On October 24, 1980 Cheap Trick released All Shook Up, a dream team effort with Beatles producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick. But if you're looking for Beatlesque numbers, you'll likely be disappointed. With the exception of "World's Greatest Lover", Cheap Trick sounds more like "Led Zeppelin gone psycho", as Rolling Stone's David Fricke wrote in his review, one of the few positive ones the album received.
It didn't help matters that bassist Tom Peterson had just left the band. He would tell Billboard:
We were playing 300 nights a year and we'd record two albums a year on our time off. After awhile, we'd gotten to the point where we were successful, but we were still on this schedule and still doing albums in two or three weeks. We needed more time to think, to air out and encourage the creativity to write. Nobody wanted to do that.
On August 12, 1980 Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen and drummer Bun E Carlos joined John Lennon at the Hit Factory studio to record I’m Losing You and Yoko Ono’s I’m Moving On. Lennon played a second guitar part, and future King Crimson member Tony Levin added bass guitar.
Double Fantasy producer Jack Douglas has worked with Cheap Trick on their Live At Budokan album. Cheap Trick had just released an EP with a version of "Day Tripper" on it when Douglas tracked them down.
Bun E. Carlos:
“Jack Douglas called, and they had a song they were having trouble getting a version of, and did I want to play on this thing, and I said sure, you know, like yeah . . . " Then we went in and he introduced us to John Lennon, and he said, “Oh you’re the guys from Cheap Trick, they told me your name but they didn’t tell me what band you’re in,” so we thought that was kinda neat. . . . We told him, “You know we wanted you to produce our first record,” and Lennon said, “I woulda done that no one told me!” We sat around the control booth and Jack played us the acoustic version of “Losing You,” and Lennon turned to us and said, you know, “You got any ideas?” In Cheap Trick we did “Cold Turkey,” and “It’s So Hard,” and we did some other Beatles tunes, “Day Tripper,” stuff like that. In the band, we’re all big Plastic Ono Band fans, we’re always saying, “Well, how would Plastic Ono Band have done this?” Or like, “If this were the next song after ‘Cold Turkey,’ how would it go?
The session happened quickly; the sound more raw than what eventually appeared on Double Fantasy. Six days later the studio musicians were brought in to take another crack at both "I'm Losing You" and Yoko's answer "I'm Moving On".
Bun E Carlos again:
When the band later recut those songs for the album they didn’t clone our version. But they copied Rick’s riffs on the songs and they did our arrangement of Moving On, too. Jack told me, ‘We cut those songs and had the band play along with it a few times on headphones to try and get the same feel you guys had.’ When we heard that we started laughing, we thought those guys must wanna kill us. We were thinking, Boy, if someone asked us to do that, we’d sure put our unhappy faces on.
Creem Readers picked Led Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door as the best album from 1979 as Jimmy Page took top honors as Best Guitarist and Best Producer, Robert Plant as Best Male Singer and John Bonham as Best Drummer. Cheap Trick also made a strong showing with the #3 and #4 albums and #2 finishes for Robin Zander, Bun E Carlos and Rick Nielsen.
TOP TWENTY-FIVE ALBUMS 1. In Through The Out Door (Led Zeppelin) 2. Candy-O (The Cars) 3. Dream Police (Cheap Trick) 4. Live At Budokan (Cheap Trick)
5. Rust Never Sleeps (Neil Young + Crazy Horse)
6. Squeezing Out Sparks (Graham Parker + the Rumour) 7. The Kids Are Alright (The Who)
8. Van Halen II (Van Halen) 9. Low Budget (The Kinks)
10. Get The Knack (The Knack)11. The Clash
12. Dynasty (Kiss)13. Fear Of Music (Talking Heads)14. Armed Forces (Elvis Costello)
15. Labour Of Lust (Nick Lowe)16. Highway To Hell (AC/DC)17. B-52's
18. Breakfast In America (Supertramp)19. Night In The Ruts (Aerosmith)20. Look Sharp! (Joe Jackson)21. Eat To The Beat (Blondie)22. The Long Run (The Eagles)23. Tusk (Fleetwood Mac)24. Damn The Torpedoes (Tom Petty + the Heartbreakers)25. You're Never Alone With A Schizophrenic (Ian Hunter)
TOP FIFTEEN SINGLES
1. My Sharona (The Knack) 2. Let's Go (The Cars) 3. Cruel To Be Kind (Nick Lowe) 4. I Want You To Want Me (Cheap Trick) 5. I Don't Like Mondays (Boomtown Rats) 6. Dream Police (Cheap Trick) 7. Pop Muzik (M) 8. I Was Made For Lovin' You (Kiss)
9. Long Live Rock (The Who)
10. Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy (Bad Co.)
