of March’s “Vehicle”. Looking back, are you amazed that “Vehicle” endured the way it has all these years later?
JP: Not only endured, but its had a renaissance! That’s what I find crazy. I was 18 when I wrote that song, 19 when I sang and recorded it. When you’re 19, you think it’s just a flash in the pan. You’re not thinking forward at all. All I knew is that whenever we played that song live, even before we recorded it, the dancefloor would fill up. People would be jiving and rocking. We started thinking, “Maybe we got something here.” That horn riff is a call to arms. It didn’t surprise me that it went #1 and hung around radio for a good 10 years. Then it kind of faded away for a little bit. I don’t know if it was because Stallone used it in a couple of his movies. In Lock Up, they’re restoring a Mustang in prison while it plays. There’s been so many usages of “Vehicle”, not only in movies, but in commercials. It’s in the water now. It’s more popular than its been since 1970 and its crazy. Not a week goes by when I don’t get a request to use “Vehicle” in a new movie or a commercial. It tickles me that its still around. Who knew? We were just enjoying ourselves, trying to impress the girls and we came up with this thing that’s kind of a classic.
You’ve collaborated with many artists over the years. Are there any you haven’t collaborated with yet that you’d like to?
JP: You mean that are still alive? *laughs*
Yeah.
JP: I’ll tell you what. If Paul McCartney ever gave me chance, I’d be all over that. I’m a huge Beatles fan. I’m more of a Lennon fan than anyone else. I have a studio in my lower level called Lennon’s Den. I have images of Lennon everywhere and a guitar I had painted with his image on the front and the dove of peace on the back. He was crazy and eccentric and weird, but especially in those early Beatles years, he was the band. “She Loves You” and the stuff I was cutting my teeth on. Those were Lennon songs more than McCartney. And his voice was like biting into a tart apple. I can’t describe it. It’s the greatest rock voice I ever heard.
It’s funny you said McCartney off the bat. When I interviewed Jean Beauvoir a few months ago and asked him the same question, he responded the exact same.
JP: What can I tell you? We have good taste! I think all melodic rockers owe a debt to The Beatles. McCartney was the king of melody. Lennon, he was good, but had more balls, more teeth. It was such a magic combination.
Do you have a favorite Beatles album?
JP: Rubber Soul. They’re all so good, but that one stands out to me. There’s not a bad cut on it. It’s all memorable. It was a good period in my life where I was a teenager, I was dating. Actually, I was dating the girl I ended up marrying. I also like Abbey Road very, very much.
Abbey Road is my favorite, but when it comes to Beatles albums, there’s no wrong answer.
JP: *laughs* That’s a good one!
Finally, it may be too early to ask, but what does 2021 have in store for Jim Peterik?
JP: Just nuts and bolts. I’m gonna be finishing all the writing that needs to take place for the Chicago album. We’re working on part 2 of the Dennis DeYoung album. Oh yeah! And I’m thinking about another World Stage album! It’ll happen, but not in 2021. I’ve gotta restore my juices and gather up more ideas. I do have one idea though. What about a women’s World Stage? I would produce. I would write or co-write and women would be the focus. I’m really good friends with a lot of women in the business. I think it would be a real challenge writing for a stable of hard rocking women. I’d call it Jim Peterik’s World Stage: A Woman’s World. How about that for an idea? I think it’d be awesome.
Check out the new Pride of Lions album, Lion Heart, out now on Frontiers Records.