If it were not for Shrapnel Records owner Mike Varney keeping Pat recording then Travers may have faded into obscurity. His record sales were low in numbers and his new music nonexistent on FM radio. Despite the bleak conditions, Travers soldiered on doing what it took to stay on the road playing music.

One might think Pat Travers would have given up by 2011. But, then again, one must know Pat Travers to better understand why he didn’t pack it in. Instead of accepting the way things are, Travers took the bull by horns and is embraced new technology to bypass the music industry and get in direct contact with his fan base. Pat is very active on Facebook and he has a very affordable fan club on his website that get access to Pat and rare songs, demos and sound board recording of concerts. Pat will even do a one-on-one guitar session on Skype with those interested in hiring him.

Pat: I don’t want to call them lessons. I have been doing martial arts and you call your teacher a sensei. That is just a word that means ‘one who has come before you.’ I want to be a sensei for guitar players. You may have a teenage daughter or son who is starting to play guitar. You can book thirty minutes with me and I am able to get them to play better with just a day or two of practice. Another person may be a professional guitar player but they have gotten into a rut and they need someone to help them remember the true passion they have for playing. We all have this true passion but sometimes it can elude us. If you want to be a player and enjoy music then there are ways to go about that and I can help with that. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro you’re going to get something in that thirty-minutes.

Pat: I do them on Skype. People have Skype-a-phobia. It is great to be able to see and hear me while I am playing. We can talk to each other during that time as well. I had this thought about a year ago and I was trying to find the right medium to use for my one-on-one sessions. I have found that Skype is the best thing to use. It’s free too. You can call any computer in the world for free. You can also use it like a phone and the maximum they charge you to call the most remote place in the world is like two cents a minute. I bet you could call the space station [laughter].

Pat: I have a fan club and they call themselves the Hammerheads. If you belong to that, which is $2.95 a month, then it is $250 for a half hour one-on-one session. If you’re not a Hammerhead then it is $300. So, it is better to join as it is only $2.95 a month and you get a lot of cool stuff being a member. You can also stop anytime you want. You don’t have to go for a year or anything like that. You will get hooked though. If I am working on a song or I find an old demo or something then I put it up on the site.

Pat: Every organization has a great logo so I was trying to come up with a logo. I didn’t come up with the name Hammerheads, they did. I wrote a song years ago called “Hammerhead” that was basically an excuse for Tommy Aldridge to do a drum solo. A couple of weeks before we had gone deep sea fishing off the coast of Miami and I reeled in a great big Hammerhead shark.

Anyway, I needed a logo and I wasn’t coming up with anything. I figured someone would throw me a bitching logo but it never happened. So, one night I just hand drew a shark that I liked and I had my daughter take a picture of my favorite Paul Reed Smith guitar and my son, Elijah, found a cool font. We put the three files up as separate attachments in the fan club site and this individual named Kelly had photo shop and he put them all together. It really looks wonderful. It was great to get the fans involved and we are having these official cards and t-shirts made up with it on there. It is really slick. We are having a competition with this new song called “I’ll Never Let You Go” on the Hammerhead site. The guitar solo section has been taken off and the fans can record their own section and send it in. It doesn’t have to be guitar; it can be anything they want. They can send it in as an MP3 and we will put it online for people to hear. We will have a show of hands online to see which one they like best and I have a Paul Reed Smith guitar that I am going to give the winning Hammerhead as a prize.

Pat: Exactly, it is called coalescing your fan base. My web guru that I have made me a list of five things that I had to do and number one was coalescing my fan base. I got really involved on Facebook and we have over thirteen thousand people that like us. Before that I had zero. I have done all of these things and they’re starting to pay off. The best thing is that I am in charge and I can do things on my time. The new song was done in under an hour.

Pat: I was like a lot of people, I was used to hard work and slugging it out and doing whatever it took to get it done. That didn’t seem to work anymore. It wasn’t until Monica, my wife, put up a Facebook page for me, just over a year ago, that things started changing. We got up to a couple of hundred friends and she was pretending to be me as I stood over her shoulder. Finally, one day I just got on there and started putting up funny, oblique nonsense up there. I was just curious to find out what the responses would be. Initially, people were going, “This isn’t Pat Travers” but it was. Now people know it is really me. I don’t even have to tell them anymore because the other people on Facebook let them know it is really me and that is really cool.

