Rock legends Loverboy, inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2009 and Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2023, have enjoyed countless hits — among them “Turn Me Loose,” “Lovin’ Every Minute of It,” “Hot Girls in Love,” “Heaven in Your Eyes,” and “The Kid Is Hot Tonite” — but it is “Working for the Weekend” that became iconic. Not too many bands can lay claim to a catchphrase, forever in our lexicon.
The 1981 single — written by guitarist Paul Dean, with contributions from drummer Matt Frenette and lead singer Mike Reno — is on their second album, Get Lucky. It reached No. 29 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in the U.S., No. 19 in Australia, and Top 10 at home in Canada. VH1 ranked it at No. 100 on its 2006 viewer-voted list, 100 Greatest Songs of the ’80s.
“It originally started as ‘waiting for the weekend,’” Dean tells NMC Amplify. “Mike wrote that line. It makes a pretty good T-shirt slogan.”
The phrase can be traced all the way back to the late 1800s, when the word “weekend” was coined and commonly used. Living for the weekend and working for the weekend were casually used in the mid-20th century, but when Loverboy released the song in 1981, it eventually became cemented as an idiom.
Loverboy performed the song on Saturday Night Live, introduced by Jerry Lewis, but then it had a life of its own, used in the iconic SNL Chippendales skit featuring Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley (1990) and replicated in 2017 on the animated show Family Guy. It’s also used in Zoolander (2001) and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003). Will Ferrell is also an obvious fan. The comedic actor sang it twice on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, once as actor-singer Robert Goulet and another as his character Ron Burgundy, in a skit that set up the song as the campaign theme for late Toronto mayor Rob Ford.
So what is the origin of the lyric?
“I was just out walking in the sun, out from my apartment, going down to the beach, and it was Wednesday. ‘Where is everybody?’” says Dean. Loverboy had formed in Calgary in 1979 but relocated to Vancouver, close to management and more of a music scene.
“This place, on the weekend, is just insane where I used to live, and I’m out there walking, and there’s nobody around. ‘I guess, I don’t know, maybe they’re waiting for the weekend? What the… what? Waiting for the weekend?’ Receptors clicked in, and that was waiting for the weekend. That’s how it started.”
He finished it in Montreal, where Loverboy was on a club tour. Dean says it was the same night that he wrote the introduction to another song, “Lucky Ones.” The band — rounded out by late bassist Scott Smith and keyboardist Doug Johnson — was in the early stages of writing for the Get Lucky album. The band’s eponymously titled debut in 1980 yielded hits “Turn Me Loose” and “The Kid Is Hot Tonite.”
“I would always take my guitar with me back to the hotel, but I would carry a little cassette recorder and I remember playing along. I probably had a little machine that would give me a click, and I would put that right beside the mic. That would be the semblance of the drummer so I could get an idea of how the guitar works against the drums and then work on the melody on top of that,” Dean says.
“I just remember it finally coming together, all the parts fell into place that night in my hotel room in Montreal, all the bits and pieces, all the key changes. I was struggling with ‘Where does the bridge go?’ and ‘What am I going to do in the bridge?’ and ‘Is there going to be singing in the bridge?’ There’s a lot of instrumental parts in that. It starts off with an instrumental, and it has that happy little Christmas theme, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. That just presented itself as well. So, I had all that but the bridge. That sustained wah-wah part in the middle of it was the last piece of the puzzle.”
Lyrically, each line begins with the word everybody, which Dean says was the first time he had used repetition like that throughout.
“Everyone’s watching, to see what you will do
Everyone’s looking at you, oh
Everyone’s wondering, will you come out tonight
Everyone’s trying to get it right, get it right
Everybody’s working for the weekend
Everybody wants a new romance
Everybody’s goin’ off the deep end
Everybody needs a second chance, oh …”
And so on.
“It wasn’t a conscious thing. It just popped out like that. It was the weirdest thing,” says Dean.
The switch from “waiting for the weekend” to “working for the weekend” came about casually, just a split-second change.
“I remember Mike suggesting, ‘No, man, we should call it, ‘Working for the Weekend.’ I went, ‘Okay, whatever,’” he laughs. “It didn’t mean that much to me; it didn’t make that much of a difference in my mind. I look back on it now, it’s pretty iconic. One word can make all the difference in the world, really. It was a great suggestion.”
Dean says the whole song was written except for one line. He doesn’t remember which one, but it was in the verse. “Matt was in the lounge, and we were still working. I don’t think we demoed the song. I think we just went straight into recording it,” Dean says.
“But we were scratching our heads. ‘What’s the next line?’ That’s why I asked Matt. What’s the next line? He just instantly went, da-da-da-da-da. I went, ‘OK great, thanks.’ And we went back and wrote it down, went back in the studio, and Mike sang it. And that was Matt’s contribution. It was like 10 seconds — there you go.”
The whole vibe of the song has a fierceness, an energy to it, with an instantly recognizable 1-2-3 cowbell opening and synth.
“Well, this is a story I’ve told before, but it kind of bears to what you’re saying energy-wise,” says Dean. “We were playing a bar on Vancouver Island, before we even started recording the album, and it was a ‘meat market’ kind of place. Three 45-minute sets, and we played the first two sets — and I don’t know if people could even hear us over the din of talking and partying and glasses clinking — and we opened the third set with it, and the dance floor was immediately full. And I went, ‘OK, this is something. I wasn’t expecting this.’ And that was the energy; it moved them.
“It’s just something about the drive, the melody, the who-knows-what-it-is, some magical thing. Thank you very much for landing in my lap.’”
They recorded the album at Mushroom Studios — because Heart’s Dreamboat Annie was cut there in 1975 — and Dean co-produced with the late Bruce Fairbairn.
“It had a one-of-a-kind console, and it just had this magic top end to it, the clarity that we heard on the Heart album.”
He already knew the song was a smash after witnessing the early reception on the dance floor at the club show.
“But the real key for me, besides that, was we did it at a soundcheck,” Dean says. “We were playing in Vancouver, and Bryan Adams was opening for us. I remember Lou Blair, our late manager, saying to me — and he was great; he’s like my wife that way — ‘That’s the song. That’s the one right there. That’s going to really do something.’”
Loverboy’s A&R guy, the late Paul Atkinson at Columbia Records in New York — former bassist in the Zombies — then heard it. The title was “Peace of My Heart,” says Dean.
“He said, ‘You can’t call it that. That’s a Janis Joplin song. You’ve got to call it ‘Working for the Weekend.’ I went, ‘Awwww, really? OK.’ I mean, what are you going to do? It’s Columbia Records, man.”
And the rest is history.
Out of all the covers, syncs, and parodies, Dean says his favourite is the SNL skit with Swayze and Farley.
“When they did that, I was kind of mortified at the time,” he laughs. “But what a great nod. I mean, it was massive. That was really powerful. I look back and I go, ‘Thank you, guys. That was incredible. Thank you for doing that.’”
