It could be a warm summer night any where in America. Smoke swims through the heavy evening air: you can most feel the electricity crackle | through the moisture. It's the kind of light that nudges at the teenager in I me—dark, sweaty, and tense. A per-

feet evening for rock 'n' roll. On stage, The Cars grind out a hypnotic set On each song the basic riff builds and grows, until the tune can't help but arrest the attention of any and all listeners. As their opening stint bubbles to a close, the tiny hall feels like a pressure cooker, steaming at the

edges with emotional energy The audience grows restless with the long set change, and anxious shouts encourage any positive activity on the ready and waiting stage. Tonight's headliners haven't had that many chances to face a primed and waiting audience: they've been too busy as America's most available and reliable

opening act. But if genius is mostly hard work, as Goethe once suggested. Cheap Trick are a band with considerable smarts. And the pay-off for that grind fills the hall—flesh and blood fans in various outfits of Cheap Trick paraphernalia (T-shirts, blouses, ties. Don't know the count on the famous Cheap Trick panties). Their shouts and cheers, even before the band hits the stage, signal the dawn of a new age for this band. Cheap Trick—certified rock 'n' roll

stars. The lights drop, and in the haze sliced by flashlights one sees Rick Nielsen step up to his mike stand, taped to which are at least sixty "Rick Nielsen,

jjfeheap Trick" guitar picks. ■ "H ELL-LOOOO-OOOO" hails Nielsen. whose stage voice sounds like a wounded pervert making obscene calls, j though with perfectly rounded o's in his greeting. The band snaps into "Hello There" with a thundering kick.

"Hello there Ladies and Gentlemen/ Hello there Ladies and Gents/Are you ready to rock?/Are you ready to rock?"

I'm not quite ready for Rick Nielsen, who in less than a minute has already completed two quick goose walks around his end of the stage and scaled the two-step ramp parked at the front. In addition to contributing vocals and playing guitar chords that sound about five miles wide. For the rest of the ninety minute set, I can't let Nielsen far

from my range of vision.

Which is difficult. Bun E. Carlos is the embodiment of a pressing enigma He looks abnormally normal, so of course you expect anyone who looks that normal must be completely bonkers. Wrong again—he's as normal as anything you can get in your Sears catalog, which by the way is where Rick gets those nifty sweaters.

Bun E. drums with an incredibly spare, tasteful power, and puffs nonstop on a chain of ciggies from which he draws enough smoke to give a dry-ice machine a run for its money. His metronomic swing underlies every Cheap Trick song. He may look like a miscast Venezualan bookie, but Bun E. is Cheap Trick's championship heart.

The face is obviously Robin Zander. Blond hair, puppy-dog eyes, and a frailty that could make even Patti Smith feel pangs of the mothering instinct are his credentials with the ladies. Despite his slight build, Zander is a vocal I A-bomb. He has the pipes to stun at 200 yards, incredible range, and a style that blends a lot of vague references i into a voice that is distinctive yet [somehow has a familiar echo. Onstage [he is the least animated of the band, treading shyly through his role as singer, guitarist and image. One suspects a reserve of charisma still untapped in Robin, but with ail that happens around him, he probably is | happy to toss it out sparingly.

Tom Petersson seems to relish the double-edge of performing. Tonight he plays a custom built twelve-string bass, which accounts for much of fhe immense wave of melody that Cheap Trick emanate. Though the snap of his fingers against each string are what sparks Cheap Trick's pistons, his bright, .smiling good-looks—we'll get Warren Beatty to grow his hair and play Tom in the movie—spark something with the ladies in the hall who think brunettes are more fun. Flashing a Pepsodent smile don't hurt neither, but it's a genuine sign of the good time he's having too.

If Tom is having a good time. Nielsen must be somewhere close to adrenal drunkenness. His pace is frantic; he doesn't stop for a second. In an instant he performs many small feats: striking a chunky chord while hopping across stage, bugging his eyes out like a ■ cartoon character, then flicking his guitar pick into the air and batting it some thirty feet, all within four seconds, all without missing a step or beat. With such agility and energy, Nielsen is a one man guitar Olympics.

