Robert Hazard — August 21, 1948 – August 5, 2008

Published by greggkirk on February 27, 2021February 27, 2021

In 1981, I moved with my parents from Iowa to Wilmington, DE, and I enrolled at the University of Delaware to attend my sophomore year later in the spring. Sometime in the summer, I heard a new song on a Philly radio station called “Change Reaction,” and I thought it was a new release by David Bowie. It wasn’t until my classmates schooled me about a local band called Robert Hazard & the Heroes that I realized it was fairly common for local radio to play some up-and-coming local bands during regular airtime, but the sophistication of songs coming from this band in particular immediately blew my mind.

Sometime in the winter during my sophomore year, I went to the Stone Balloon to see this band play, and it was the first time in my life that I actually felt compelled to ask for the autograph of a local performer. Robert Hazard’s band was slick, professional, and the original music they were playing was spectacular. The audience hung on his every word and mimicked his patented hand gestures he used to punctuate moments of particular songs. It was pretty amazing to see for the first time. Little did I know that a mere six years later, I would become one of these so-called “Heroes” and be Hazard’s lead guitar player for a short period of time.

I graduated from the University in the summer of 1984, and I spent the next four years unsuccessfully trying to put my own band together when a friend told me of a general audition that was printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Hazard was looking to overhaul his band, and I heeded the call in the summer of 1988. There were about 50 or so tragically-hip guitarists who showed up. I stood in line with them while they sprayed their hair with Aquanet and practiced their guitar chops.

When it was my turn, I sat alone in a room with Hazard and two guitar amps. He asked me to play some of his songs with no accompaniment and then he strummed along on some new songs he was writing. Two of the tunes were named “Walking on the Moon,” and “Wild Life.” I remember telling him that the Police already had one called “Walking on the Moon” and the Talking Heads currently had a hit called “Wild Life.” He seemed genuinely baffled, as was I that he hadn’t heard of these very well-known songs.

I didn’t feel like I blew him away in the audition, but his wife Susan called me to come back for a second audition. The second one went a lot better, and I felt like I had a real shot at being in his band. I was living with my parents at the time and I was working a temp job at DuPont in Wilmington. My mom called me at work to tell me that Robert Hazard had left a message and asked me to play in his band. “Is this important?” she asked. I told all the people at work at lunch and they instantly started treating me differently. And so the rock star treatment began.

While I was in his band I was rehearsing with what would be a new original band I was forming called the Killtoys at the same time. I held out a little hope that Hazard would be open to some of my song ideas. I remained fairly quiet during rehearsals and didn’t go with the other dudes in the band to go drinking with him afterwards. This made me seem like an outcast, I’m sure. But it was an hour and a half drive to the rehearsal place in Medford Lakes, NJ and I was more interested in hanging out with my girlfriend at the time and rehearsing with the Killtoys.

The day finally came when Hazard wanted to write some tunes. It was a bit weird. He had fully-formed ideas that he conveyed to us with his acoustic guitar. Then he asked us to start playing, and as we were jamming, he’d go to one of us and instruct us on what he wanted to hear us play. “Do some chugging” is what he always said to me. In other words, mute the strings and thump on a chord in a downward motion. This was the equivalent of asking a race horse to walk around the track. It showed me I didn’t have much of a creative place in his band, so instead of talking to him about it, I booked a gig with the Killtoys. I also found it ironic that when Hazard wasn’t satisfied with the outcome of the songwriting session, he complained, “My songs are getting to be as formulaic as a country and western song! They’re all sounding the same.” I felt like yelling, “Well, why don’t you listen to someone else’s input?” But I kept my mouth shut.

One night, he was going over the schedule of upcoming gigs, and he mentioned a stadium gig at Dorney Park in PA. Playing a stadium is everyone’s dream, you know? But it conflicted with the debut gig of the Killtoys at the Barn Door… a place that MAYBE seated 30 people. I told him about the conflict and he said, “Oh, is this your last gig with the group?”

I said, “No, this is actually the first gig.” Then he asked me what my place was in the band. When I told him I was the lead singer and lead guitarist, he exclaimed, “I can’t have my guitarist fronting another band! What would people think? What if we were booked on the same bill? You can’t do both. You’ll need to decide what to do…” I told him I’d give him my decision in the next rehearsal.