Pat: Our band has been through the ringer. We have gone into some bad situations with our heads held high and came out looking good. We’ve had a lot of willpower. I think a lot of others would have given up where we kept going. This is really true of the Fidelis album that we recorded in the summer of 2008. The record company kind of fell apart and the money stopped flowing. It was scary because it was one of the best albums we had ever done. To see that it was not going to happen was really disappointing. We got it together and we used Sean Shannon’s recording studio, RedRoom, to finish all the overdubs. One song was re-recorded completely there. We got it done and it does exist and you can order it on Amazon.com and you can download it on itunes.

I think you can get it from the record label called Alexus; I have had a falling out with them. If you go to them then I think you can get a copy of the finished product. I don’t know what his intentions are and it really sucks how they have handled it because it is a really good album. We have some at shows that people can buy as well. If you order it from Amazon then you don’t get the liner notes. I am thinking of putting the liner notes up on my site so people can download them from there. That is the best I can do for now.

I have a new album that I am working on and we will have a slew of new downloads that will be available from iTunes. This stuff may not even go on an album; it is stuff that is different. It is stuff that gets recorded but never gets listened to unless you are my wife. If it doesn’t get put on an album then it just sits and why it didn’t get finished I don’t know but some of this stuff is really good. That will also be available for the fan club. We are also putting up board mixes from some of the shows because we found there are a lot of people who like that sort of thing. I also forgot to mention that if you become a Hammerhead then you can actually ask me questions and I will personally answer them. You just send the message to me and I will respond if you’re in the fan club.

Pat: We talk with people in Japan, Brazil, and England and all over the world. By this time next year I am going to have stuff on the Hammerhead site where you will be able to learn how to play this lick or that lick. I will also have a five minute section, for instance, of “Snortin’ Whiskey” where I show people the proper way to play the opening lick. When I see other people play it they don’t quite get it; it is a little more country than you think. There are some nuances in there and that is what I am wanting to convey because that is what makes it all different. We all play a minor third to the root but not like BB King does it. It is two notes, for instance, a C to an A, but the way BB does it has attack and vibrato and it is just different. These are the types of things we talk about on the one-on-ones. I will show people where to look in order to find their own style.

Pat: That would be an inspiration that I have concerning voicing and cadence. I do think about that a lot and I try to use that as a guide. I will actually think, “What would four horns in unison sound like here?”

Pat: I was not just a Hendrix freak by any stretch of the imagination. Hendrix was Hendrix but Jeff Beck was Jeff Beck and Johnny Winter was Johnny Winter. Do you think anybody has ever tapped Johnny Winter on the back and said, “Oh I’m sorry I thought you were somebody else.” That has never happened. He is that recognizable by the way he plays as well. When you hear him then you know it is Johnny Winter, well not so much now but clear into the 1990’s he was playing a hundred miles an hour and every phrase was amazing. He had a ton of enthusiasm and passion. He is the genuine article.

Johnny Winter is second-generation original bluesman; he really is. He is from Beaumont, Texas. He was 25 years old when his first album came out and that was 1969 or something like that. There were still first generation electric blues players that he saw and that he played with. He was playing with these great black players and he was the whitest guy on the earth. How ironic is that? I was lucky enough to meet him twice. We never got to jam together but I would have loved to sit with him with two acoustic guitars and I would play rhythm and he would play slide. That would have been so great.

Pat: I don’t know; I was a young man and I was unencumbered. For instance, when I came up with the riff to “Heat in the Street” it was just fun. I had that riff in England at the end of ’77. We moved back to the US at the end of 1978. Tommy Aldridge joined our band sight unseen that year. I saw him play a drum solo on TV and I thought he was awesome. My manager at the time was English and he had worked with Black Sabbath. Black Sabbath and Black Oak Arkansas had done a bunch of dates together. My manager told me one day that he could get in touch with Tommy because we didn’t have a drummer; it was just Mars Cowling and myself.

We were in New York City in January of 1978 and “Heat in the Street” was one of the new songs we were doing. We met with Tommy and he made me realize that one of the bars in the riff was missing a beat. Well, I knew it was there because I played it but I never even thought about one of the bars being short a beat. Well, Tommy could not get it. Not only could he not get it --- there are two different riffs, the main one and the one in the chorus --- the main one is faster and the chorus was longer but they are the same thing. It was no big deal to me. But Tommy couldn’t get it. We were counting to twelve and to thirteen and I said, “Guys we don’t need to count that high. How are we ever going to ever get a groove if we sit around counting that high?” Finally, he just got it. I realized that trying to tell him how to count it to play it was the wrong idea. He just had to memorize it and have fun with it. It is one of those songs that you can over think what it actually is.