11. My My Hey Hey (Neil Young)
12. I Fought The Law (The Clash)13. Roxanne (The Police)14. Superman (The Kinks)15. Rock Lobster (The B-52's)TOP TEN R+B SINGLES
1. Bad Girls (Donna Summer) 2. You Gotta Serve Somebody (Bob Dylan) 3. Sail On (Commodores)
4. Hot Stuff (Donna Summer)
5. Boom, Boom (Pat Travers)
6. After The Love Is Gone (Earth, Wind + Fire)
7. Still (Commodores) 8. Pop Muzik (M) 9. Move It On Over (George Thorogood + the Destroyers)
10. I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor)BEST GUITARIST
1. Jimmy Page
2. Rick Nielsen
3. Mick Jones (Clash)
4. Edward Van Halen
5. Pete Townshend
6. Ted Nugent
7. Ace Frehley
8. Keith Richards
9. Johnny Ramone
10. Joe PerryBEST DRUMMER
1. John Bonham
2. Bun E. Carlos
3. Neil Peart
4. Peter Criss
5. Charlie Watts
6. Clem Burke
7. Keith Moon
8. Nicky Headon
9. David Robinson
10. Carl PalmerBEST PRODUCER
1. Jimmy Page
2. Nick Lowe
3. Roy Thomas Baker
4. Brian Eno
5. Todd Rundgren
6. Mike Chapman
7. Tom Werman
8. Glimmer Twins
9. Eddie Kramer
10. Phil SpectorBEST MALE SINGER
1. Robert Plant
2. Robin Zander
3. Roger Daltrey
4. Mick Jagger
5. David Lee Roth
6. Steven Tyler
7. Elvis Costello
8. Bruce Springsteen
9. Graham Parker
10. Bob Seger
BEST ROCK MOVIE
1. The Kids Are Alright
2. Rock 'n' Roll High School
3. Life Of Brian
4. Quadrophenia
5. Rust Never Sleeps
6. Apocalypse Now
7. Alien
8. Hair
9. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10. The Rose
FAD OF THE YEAR
1. Roller Disco
2. Disco
3. Drugs
4. Punk/New Wave Rock
5. Anti-disco
6. The Knack
7. Sex
8. No Nukes
9. Mods
10. Designer jeans
In the Fall of 1979 Cheap Trick finally released Dream Police, an album Epic decided to hold back when the group's Live At Budokan and the singles"I Want You To Want Me" and "Surrender" made them superstars. Creem Magazine readers enthusiastically voted Cheap Trick the second best group of the year after Led Zeppelin ( and ahead of The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Clash).
The live album only raised the stakes higher for the hardest rocking band from Rockford, and Dream Police failed to deliver the needed home run. The title cut, "Voices" and the last track "Need Your Love" are all solid. But the nine minute long "Gonna Raise Hell"is just as awful as its title suggests. This is the deep cut Cheap Trick puts high up in their set lists when they know they're performing in front of drunk crowds. I saw them at a casino a year after they were playing their great albums in their entirety. I think they started with "Hello There", then played "Clock Strikes Ten". I was thrilled. Then came "Gonna Raise Hell" and the concert ...kinda went to hell for me.
Dave Marsh, writing for Rolling Stone, actually called "Voices" disastrous and adds:
The issue isn't whether or not Cheap Trick can become the great American rock band we lost when Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane went down, but whether Rick Nielsen has the guts to probe deeply enough to let loose what's there. Dream Police doesn't offer any answers, yet it does suggest some dire possibilities. I hope that the deterioration I think I'm hearing is something else -- maybe Nielsen really is struggling to come to terms with rock + roll demons -- because Cheap Trick is too fine a group to be buried in the circle of hell reserved for those who had potential and squandered it.