I was carpooling with another guitarist and I confided in him what my decision would be. This little weasel called up Hazard and told him ahead of time. When I showed up to rehearsal the next time, everyone was already giving me the stink eye. Hazard asked me what I would do, and I told him and his response was, “I knew it.”

So, that was my short stint with him. When we played gigs, he had his own dressing room with champagne, chocolate-covered strawberries and nice amenities. In stark contrast, the band’s dressing room had KFC, beer, and soda. At one gig, I actually had to dress in front of some diehard groupies who showed up to every gig and strategically gave Robert bouquets of roses whenever a certain song played.

Onstage, we were instructed not to cross a certain line. He also didn’t want us to “sing” back up. “I’m the singer,” he said. “You’re supposed to be from the back streets of South Philly. You need to shout the lyrics.”

But the production for each gig was top shelf and was geared to be the rockstar experience. I only needed to show up for performances with my guitar. The amps, roadies, etc. were already at the concert hall. We were instructed to wear one set of clothes to the gig but don a different set of clothes that he actually picked out for us to wear on stage. We played on big stages in large venues, and groupies actually pulled our hair and tore our clothes when we walked off stage. It was pretty stunning.

But we were all hired, mercenary session men paid to play a part. It was a lot of fun for about 3-6 months or however long I did it, but I could see there was no future in it. Later, I understood why. Hazard was the brain behind it and not having any conflicting voice or ideas kept things simple. He also didn’t have to share any publishing rights with anyone.

In retrospect I don’t think he was as much of a jerk as many made him out to be. But from my upstart perspective at the time, I hated being treated like a musical instrument instead of a thinking, contributing member of the band. Ultimately, Hazard’s approach wasn’t sustainable. Because he didn’t collaborate with anyone else, he never wrote another hit after his “Darling” album (the release I helped support). I believe he got frustrated with the creative limitations of the style of music that originally brought him fame, and he ultimately finished out his career as a folk artist not long after I left the group.

Still, his creative patch in the early ’80s was unparalleled in the Delaware Valley. He wrote about 8 songs that could have easily been national hits if his record label hadn’t screwed things up. Even still, his writing of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” (that was recorded by Cyndi Lauper) paid his way for the rest of his life. You know, it’s funny about that song. He didn’t write it as a feminist anthem. He wrote it as a song describing that most girls are party animals. His take on it, if anything, was a bit misogynistic, but Rick Chertoff (the producer who recommended the song to Cyndi Lauper) turned it on its ear and gave it a new spin that ultimately paid dividends.

But to this day, I don’t think a single group or songwriter from the Delaware Valley has written better songs than “Change Reaction,” “Out of the Blue,” Escalator of Life,” or “(I Just Want to) Hang Around with You.” All of those tunes appeared on his EP release “Robert Hazard” in 1982. From that point on, he received positive press from Rolling Stone Magazine and eventually landed a spot on American Bandstand playing “Escalator of Life.” In particular, his video for “Change Reaction” is a brilliant time capsule of musical life in Philadelphia in the 1980s. Filmed at JC Dobbs on South Street with actual fans, and ending up at Pat’s Steaks in South Philly, the video shows Hazard at the top of his game.

A handful of his videos received some rotation on MTV, but unfortunately his major-label release “Wing of Fire” in 1984 did not match the songwriting quality of his local release, and it didn’t do well. Still, it can be said with a straight face that Robert Hazard was Philadelphia’s first homegrown rockstar of the 1980s.

In a strange twist of fate, my band the Killtoys DID ultimately open up for Robert Hazard’s retooled band sometime in the early ’90s. He was not promoting himself as Robert Hazard & the Heroes anymore, and he was transitioning to more folk-style songs that would later end up on his “Howl” album to be released in 1998. I met him backstage and we cordially shook hands, and he said a few nice words about my band. “This is the band you left my group for?” he asked with a sideways glance. “Yes,” I said. That would be the last time I would talk with him.

Hazard was a lifelong smoker, and his health failed him in the end. He died from complications of pancreatic cancer surgery in Boston on Tuesday, August 5, 2008.