NEW YORK- The members of Player are utterly imperturbable. Following their No.1 single "Baby Come Back", and their latest lp Danger Zone, the group struts onto stages confidently, coolly, with pure professionalism. It little concerns them that people hearing "Baby Come Back" searched in vain to find Daryl Hall and John Oates among their membership, and that "Prisoner Of Your Love" is sung to be a disco-fied beat with harmonies uncannily resembling the brothers Gibb. "It could have been worse!", asserts bassist Ronn Moss. "People have to have a reference point when they hear a new group. The Eagles were compared to America, and it didn't hurt them any."
Player's mention of their Los Angelenos might hold a modicum of wishful thinking. After spending several unsatisfying years playing in bands with such names as Count Zeppelin and the Fabled Airship or (strange but true) Punk Rock, Moss sees something magical in 'Baby Come Back'. "I dreamed about it", he recalls. "I thought we recorded the song, that, why shouldn't it be a hit? It had incredible potential, we just felt it in our bones when we worked it up, but you never know..."
According to the lead vocalist J.C.Crowley, co-writer with Briton Peter Beckett of all Player songs, Danger Zone stresses the groups musicality, not hit formulas. " There aren't any short songs on the album, which comes from it's live aspect. We set everything up in the studio almost as if we were on stage. We don't even add anything we can't do on stage. It's incredible how we covered it. Sometimes I'm almost embarrassed.", he deadpans.
Player's approach to dealing with the rock biz, it's illusions and facades, has been as unsubtle as Crowley's sarcasm. They enlisted producers Dennis Lambert and and Brian Potter by walking the band's three guitar players into their office. Says Moss, " It's easy to put a tape on a shelf, but you can't put three guys on a shelf. We made appointments, we didn't hang out like bums, but we were very forceful." Crowley says the production duo, known for their rigorious work with The Four Tops and Tavares, is "open and malleable" in dealings with Player.
The members of Player are still close enough to their pre-hit fanasties to set goals of not relying upon nine-to-five jobs, cocky enough to think about controlling their records from products to packaging. Who can argue with an attractive quintet, clothed in off-the-rack leathers, so clean their hairdos are unruffled at shows end, their shirts untarnished by sweat? Player openly recycles the American harmonic pop tradition, "listening to everything, putting it together, and spitting it out as our own thing." Exactly.
Toby Goldstein
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