Robert Christgau gave Dream Police a lukewarm B-, writing
What's always saved this band for me was the jokes, but this time they're not just in the grooves, and there's only so much you can do with funny hats on the cover. A good heavy band, sure -- be thankful for the fast tempos. But probably not a great heavy metal band. And you know what happens to a good heavy metal band long about the fifth album.
In February of 1979, Epic Records released Cheap Trick at Budokan, the band's all-time best selling album and one of the best selling live albums ever. All three of the preceding studio albums were critically acclaimed but didn't sell huge numbers in the United States. “If it weren’t for …Budokan,” Robin Zander tells Classic Rock magazine, "it might have been the end for us. We were in debt by about a million dollars. That album saved us from probable obscurity.”
Only in Japan were Cheap Trick a very big deal. All of their albums had gone gold despite the fact Cheap Trick had never toured there.
That changed in April of 1978. When the band landed in Japan, 5000 screaming fans met them at the gate. Rick Nielsen told Time Magazine "We flew coach. We had no idea what was waiting for us. " The band's official photographer Bob Alford tells Classic Rock “It was just like Beatlemania. Gangs of Japanese fans were chasing them everywhere trying to rip their clothes off. I remember girls hanging out of the side of high speed taxis taking photos, risking life and limb. It was nuts!”
Thousands of fans staked out the band's hotel. Cheap Trick needed 24 hour guards.
Cheap Trick played two high energy concerts before 14,000 fans at Tokyo’s famous Nippon Budokan and another one in Osaka. The fans went wild. The crowd response was incredible,” Nielsen affirms. “It was so loud it was almost frightening."
It was the CBS/Sony that label decided to record Cheap Trick at all of the shows and demanded the band play some unreleased songs. That explains the inclusion of the Fats Domino cover "Ain't That a Shame".
As Nielsen tells Time, Cheap Trick at Budokan was never meant to be sold in the United States:
It was supposed to be for the Japanese fans only, but we hadn’t made any special recordings. It was just being taped while we were performing. It wasn’t really planned to be an album. We just played the shows. We recorded in Osaka, Nagoya, Tokyo. And a number of months later, we were asked to mix it. It was Bun E, Jack Douglas and I who went to New York — and there was more material but we were just putting out a singles album. It was one of those ‘don’t worry, it’s supposed to be just in Japan; don’t worry, no one will ever see these pictures’ sort of deals.
It was an okay big-hit in Japan. There were 30 or 40, 000 people who had seen us over there, who wanted the album. But then it started to get airplay in Boston and they started playing the live version of “I Want You To Want Me” and it started to be a hit — but it was just on this live Japanese album. It eventually became the largest-selling live album import ever, and the record label finally thought, ‘why don’t we release it domestically?’ I don’t remember what the price was, but people were paying four times the price. Something like $40 a copy. People couldn’t import them fast enough.
Zander was told to introduce songs slowly for the Japanese audience on the Top 10 single you hear him draw out the title : "I want you...to want...me." When it was finally released in February of 1979, Cheap Trick at Budokan sold 4 million records in the United States, peaking on the Billboard Hot 200 at #4. In 1998 Cheap Trick released At Budokan: The Complete Concert, restoring all of the numbers left of the original 42-minute album.
The band may have flown coach to Japan but they returned in first class.
In May of 1978 Cheap Trick released their third album, Heaven Tonight. The album-- like In Color, its predecessor, produced by Tom Werman-- kicks off with perhaps the band's greatest song"Surrender". Here, this Midwest band of anglophiles plays up all of their UK 60's rock band influences and complies them into 44 minutes of fun.
Reportedly released a few weeks early in Japan where the band was on tour and recorded the breakthrough Live at Budokan album on April 28 and 30.
Mitchell Schneider for Rolling Stone Given Cheap Trick's boisterous indebtedness to rock and roll history, you could argue that the members of this foursome are not so much creators as dedicated fans. Exactly. Heaven Tonight, the band's third and best album, practically synthesizes the music of the Beatles, the Who, et al., into a series of superbly crafted and cleverly arranged original songs. While Cheap Trick may not be remembered as lovingly as its primarily British antecedents — the price one has to pay for musical kleptomania, I suppose — the group's intelligence, verve and charm will do just fine for now.