No doubt Rick's fusion of Huntz Hall and Pete Townshend into a single being is what sets Cheap Trick apart from anyone else in rock 'n' roll— forever, which isn't a bad thing. Rick's persona and bag of tricks are all his own: flipping his cap brim up or down, puffing his cheeks, leaping to the top of his ramp, spinning around and flying back down, a thumbs-up, wink, and cock of the head to the audience, a startled look, a look of feigned retardation. A flick of the pick up into his mouth, from where he spits it out into the audience, picks stuck on his forehead, picks stuck to his cheeks, picks flying fifty or sixty feet from the stage, picks winging off into the distance. Machine gun guitar walks like Sgt. Fury out of a foxhole, leaps, splits, twists and stops . . . but only short stops. A one man solution to the rock energy crisis.

He looks like I wouldn't want him on my Little League team. In black high-top sneakers, baggy wrinkled trousers, and a red button-down sweater that only Mom would force you to wear, he's the Mark Fidrych of rock. Festooned on his sweater are a variety of buttons—Cheap Trick and otherwise, a Kinks "Misfits" one being the most telling—and around him onstage is a similarly unique collection of nine guitars, all with black checked straps. Tonight Rick scores a first, wearing

three guitars for a song, playing and shedding each in succession. At the end of the first encore, he drops his guitar on the top step of the platform. But musician that Rick is, the guitar clangs in key.

The crisp, compelling set includes some songs that sound like real standards: "I Want You To Want Me," "On Top Of The World," "Big Eyes" and their searing rendition of the Move's "California Man." But there is

We can be rotten, dirty and heavy as anyone. —Rick

one song that not only echoes the musical feel of The Who, perhaps the closest of many Cheap Trick references, but responds to "The Kids Are Alright"—"Surrender. "

"Mommy's alright/Daddy's alright/ They just seem a little weird ..." the song reads. Members of the rock 'n' roll generation, meet the band of your children's wildest dreams.

Cheap Trick might well be the Beatles of the 80's. Which means —and don't get me wrong here—in no way, shape or manner will they ever replace the Beatles or parallel that band's singular accomplishments. They may well sell more records (Abba already claim that feat), but that has to do with the "growth of the market." If you don't understand what that means, ask Clive Davis.

But Cheap Trick does have the suss to fill a certain void in rock since the fab four's demise. C.T. is yet another quite fab, and quite identifiably different, four rockers. And considering the times, aren't Tom, Rick, Robin and Bun E. rather logical extensions of John, Paul, George and Ringo (and Murry The K, Stu Sutcliffe, Badfinger, Wings, Beatlemania and Nick Lowe?). No hangers-on either.

Apart from having four distinct personalities, Cheap Trick compose songs that stick to your ears like peanut butter, have a stage show that rivals Kiss for interest and anyone in rock for sheer entertainment value, never mind the fierce musical qualities (as yet not fully captured on disc), and have teen appeal up the gazoo.

Yah, Herr Doktor. Vee haff found ze perfect specimens. All vee must do iz inject zem into ze public eye.

About Cheap Trick at least this much is known. Around 1967 Tom Petersson and Rick Nielsen (at the time with shoulder-length hair and sans trademark cap) pop up in a Madison, Wisconsin band called The Grim Reaper. Band signs with Epic Records, who pull a cheap trick and insist the name be changed. Fuse, as they became, record one album that all reports say is better off left obscqre.

Sometime after Fuse's one and only album, Rick arid Tom join together with Stewkey and Thom Mooney of the Nazz, who have been left high and dry by Rundgren's departure. The project brims and wanes over time, but never jells. Rick and Tom depart for Europe.

It's on that continent where, legend has it, Cheap Trick first came together. It was almost ine vitible that two humans as unique as Rick and Bun E. should chance upon each other; Robin at the time was wandering around Scotland with his acoustic guitar.

