STACK New Zealand May 2016 Issue

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U nfortunately for Cheap Trick, by the
time they got to record their album All
Shook Up with former Beatles
producer George Martin and their engineer
Geoff Emerick in 1980, they were starting to
pull apart and had run out of puff – and great
songs.
But the band from Illinois in the mid
'70s – sometimes wrongly described as
“America's Beatles”, but we'll see why soon
– had proven themselves on a run of albums
which established them as one of the great
rock'n'roll-pop bands, and a thrilling live act.
In New Zealand, their show at the Auckland
Town Hall in ’79 (on the back of their Dream
Police album) is legendary for their sheer
exhilaration. They'd been having that effect
everywhere in the years following their self-
titled debut just three years previous.
Between that album and Dream Police they
released two classic and critically acclaimed
power-pop albums ( In Color and Heaven
Tonight ), and took off into the stratosphere
with the live Cheap Trick at Budokan album.
If they hadn’t made much chart impact in
the US or elsewhere early on, they’d won over
Japan, and when they went there – amidst
scenes reminiscent of Beatlemania – they
recorded their shows at the famous Budokan,
intending the album to be a Japan-only
release.
But its reputation grew and it was given a
US then worldwide release. Even now it is
one of the most unashamedly enjoyable live
albums. Ever.
By that time the four
members had been in
bands – together and
apart – for a decade.
Caught up in a love of
the Beatles in the '60s
– they played a superb, letter-perfect version
of Daytripper live at the time and in 2009
performed Sgt Peppers in its entirety with
an orchestra — they all, individually, became
Anglophiles. Their love of the hard pop and
rock of the Who, the Kinks and Jeff Beck
became welded onto a sense of theatre and
pop songs turned up to 11.
They brought humour and cynicism into
enjoyable pop (ELO Kiddies is a sly tribute to
Gary Glitter's glam, Surrender is about parents
rolling joints and playing their kids' Kiss
records) and their set had a built-in opener
(Hello There) and farewell (Goodnight Now).
They could play pop and rock'n'roll (Ain't
That a Shame) with joyous abandon. And
Cheap Trick at Budokan distilled it into 42
minutes.
They moved up to arenas, expanded their
musical palette with Dream Police (more
orchestration and melodrama), and Nielsen
just kept buying weird looking guitars
(women’s legs for the neck, the infamous five-
neck guitar, etc).
They had arrived fully formed by years of
touring and clever imagery: their distinctive
typewritten band name; the two good looking
guys – singer Robin Zander and bassist Tom
Petersson -- on the front cover, the two quirky
ones – Nielsen in his checked baseball caps
and portly perma-smoker drummer Bun E.
Carlos – on the back.
As Ira Robbins wrote in their four-CD box
set Sex America Cheap Trick in 1996, “In
Cheap Trick, America had its first chart-ready
group to effectively combine roaring rock,
Anglocentric power-pop, a sarcastic sense
of humour, genuine fandom and a broadly
theatrical approach to performing... unlike
their peers [they] managed to make rock
stardom look like fun.”
But by the time they got to George Martin
there were tensions (Petersson left shortly
after, not to return for seven years) and the
songs were no longer as strong.
From then on – until the unexpected hit
with the MOR ballad The Flame in
'88, which they didn't write – Cheap
Trick struggled, but past glories were
never far behind.
The box set (lots of unreleased
and alternate versions) revived
their career, recent budget priced
collections of their albums made them
available to a new audience, and last
month they were inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (alongside
NWA, Chicago, Deep Purple and Steve Miller)
by Kid Rock.
He said, if you thought you were a great
live act you'd go see Cheap Trick and think, “I
better step up my game”.
Their new album Bang Zoom Crazy... Hello
hardly changes their successful template of
in-jokes and power-pop: Blood Red Lips is a
pure Gary Glitter-glam stomper, When I Wake
Tomorrow is Hunky Dory-era Bowie, Roll Me
steals from AC/DC, but it is all given some
magical Trickery.
Four decades on from their debut album,
Cheap Trick (now with Nielsen's son Daxx
replacing Carlos on drums) still offer more
noisy power-pop fun than anyone else around.
“We're not going to change because
everyone else does,” Rick Nielsen told me
way back in 1997. “We've always been a pop
band. I consider a pop song has a beginning,
middle and end. It's also fun and got some
melody to it. It's got life, that's what pop is.”
But the trick is, they add power.
Graham Reid catches up with one of the great
power-pop bands, CheapTrick.
For more interviews, overviews and reviews
by Graham Reid see:
We're not going
to change because
everyone else does
visit MUSIC FEATURE
22 MAY 2016
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