Not since the Move (whose "California Man" is covered here) or the Raspberries has a band hammered out power pop as irresistibly and snappily as Cheap Trick. Heaven Tonight has enough gorgeous harmonies, zealous melodies, two-fisted riffs and heavy-metal chords to scare the kitsch right out of Queen or Kiss. However impressive last year's In Color was, it merely anticipated this record. If Cheap Trick now plays with more force and precision — guitarist/chief songwriter Rick Nielsen slashes away with Pete Townshend vengeance — it also comes on with more innocence in its bubbly harmonies. And that's where the tension in the group's music resides.
There is probably not one melody, vocal harmony or chord pattern on Heaven Tonight that honestly belongs to Cheap Trick. So what. Listening to this LP makes you feel as frenzied as a contestant on Name That Tune. Some of the vocals on "Surrender" (whose electronic guitar effects and power chords re-create Who's Next) duplicate those from the Hollies' "Carrie-Anne." "Stiff Competition," which borrows its chords from Pete Townshend's "Won't Get Fooled Again," contains harmonies that are reminiscent of the Beatles' "I Feel Fine." The vaudevillian frivolity of "How Are You" bears a suspicious resemblance to the bouncy part of "A Day in the Life." Further, lead singer Robin Zander successfully impersonates John Lennon (not to mention Lennon's clone, Jeff Lynne). So it's no wonder that "Heaven Tonight" and "Takin' Me Back" suggest "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," respectively. And so on.
Yet for all its stylistic meticulousness, Heaven Tonight never comes off as detached or lofty. Such compellingly moronic verse as "Sayonara oh suicide hari kari/Kamikaze you won't/See another evening/Goodbye" makes Cheap Trick, along with the Ramones, ardent practitioners of Andy Warhol's finest philosophy: "We should really stay babies for much longer than we do, now that we're living so much longer." Consider the phallocentric "Stiff Competition," on which Zander sings "The bigger they are — the harder they fall." Or "On the Radio," whose Pampers harmonies brilliantly satirize and celebrate the Bay City Rollers in their prime.
However admirable Heaven Tonight may be as an aural rock and roll encyclopedia, one wonders if Cheap Trick will continue to swipe its musical ideas from the past — an approach that could become tedious — or eventually carve its own initials. I'm willing to find out.
Robert Christgau gave the album a B+ review writing:
When I gave the weak side a final spin, I was quite surprised to recognize four hooks with pleasure. The strong side begins with a wonderfully funny parents song and includes a sarcastic ditty about suicide. Am I to conclude that I'm once again seduced by this power-tooled hard rock product? Guess so.
Heaven Tonight finished #22 on the Village Voice Pazz and Jop Critics Poll just behind Bob Dylan's Street Legal.
In September of 1977, Cheap Trick released their second album, In Color. Just six months after the release of the debut, In Color was produced by Tom Werman who chose to emphasize the band's melodies, hooks and harmonies. The result is a power pop masterpiece that might sound thin in places, especially if your introduction to Cheap Trick is the live in Japan album that came out two years later and featured five songs.
The 31-minute album pleased many rock critics who voted In Color the 10th best of the year ( ahead of Jackson Browne's Running on Empty ). Robert Christgau gave the album a B+ review writing :
Nowadays, punk makes it possible to resist hard rock so slickly textured, but with these guys why bother? They don't waste a cut, and permit none of the stupidity or showiness or sentimentality of postheavy and/or postboogie professionalism, either. If only they seemed interested in their well-crafted say-nothing lyrics.
Writing for Rolling Stone, Dave Marsh admitted to listening to the album forty times without knowing what the songs are about.
In a way, Cheap Trick is Beatleesque. But not in the sense of the Raspberries or Elton John or (God knows!) the Bay City Rollers. What sets this group apart is that these guys actually imagine that the important music of the later Beatles was the almost heavy metal (but still melodic) hard rock of "Birthday," "Helter Skelter" and "Back in the U.S.S.R." on the White Album and "I Want You" and "Come Together" on Abbey Road.
The band was never satisfied with the sound -- "I Want You To Want Me" sounds especially weak and tinny in comparison to the live album. So In Color was re-recorded by the band in 1998 with producer Steve Albini. Though never released, you can probably track it down with the help of Google.