In the summer of '72, Rick and Tom return to their native Illinois and form a band with Bun E. on drums and a fello.w by the name of Xeno on vocals.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 66

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 50

"We came back to the Midwest at a good time," enthuses Rick. "Ken [Adamany, the group's perpetual motion manager, then an agent and club owner in Madison] had work for us, we got the equipment together, rehearsed for two Weeks, and have been playing six or seven nights a week since."

In over five years since, the band has gigged constantly without vacation, and breaks for but a few weeks to record their albums.

"We actually made money and supported ourselves before we even had a record contract," says Rick. "We had a full p.a., lights, road crews, busses, all that.

"So after the first record we were actually losing money opening when we could have made more money playing clubs."

Their picture was printed so often in Performance, the booking magazine, that their present publicist grew to hate the odd looking crew by just regularly reading the magazine. She nearly bombed the A&R department when Cheap Trick was signed, but now sings a much different tune (most probably a Cheap Trick tune, in fact). No two ways about it, from the beginning this was a band you could not be blase about.

How did the name com£ about? "We had a story last year we got tired of tellin' " explains Rick, "so the story this year, which we're almost tired of telling, is that a UFO landed and they were wearing Star Wars and Cheap Trick t-shirts. And we opted for the wrong one. We could have been famous like the movie Star Wars, but we decided to take Cheap Trick.

"We took the tough way; we'd rather work for our credibility."

Early in the band's saga Xeno is replaced by Robin Zander, for whom Cheap Trick is his first and only band.

' Epic Records discovers the band and signs them in 1976, and has luckily stumbled upon a complete package,

ready to record and tour until you say stop.

jack Douglas records the band's debut almost straight from the live show. It attracts interest, but the touring that follows and the critical acclaim for In Color really set the ball rolling. As for Heaven Tonight, it's been bubbling steadily for nearly three months now, and as I write this, "Surrender" is bulleting up the singles charts.

Not exactly overnight sensations, here, at least. Neither were the Beatles in England. Butin Japan, the band flew in this spring already stars, headlining huge halls and spurring frantic Oriental teen mania. If you note how carefully the Japanese have gotten closer and closer in following our fads—their adoration of Kiss is the best recent example —this discovery of a fad before it breaks here becomes doubly significant. In the land of the rising sun, Cheap Trick are already on their way to being the Beatles of the 80's.

They're not doing too bad here, either. I wear a lot of rock 'n' roll t-shirts; none have elicited near the reaction I got in two short days wearing a Cheap Trick t-shirt. At one concert I received one offer to buy it, three "nice shirt" comments, and a fellow who saw the shirt, pointed, and immediately befriended me with a hearty "Hey, how ya' doin' ". After the show at Nathan's (the best place in New York to cull real public opinion), the gent ahead of me in the line noted my shirt, asked if I liked the band, then jumped into an extended discourse: "I think they're the best American rock 'n' roll band around. There are some English bands that may be better—'cause they been around a while, like the Stones 'n' stuff—but there's nobody in America anywhere near like Cheap Trick. They're four great musicians."

The next afternoon I get a thumbs-up from a bicycle messenger peddling by and two "Cheap Trick! All right!" cheers. I toss the shirt in my laundry bag, point proven.

It isn't hard to see Cheap Trick living a version of "A Hard Day's Night" of almost Warholian length and proportions. Just cast Rick in the role of Paul's ever-troublesome grandfather, and Ringo's role too.

After the show a group of us await the band in the Vinyl Virgin lounge of the local Holiday Inn. Assembled are publicists, writers, photographers and a few other record company types.

A little scene-setting. In. the room is one photographer who did a very nice photo spread of the band in Where It's At magazine. Their publicist was pleased as punch until she turned over the last page of the spread. On the other side of the page was an ad for male anal douches, and a quick flip

through the schlong pix confirmed that the mag was indeed gay. "Adamany will kill me!" was her first reaction, but press is press.

So into the assembled scene wanders Rick Nielsen, a hawk circling unsuspecting prey. He spots the photographer.

"Hey fella, how ya' doin,*' says Rick in his singy voice that can never decide if it's sincere or snide. "Gee, I wanna really thank you for the nice spread in.

. . what was that? Back Door Man Magazine?"

