50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

The Zoo Crew has got a sly little number spinning for the Zoo Freaks, and it is not the one most folks expect when they hear those opening lines. Trixter, the Paramus, New Jersey hard rock outfit, cut Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" for the 1994 covers set Under Covers, also billed in places as Undercovers, and they liked the tune enough to put it on the record twice. One pass is the plugged-in version, running about four minutes and forty-two seconds, and the other is an unplugged take that clocks in just past four and a half minutes. Same advice from the lady in the song, two different rooms. Slip out the back, Jack. Make a new plan, Stan. Hop on the bus, Gus. Drop off the key, Lee. Only this time the bus has a Jersey license plate and a stack of Marshalls in the cargo hold.

Under Covers landed on November 15, 1994, through Backstreet Records, produced by guitarist Steve Brown and bassist P. J. Farley. It is a short ride, eight tracks and roughly half an hour, and it did not chart. The company around "50 Ways" tells you what kind of night the band was having. They opened with Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up," slid into Simon, then took a left turn into Nine Inch Nails' "Terrible Lie," Supertramp's "Take the Long Way Home," AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap," the Beatles' "Revolution," the acoustic Simon reprise, and a live crack at the Beastie Boys' "Fight for Your Right." Pete Loran handled the lead vocals, Brown the lead guitar, harmonica, and backing vocals, Farley the bass, and Mark "Gus" Scott the drums. A hair-metal band covering Costello, Simon, Reznor, and the Beatles on one EP was either a dare or a love letter. With Trixter it was both.

The reason they made a covers record at all is the part the interviews keep circling. In a 2012 sit-down, Steve Brown talked about a song called "Drag Me Down" that he had written in 1993 with Glen Burtnik of Styx. That tune was meant for what was supposed to be the next Trixter album of originals. They did Under Covers instead. Brown said they were tied up in a legal scrape with their old record company, along with some other business trouble, and they could not move ahead with the record they wanted. A covers EP on an indie label was the door that still opened. Years later he put it even plainer. He had hired a friend to teach him how to engineer, the band cut Under Covers, they took it out on the road, and then the band went quiet for a long stretch. Grunge had already changed the weather. Hear!, their 1992 follow-up, had not held the ground the debut had claimed, and a half-hour of other people's songs was never going to outshout what was coming off the Seattle stations.

There is a studio story attached to these tapes that Brown has told more than once. Instead of spending the money from the early years on a flashy car, he bought a house and built a room he named Mojo Vegas 6160, a nod to Eddie Van Halen's 5150. Under Covers was the first Trixter record cut in that house. He has talked about sitting with the old tapes and transferring them, hearing the sessions again and remembering exactly where he was when they tracked them. Listeners who found the disc later split down the middle. Some said the Simon cover stayed true to the old bones of the song and that the unplugged pass caught them the same way the electric one did. Others figured two versions of the same exit plan on an eight-song record was one version too many. Both camps have a point. Paul Simon wrote the original for Still Crazy After All These Years in 1975, with Steve Gadd's famous drum pattern doing as much talking as the rhymes, and it went to number one. Trixter did not try to out-clever that. They just played it like a bar band that grew up on the radio, once loud and once with the amps cooled down.

The band that cut it had been at this since Brown was a kid. Trixter started in June 1983 in Paramus, when Steve Brown was twelve years old, alongside bassist Doug "Dougie C." Cowie. They first went by Rade. Drummer Mike Pane came in, and then singer Pete Loran. After a single concert Pane was out and Mark "Gus" Scott was in, and the name on the van became Trixter. Brown has told the Loran story with a grin. Pete was about four years older, the girls already liked him, and he was deep into Van Halen, Judas Priest, and Boston. Steve rang the house one day to talk to Pete's little sister, got Pete on the line instead, and the two of them fell into a music conversation that never really stopped. Loran was not walking in as a finished frontman. The band grew him into the job.

By 1986 they were a regular sight on the local circuit, and by 1987 they were filling rooms and sharing bills with Kix and Skid Row while labels came sniffing around. In 1988 they tracked what was meant to be a debut called Just Having Fun at Bear Tracks Studios in New York, with engineer Nelson Ayers, the same man tied to the Guns N' Roses Appetite for Destruction sessions. That album never came out. In November 1988 Dougie C. stepped aside and local bassist P. J. Farley took the low end. May 1989 brought the deal with Mechanic/MCA. They headed for Hollywood and cut the self-titled record with producer Bill Wray, folding in pieces from the earlier sessions. It arrived in 1990. "Line of Fire" got the rock stations interested. "Give It to Me Good" did the real damage, climbing to number 65 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sitting at number one on Dial MTV for five weeks running. "One in a Million" and "Surrender" kept the videos in rotation. The album peaked at number 28 on the Billboard 200 and went gold in 1991 after they had sold past half a million copies in the States.

The road that followed was the classic early-nineties circuit. They opened for Stryper and Don Dokken, rolled with Poison and the Scorpions, and joined the Blood, Sweat and Beers run alongside Warrant and Firehouse. They also landed a song on the If Looks Could Kill soundtrack. For a band that had started with a twelve-year-old guitarist in a New Jersey town, that was a long way from the first Rade gig. It was also a short peak. Hear! did not repeat the trick. The legal tangle with the old label pushed them toward Under Covers. Gus Scott eventually left, and the group called it in 1995. Brown and Farley kept making music. The old lineup found its way back in 2007, played Rocklahoma, and later cut New Audio Machine and Human Era. These days Brown and Farley still carry the name, with Ben Hans on the drums, and the old songs still get a workout when the van is loaded.

"50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" sits in the middle of that story like a postcard from the in-between years. It is not the song that made them famous, and it was never meant to be. It is the sound of four Jersey rockers, stuck between a gold record and a closed door, picking a Paul Simon tune off the shelf and playing it because they still wanted to be in a room making noise. The rhyme scheme did half the work. The band did the rest, once with the band cranked and once with the guitars unplugged, which is about as honest as a covers record gets. Zoo Freaks who want the rest of the trail can find the camp at the official Trixter site, along with the band on Facebook, Instagram, and X. And if you are still riding with the Crew, you already know where the dial lives. Keep it locked on THE ZOO, where the deep cuts still get a full spin and nobody tells you there is only one way out of a song.