As a fan of pop music, I would say this is my favorite Cheap Trick album. Along with The Beatles references, you can also hear a little ELO, The Move, and The Who. I did see Cheap Trick a few years ago and Robin Zander's voice was holding up well.
In February of 1977, the hardest working band in America released their debut album, the self-titled Cheap Trick. Produced by Jack Douglas ( Aerosmith), the album features a harder rocking sound than the later classic Cheap Trick albums that followed ( In Color, Heaven Tonight) . That said, there were songs that anticipated their hit making power pop sound like "Oh Candy", which was sadly inspired by the band's friend and photographer Marshall Mintz who killed himself by hanging. ( His initials M and M led to the Candy nickname).
Other favorites are "Elo Kiddies", the Beatlesque "Taxman Mr Thief" ( have you heard the Ardent Studios demo ?) and the dreamy "Mandocello", which is the name of am eight stringed instrument related to a mandolin.
I like what Jason Hernandez wrote in his RateYourMusic review : Any time any band "rocks" and delivers great pop at the same time, I compare them to Cheap Trick. Cheap Trick are the fizziest soda pop, the greasiest cheeseburger, the gooiest ice cream, the coldest beer, and the chewing gum with the flavor that lasts the longest.
For Rolling Stone Charles M Young wrote These guys play rock and roll like Vince Lombardi coached football: heavy emphasis on basics with a strain of demented violence to keep the opposition intimidated. The closest musical analogy is the Who, who have always sounded like the inmates of Bedlam on their best stuff. Cheap Trick not only sounds like their attendant forgot to lock their cages, they look like it, too. Half the fun of the album is staring at the pictures on the back and wondering if lead guitarist Rick Nielson really has fire ants in his underwear, and how Boris Karloff mated Henry Kissinger with Adolf Hitler to come up with drummer Bun E. Carlos.
Rock critic dean Robert Christgau gave the album a B, writing "I like their looks--two pretty-boys balanced off by two ugly-guys--and have no objection to their sound, which recalls the Aerosmith of Rocks. Nor am I shocked that they're not as powerful as the Aerosmith of Rocks, Jack Douglas or no Jack Douglas. But given their harmony singing you think they'd try and be more melodic. Sign of smarts: the way the phrase "any time at all" hooks 'He's a Whore.'"
The boys from Rockford would open for Queen on their 1977 American tour and win praise from Japanese rock journalists. The following year, 5000 Japanese fans would greet the band at the airport.
We were struggling. We were just a rock band in the Chicago area from a little town trying to make a living. We didn't really think about how long our band was going to last or if we were going to record anything that would be released. We played for ourselves. We'd play shows to three people.
-Robin Zander
In August of 1976, years of touring and playing three to four sets a night finally paid off for a Rockford, Illinois quartet when Epic Records signed Cheap Trick. There were far easier ways for a band to make money than to play originals in suburban bars, as bassist Tom Peterson noted in a Chicago Reader oral history about the Cheap Trick's early days:
People wanted to see the Top 40 bands, but the audiences who'd come and see us, they'd be hooked. But we were making $50 to $75 a week, and the cover bands were making $800-$900 a week. We had enough to survive and buy guitars and strings. All those cover bands would come up to us and say, "You guys are so lucky, you get to play all your own material." And we'd go, "Lucky?" There was no way those cover bands were going to take a pay cut. We were dying out there.
In February of 1975, John Lennon released Rock'n'Roll, one part tribute to the music he loved as a teen; one part court settlement for borrowing a few lines from a Chuck Berry song for the Abbey Road track "Come Together". Lennon especially rocks out on the Fats Domino hit "Ain't That A Shame", clearly inspiring Cheap Trick's version on Live at Budokan.
"Ain't That A Shame" was the first rock 'n' roll song I ever learned. My mother taught it to me on the banjo before I learned the guitar. Nobody else knows these reasons except me.
-John Lennon
One day, we were listening to John Lennon’s Rock ‘n’ Roll album, and one of the songs on there is Ain’t That A Shame. ‘Hey, if it’s good enough for John Lennon…’
-Rick Nielsen, Cheap Trick
By the way, those blurry figures in the photo above are Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Stu Sutcliffe, from a photo shot back in the Hamburg days.