Rick opens to a toothy grin and stares as the guy melts into the chair. Rick turns to the rest of the crowd . "Oh, and look who we have here!" he exults. On to more game.

Rick is also proud of his buttons. "See that," he says, displaying a large color photo button. "That's Bun E. hustling a girl in a sauna. I don't know if he got her."

Suddenly he's off on another tack : "I had a Russian wolfhound and it died in January of last year. Her name was China and she wrote great songs. I couldn't stand the competition in the family so I killed her. Karate-chopped her to bits."

As the rest of the band ambles in, the lounge singer in the corner works her way through the chorus of "Pennies From Heaven."

"Panties From Heaven?" inquires Rick. On that note we all retire to the next room for a stab at serious interviewing. Or at least we try.

As I cry to the waitress later for more coffee, Rick offers aid.

"Here, drink this, it's really good coffee," he says, pushing over his cup.

"It looks like it's staining the cup," I comment as I lift it to my lips. My tongue is attacked 'by salt, and I grimace.

"Aw, I'm sorry. It was onion soup!" laughs Rick. "Sorry Rob, what could I do! Ya know ... I don't know . . . I'm from Illinois, ya know?"

Okay, Okay!

"That's okay," offers Rick. "If we were from California we'd all have moustaches and tattoos, and only one of us has a moustache, and none of us have tattoos, except Tom, who bought some of those rub-on ones at that barbecue place."

To fend off further trouble, I ask Bun E. about Japan.

"Well," he says calmly, "it got to the point where we were just locked in our rooms—we couldn't even ,walk in the halls. Girls would always sneak up and you'd have to call the security guards to escort 'em out. They were always sneaking in through freight elevators, pounding on our cars ..."

"We heard they were real calm and polite," says Tom, "and we also heard it was pandemonium. We didn't know which to expect, and it was soon clear that it was pandemonium."

"We arrived at the airport, went down this back hall and paist some glass doors," recalls Bun E. "All of a sudden, there was this huge scream—a hundred girls. Then we knew."

"And we rounded the corner," adds Robin, "and there was another two thousand all yelling and screaming." Throughout the tour fans tossed dolls, drawings and buttons made in the Cheap Trick likenesses onstage. The adoration was total.

"They'd all charter cabs," says Bun E., "ten girls to a cab, and follow you to the hotel. A whole fleet of maybe twenty cabs, and they're all leaning out trying to get this close to you," he motions with a slight gap between thumb and forefinger. "It's scary!"

"The fans were well-prepared too," says Rick. "All these tapes blaring and pictures. They knew everything! They knew it all. It's like the CIA couldn't have infiltrated better."

What's Cheap Trick's secret? No secret at all, according to Nielsen.

"We got together because we all liked music and how each other played. We always had inklings and thoughts that we could be making records because we were good enough -to, and that happened.

"But at the same time we were happy playing in clubs and doin' all right. Sure

it's better doing this. Better makin' records and travellin' around the world than travelling in a car with a trailer.

"We can be rotten, dirty and heavy as anyone, but at the same time we've got lots of melody. I hate to be too undirectional, which we aren't. We're real diverse—our personalities, our music, what we want— but at-the same time there's a line right down the middle: great drums, great bass, lots of melody, lots of fun, lots of excitement.

"We're basically a rock band," Rick concludes. "Guitar/bass/drums/vocals, but we take it further than that. Bun E.'s got one of the largest drum sets ever made, Tom has a special bass, I have special guitars. And the way Robin sings, fib's different from anyone."

They seem picked to click. A friend of mine's sixteen-year-old sister may play an electric guitar and admire Patti Smith, but it's Robin Zander she's in love with. And while they speak to the younger generation with clarity and verve, they've got a language so well versed in rock essentials that a boring old fart like me is reduced to nearfandom.

As the party winds down the band heads towards their rooms, in the lobby are their two only groupies, riot Japanese or screaming. The girls gawk in awe as the band pay their respects to us, and amble on off to their rooms. It may be just another hard day's night of many for Cheap Trick, but for those of us there, it's a night to remember.