Pat: My manager approached the Miami Police Department Benevolence Society and got them to let us take a couple of rental cars and block off the meters on Biscayne Boulevard so we could get started early the next morning, shooting the shot. The police also stopped traffic a couple of times for us and let their cars be in the shot. We were there about three hours. The ladies that were dressed like cops were just actors. My girlfriend at the time, Suzi McKinley, is in the back of the limousine. People used to ask me, “Is that Steven Tyler?” I never told her people said that.

Pat: We needed a good shot for the cover of the live album and I think that it was something about me not liking anything they had or something was wrong but we needed a shot. The funny thing about that cover is that the picture of me is not live in concert at all. I was in New York and they sent me to a photographer and he put me on a little wooden box about four feet square. They had lights above me and they rented a black Les Paul guitar from Manny’s or somewhere. There weren’t any amps or music and I just faked it. I just closed my eyes and got into it; that is my secret. I do that in the studio too. I just close my eyes and get into it.

Pat: At the time I had no idea because I couldn’t hear it. Now I hear it. It really jumps out at you like some kind of snake. It is very fast and vicious. That album really has a lot of energy.

Pat: Our first tour was with Rush and they did a really long set. We had to go on really early at night and play strictly thirty minutes. I knew people were sitting down and showing up but I wanted them to remember us. I told the guys that the fucking place would be packed and that we didn’t need to worry about that. I told them we had thirty minutes and that there would be no talking between songs. We just packed all we could into thirty minutes.

I knew that everybody that was walking in those doors was going to be getting their very first image of us so I knew we had to be peddle to the meddle the entire time. We had to be that good even if there was nobody there or even if they were just looking for their seats. I wanted them to look up and see four guys onstage playing with all of their might. By the time we got closer to the end of our set the place was starting to fill up so I would move into “Hammerhead” or “Boom Boom (Out Go the Lights).” Tommy had a drum solo and he always looked great doing it. We were very aware of every second of that thirty minutes we had onstage.

Pat: I got that guitar riff from my friend Derek O’Neil, who passed away a year ago. He was in the first two-guitar band that we ever put together.

Pat: Well, they are both pretty bluesy. I have never thought of it that way but yeah, we were a jam band. “Born Under A Bad Sign” was just a huge jam but “Is This Love” had to be structured throughout the entire song. We tried to do it live a few times but we never really got it to work. I have a DVD that has that on it from the Hammersmith Odeon with Tommy, Mars and me. I should stick that on the Hammerhead site. I found it the other day and it is just a mono recording but I can probably take it into the studio and make it sound better.

Pat: Well, no I didn’t. I made a threat of a lawsuit that they, by their own admission, knew they couldn’t win. It would have tied me up from recording and performing for a long time and I couldn’t afford the attorneys. They knew I couldn’t sue them; it was a Mexican standoff. They knew they wouldn’t win the lawsuit but they knew it would tie me up for about a year. I wasn’t very old then so I wasn’t going to miss out on recording and playing at that time.

Pat: That was interesting. I had cut my hair really, really short and I wished that I had not done that. Back then there was a lot of things that I wish I had not done. It would have been a much better tour experience for me if I had not done some of that stuff. I remember hearing “Hush” with Ritchie Blackmore when I was fourteen years old. It was magic to me. He played with such great vibrato and it was so unique. I was a huge fan of his. To be on a co-headlining tour with him was amazing. I actually was the headliner on some of those shows but to be honest I really didn’t enjoy that tour.

Pat: We’re going to play together. It will be my band with Ronnie Montrose, Mark Farner and myself. I am not sure when our first date is but I knew we have about eight dates. They are going to be adding more all the time. We are having some artistic differences with one of the members. I want to do it one way and somebody else wants to do it another way. The way that I see it would be really good for casinos and fairs. It would be Pat Travers tunes with all of those great Montrose songs and Grand Funk Railroad songs. Ronnie and I will play our Les Pauls in open E tuning on “Bad Motor Scooter” and Mark will sing it. You should hear Mark sing “Bad Motor Scooter” he sings his ass off on that song.

Pat: I like a bunch of the songs on there but there are songs I don’t like. The songs I don’t like are the songs that I didn’t write. “Living on the Edge of Love” and the others I didn’t write and the record company wanted them on there because they were supposed to be hits but they were not.

Pat: I loved “Killer” but I wrote that one. It was a total ZZ Top rip off. I knew when I wrote it that it was a total ZZ top rip off but I just didn’t care because I just loved that song.

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