Cheap Trick Transcended Genre To Create Something Just A Little Weird
In February of 1977, Cheap Trick unleashed its self titled debut on an unsuspecting public. Like most of Cheap Trick’s history, the facts are uncertain; there’s no exact release date to be found, but anyone who was there suggests that it was around the first week of February. This is very on brand for the band: Cheap Trick’s liner notes explain that Cheap Trick is a band without a past. With its first record, Cheap Trick created something truly unique, which has been both a blessing and a curse for the band over the past four decades. While they were a favorite of Kurt Cobain’s, and remain a favorite of record store clerks and rock ’n’ roll enthusiasts to this day, the very same uniqueness that attracts these tastemakers has made it difficult for the band to attain U2 or Bruce Springsteen levels of stadium success.
1976 saw rock music in a state of flux. As Cheap Trick was coming into its own in the midwest, punk rock was taking over New York City and London. Hip hop was coming into its own on the east coast, and for the first time, the cassette tape was rivaling the LP for consumer dominance. Blondie had released its debut album, and The Damned and The Sex Pistols had both unleashed their first singles. A sea change was coming — even if, in the midst of the punk rock explosion, the Eagles’ Hotel California hit #1 that December. Cheap Trick signed to a five year recording contract with Epic records on August 1, 1976, and in less than six months the band’s debut record would populate record stores around the world. Cheap Trick , particularly on its debut , was unclassifiable, splitting the difference between the heavier rock acts that crowded FM radio, the British Invasion-inspired pop that came in the wake of The Beatles, and the punk acts that were unleashing a sonic assault on the record industry.
Audiences — and, arguably, record labels and managers — never knew what to make of Cheap Trick; the band was at once too smart for radio rock, too proficient for punk, too heavy for the pop tarts, and too succinct for the prog rockers and metalheads. Plus, their look was bizarre and wholly original, even in an era was David Bowie was king; singer Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson resembled members of late-era Roxy Music, while guitarist Rick Nielsen took on a cartoon character persona. And drummer Bun E. Carlos? He looked like the band’s accountant.
Cheap Trick has always been a quintessentially Midwestern band: too cynical for the glamour of Los Angeles, and too down to earth for New York City. Elvis Costello told Creem in 1981 you have your entire life to write your first album, and Cheap Trick was the result of vigorous playing and constant touring out on the Midwest bar-band circuit. The result is a rock ’n’ roll record like no other, equal parts poppy, powerful, angsty, funny, scary, sweet, and — to paraphrase a future hit for the band — just a little weird. Producer Jack Douglas, who is credited with signing the band, aimed to capture the raucous live sound that the band had perfected in clubs back home.
There was something in the ether in the Midwest (or maybe it was the water ) around that time, as kids that grew up on The Who and The Beatles were ready to stab bloated ’70s radio rock in the heart and let it bleed all over the stage. Fans often refer to Cheap Trick as the “midwest Beatles,” as well as luminaries of power pop, a term coined by Pete Townshend of The Who. In the ’70s, Chicago and its surrounding areas gave birth to Pezband — which The Today Show’s Jane Pauley called called “the sound everybody would be talking about” in 1977 — as well as Off Broadway, Cleveland’s The Raspberries, and countless bar bands that cribbed from the British Invasion playbook.
But while Cheap Trick is often categorized as power pop, “We’re a bit heavier than those types of bands,” as bassist Tom Peterson explained to the Chicago Reader in 2016. “We tend to have scarier lyrical content and subject matter. Darker and really heavy — it borders on heavy metal sometimes.” Power pop was quickly becoming a catchall for rock bands that weren’t quite AOR and weren’t quite punk that labels didn’t know how to sell, similar to “new wave.” While Cheap Trick’s influence on, and contributions to, the power-pop subgenre cannot be denied, what makes Cheap Trick more memorable than most bands of its era is that while it is power pop, it also transcends power pop. (It’s like how the Velvet Underground isn’t “punk” in the traditional sense, but many punk acts were inspired by Lou Reed and company.) In the 40 blistering minutes that make up 1977’s Cheap Trick, the band runs the gamut between sweet harmonies, dissonant guitars, and peculiar subject matter, never feeling like its pandering to a particular audience. They’re simply being themselves.
There’s something more sinister and infinitely more sardonic in the DNA of Cheap Trick than most power pop or rock acts of the day, whose lyrics are all about falling in love or getting laid. ”Jack Douglas tried to pick songs that were controversial,” Zander revealed in Reputation Is A Fragile Thing. “That’s the kind of record he wanted us to do. It could have been all sweet stuff, because we had a lot of sweet sounding stuff.” Nielsen added, “I feel like I should use different songwriting names” because of the band’s wildly divergent subject matter, but “screw it. Your personality is that you have all that stuff inside of you. You shouldn’t feel embarrassed about any of it.”
