Player

Haven to RSO

This is the British-American soft rock band, not the Equals' 1968 "Baby, Come Back". Peter Beckett, from Liverpool, played with Paladin there and then Skyband in Los Angeles in 1974 with Steve Kipner, which ended in 1975. He met the Texan J.C. Crowley at a party, and they formed Riff Raff, renamed Bandana, whose single "Jukebox Saturday Night" came out on Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter's Haven label. When Haven folded, Lambert and Potter moved the group to RSO in 1976, and the manager Paul Palmer added Ronn Moss on bass and John Friesen on drums. Wayne Cook, formerly of Steppenwolf, played keyboards live and on record. The name comes, per the band's bio, from a television movie's end credits listing the cast as players. They toured in the fall of 1977 opening for Gino Vannelli and then Boz Scaggs.

Player (RSO, October 3, 1977), recorded at Western Recorders and Sound Labs in Hollywood and produced by Lambert and Potter, reached 26 in the US, 32 on R&B and 15 in Canada, and went gold, as did Danger Zone (1978, 37). Singles on the Hot 100 were "Baby Come Back" (1), "This Time I'm in It for Love" (10), "Prisoner of Your Love" (27), "It's for You" (46) and "If Looks Could Kill" (48). Billboard named them Best New Singles Artist of 1978, and Wikipedia says calling them a one-hit wonder is an error. They toured with Eric Clapton on his Slowhand tour in 1978, and Beckett said that after that, we stopped getting hits. Beckett left after tension following an October 29, 1978 show in Miami, and Room with a View (Casablanca, 1980) sold poorly, followed by Spies of Life (RCA, 1982) and a split that year after a Solid Gold appearance. Moss went into acting, playing Ridge Forrester on The Bold and the Beautiful from 1987 to 2012.

Beckett wrote for film and television, co-writing Olivia Newton-John's "Twist of Fate" (US 5), played in Little River Band from 1989 to 1997 and made the solo album Beckett (1991). Crowley made the solo album Beneath the Texas Moon (1988) and had country hits in 1989. The band re-formed at the L.A. Music Awards on December 16, 1997 and in 2007, and released Too Many Reasons (Frontiers, 2013), appearing on General Hospital on May 12, 2014. Beckett now tours as Peter Beckett's Player.