It was a love of rock music that kept his band plugging in nightly at beach bars up and down the East Coast for years before their big break, and that same passion still keeps John Cafferty on stage regularly more than 50 years later.
The 73-year-old North Providence native says they play as many of those beach joints as still exist – including an Aug. 10 date at the Ocean Mist in Matunuck – but he can’t deny the thrill of taking the stage in larger venues like the Providence Performing Arts Center, where John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band will perform on July 13.
“That’s the first place we played after a year-long world tour. It was like coming home,” he says of PPAC, where his cousin’s band Steve Smith and the Nakeds will open. “Stevie is a Rhode Island institution. It’s going to be a fun night with the big hits, album cuts people love and some new stuff.”
New stuff? That’s right – after almost 30 years, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band are poised to release an as-yet unnamed album that they hope will drop in August. Despite the passage of decades since their 1988 album “Roadhouse” and even longer since they were tapped through a serendipitous connection to record the 1983 soundtrack to “Eddie and the Cruisers,” songs on the new album reflect the band’s rock 'n' roll roots.
“I remember my cousin and I in the beach cottage in Matunuck, listening to rock stations on our transistor radios. We were inspired by rock,” Cafferty recalls.
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Rhode Island shoreline communities provided a backdrop for his musical development, as the band rented summer houses in the winter to “make a lot of noise” without bothering neighbors. Band houses were the hub as they played beach towns from Florida to Maine. Clubs, which admitted anyone over 18, were packed in those days as the band “built a name for ourselves up and down the East Coast.”
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“We were at it for a while when we got a call from a music producer, Kenny Vance, an original member of Jay and the Americans, who heard us a few years before,” Cafferty says.
Vance had happened upon the band playing for rent money at The Bitter End coffeehouse in New York City's Greenwich Village. He absorbed the band’s sound – rich brass, rock bridges softened by a Beach Boys-esque summer vibe, “reflective” storytelling – and when he was scouting for a band to support “Eddie and the Cruisers” musically, he reached out.
“Honestly, he heard us being influenced by his sound from back in the day,” Cafferty says. “It shows that you just never know who’s listening.”
The collaboration produced a No. 7 hit single – “On the Dark Side” on Billboard’s Hot 100, and opened doors for the band for appearances on "American Bandstand." (“Dick Clark liked our overnight break after we’d been playing together for 12 years,” says Cafferty.) and a spot atop MTV’s charts (“I wasn’t sure what that was. I didn’t have cable at the time.”). Other hits followed, including “Tough All Over,” “C-I-T-Y” and Cafferty’s solo “Heart's On Fire” from the 1985 soundtrack for “Rocky IV.”
Time, Cafferty says, hasn’t worn the spirit of the six-member Beaver Brown Band, which features new faces but the same “dance-in-the-aisles” bounce to the music. It helps that fame came a little slower.
“We were very good at what we did because we did seven gigs – long gigs – a week. We were a bar band extraordinaire. So, when the bright lights turned on us, we knew what it meant and what it didn’t mean,” he says. “I’ve spent my whole life doing what I love to do – that’s the prize. And, if I do it right, it not only brings joy to me, but to others as well.”
If You Go ...
What: John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, with special guests Steve Smith and the Nakeds
When: July 13, 8 p.m.
Where: Providence Performing Arts Center, 220 Weybosset St., Providence
Tickets: $13 and up
Info: (401) 421-2787, ppacri.org
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