From its opening salvo, Cheap Trick is unlike most rock records of the era: The opening track, “ELO Kiddies,” is a rock ’n’ roll rumination on getting older from a band barely out of its twenties, an alarm clock in the mix subtly telling listeners to wake up. “ELO Kiddies was one of my favorites,” drummer Bun E. Carlos explains in Reputation Is A Fragile Thing. “In one way, it tells kids to go out and have fun and go nuts and go completely wild, but remember when you get to be a little older you’re going to wake up with headaches and you’re going to get ulcers.”
With a pitch black sense of humor, “Kiddies” seamlessly transitions into “Daddy Should Have Stayed In High School,” where lead singer Robin Zander takes on the role of a character proclaiming that he’s been “waiting every night after school,” fantasizing in falsetto about being ”your daddy.” About the song, Nielsen told Guitar World that he was “trying to put [himself] in the place of a grown man who’s consumed by lust for girls half his age.” “
The cynical “Taxman, Mr. Thief” riffs on money, greed, and The Beatles while emulating the feel of a wood-paneled Midwest basement that reeks of low-grade grass and stale Point beer. “Cry, Cry” is closer to a traditional pop song, full of bluesy swagger as Zander cribs from Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” asserting that “he’s been so lonely, baby.” Closing out Side 1 (the album features a Side 1 and a Side A, suggesting that the band has no B material), “Oh, Candy” — arguably the most traditional “power pop” tune on the record — at first appears to be a lovelorn song of romance gone sour, but it is in fact about the band’s photographer, nicknamed M & M, who had died by suicide.
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Side A kicks off with the blistering and lusty come on “Hot Love,” followed by what would become a live showcase for Petersson’s 12-string bass playing (he played a 4-string on the recording) cover of Terry Reid’s “Speak Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace.” Next up, “He’s A Whore” is two minutes and forty three seconds of punk fury that would go on to inspire both Steve Albini and Joey Ramone.Then, “Mandocello” is the closest thing to a ballad featured on Cheap Trick, but still features heavy bass groove and drives almost as hard as anything else on the record. Finally, closer “The Ballad Of T.V. Violence (I’m Not The Only Boy)” — decidedly not a ballad — was a favorite of the band’s live sets. Originally titled “The Ballad Of Richard Speck”, the heavy number finds Zander singing from the point of view of the infamous serial killer who, in July of 1966, brutally tortured, raped, and murdered eight student nurses in Chicago. “I’m not the only boy,” Zander wails like a madman, before the album closes out with a lone gunshot.
To promote the record, Cheap Trick recorded a series of promotional videos at a club called the Night Gallery in Waukegan, IL, a far north suburb of Chicago. The band played the venue regularly, “I don’t have that many fond memories [of Night Gallery],” Petersson revealed to the Chicago Reader in 2016. “It was such a drag with the hours. You’d get there at 4 PM. We’d go on at 10 PM, we’d go on at 2 AM, and we’d go on at 4 AM. Then six in the morning rolls around.” But regardless of whether they really wanted to be there, the band recorded clips for “ELO Kiddies,” “Oh, Candy,” “He’s A Whore,” and “The Ballad Of T.V. Violence” at the venue.
This was still a pre-MTV landscape, but according to Pitchfork, “local television stations would often air the clips between programs, and discos started streaming them on loop via closed-circuit TV. Actual music video programs started taking shape as well.”
The music press lauded Cheap Trick upon its release. Trouser Press’ Ira Robbins wrote of the band that they were “sarcastic, smart, nasty, powerful, tight, casual, and destined for something great,” while Rolling Stone compared the band’s playing to the coaching style of Vince Lombardi: “heavy emphasis on basics with a strain of demented violence to keep the opposition intimidated.” An appropriate comparison for a band of Midwesterners. Meanwhile, back in Chicago, “[Cheap Trick’s] first album came out during a time when everything that wasn’t Linda Ronstadt or Styx was considered punk rock,” rock DJ Lin Brehmer explained to the Chicago Reader. “Working at a progressive rock FM station, we embraced ‘Mandocello’ and ‘ELO Kiddies.’ In those days, the music director would put a large index card on the album for DJs to make comments and suggest which tracks to play. I remember the first comment on Cheap Trick was simply, ‘ELO Kiddies!,’ which was shorthand for ‘killer track’.”
Throughout the ’80s, Cheap Trick would lean into the power pop tag that had been put on it with the catchy, melodic MTV staples “If You Want My Love” and “Tonight It’s You,” as well as peppering albums with weirdo jams like “I Want Be Man” and “Man-U-Lip-U-Later.” The closest the band ever came to recapturing that raw sound of their debut would be twenty years later, with another self-titled record that most fans have called a sonic rebirth. With their first album, Cheap Trick set the stage for a long career with ups and downs, never truly gaining the stadium success of their contemporaries, but never truly selling out, either. Cheap Trick — like most debut albums — is the band at its most honest: schizophrenic, darkly comic, and just a little bit weird.
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Follow Mike Vanderbilt on Twitter @MikeVanderbilt
