Along For The Ride

With more than 30 studio albums to his name, Canadian guitarist Pat Travers really should be better/more widely known. But, he says, our destiny is not something we have control over.

- James McNair

While the playful, sassy music videos ZZ Top made for the singles from 1983’s Eliminator wowed MTV and famously rebooted the Texan trio’s career, not every voyager thrived in that brave new world. In 1982, the year after MTV arrived, the video promo was still finding its feet, and Pat Travers, for one, briefly came a cropper.

The promo for the Canadian singer/guitarist’s rather brilliant single I’d Rather See You Dead had a decent enough budget, but its footage of him serenading a deceased fictional lover as she lay pegged-out in her coffin landed bumpily at MTV, even if the corpse did join in at one point.

“I remember it was shot in a mansion in New Jersey”, a laughing Travers says today. “We hired a real coffin, and the funeral-home people were like: ‘You will look after it, won’t you?’ But as soon as they left we were all climbing into it to have our picture taken. I didn’t enjoy making videos, and that one was probably a little too out-there.”

Perhaps remembering the scene in which he and his fellow pall bearers did a little choreographed dance, Travers laughs again and shrugs his shoulders. “What can I say? Videos weren’t my forte, I just did what the marketing people asked.”

Some 43 years on from the Pat Travers Band’s 1980 classic Snortin’ Whiskey (And Drinkin’ Cocaine), Travers is chatting to Classic Rock at his home in Florida. These days he leads a much more temperate existence than that depicted in the aforementioned song, with mindfulness, meditation and practising karate at Black Belt, Third Dan all part of his routine. “I train so I don’t have to fight – that’s how