Killer’s Instinct

Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew is rolling into "Killer's Instinct," the second cut on Heat In The Street, and this one still bites. Pat Travers cut that record in the summer of 1978 down in Miami at Quadradial, then mixed it at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, and it was the first album billed as the Pat Travers Band. Nicko McBrain had already moved on, and in came drummer Tommy Aldridge from Black Oak Arkansas, plus a second guitarist, Pat Thrall, who Journey's Neal Schon had pointed Travers toward. Travers later told Guitar World it felt like four players from different corners of the world coming together like magic. "We were a tough band. We rocked like mad, but there was some real cool stuff going on musically." Thrall has said the two of them clicked as players and as friends, both young and unencumbered, and that it felt like somebody had dropped a new engine in the car, and the car was a Lamborghini.

The song itself is a Travers and Jeffrey Lesser number, and Lesser produced the album. In a Guitar Player sit-down, Travers named the solo on "Killer's Instinct" as one of his favorites, right alongside "Off Beat Ride," because those leads went down in a single take. He said the same about "I Tried To Believe," another cut from this record. That lines up with how he has always talked about his playing. The good stuff arrives when he does not have time to think about it. The lyric rides that same mean streak, cruising in about two feet off the ground, and the twin guitars do the rest. Travers has said a lot of his tunes are hard to play and sing at the same time, so he would put the riff on a Teac, step away from the guitar, and just be the singer until the parts locked. Heat In The Street is where that habit paid off.

Pat Travers came out of Toronto, born April 12, 1954. His uncle Hank ran a music store called the Blue Note in Ottawa, and when Pat turned 12 the man handed him a Stella acoustic and figured it would be gathering dust in two weeks. It was not. Around the same time he caught Jimi Hendrix in Ottawa, and that show stuck. He has said the thing that really lit the fuse was seeing the Beatles and the Stones on Ed Sullivan and wanting to be respected as a musician. By 15 he was in a band called Red Hot, then Merge, playing Quebec and Ontario clubs seven nights a week, five sets a night, backing strippers and country players, building the stamina the hard way. One room was so rough even the police stayed out, and they got a night off only because the place caught fire.

Ronnie Hawkins caught him at the Nickelodeon in Toronto and took him on the road for a year of rockabilly, country, and old rock and roll, tux and tie included. At 20 Travers decided he did not want to be a local hero anymore. A guy from home, Peter La Fay, bought the plane ticket to London, covered a few months of rent, and paid for the demo. Travers knew nobody over there. He hired players out of Melody Maker, cut a tape, knocked on doors, and landed at Polydor. The 1976 debut, with Peter "Mars" Cowling on bass, was his twenty-first birthday present to himself. On those early English tours he wore a red and white jumpsuit with a maple leaf and often played barefoot. A couple of albums later the Thrall and Aldridge lineup showed up, and Heat In The Street is the record where that band found its feet.

If you want the man himself, the official home is pattravers.com, where the tour dates and the backstage notes live. The band keeps a verified page on Facebook, posts as @therealpattravers on Instagram, and turns up on X as @PatTraversBand. Their Linktree gathers the rest of it, including The Pat Travers Band Facebook Group, where the longtime fans still trade stories about those twin-guitar nights. Go for what you know, Freaks.