CHEAP TRICKSTERS DENY PLANS FOR GLOBAL CONQUEST

CHEAP TRICKSTERS DENY PLANS FOR GLOBAL CONQUEST

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I want recognition as a writer...a designer of guitars, of sweaters, and of structural concepts... -Rick Nielsen

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Term Mass Invasion A “Dream Police Action”

by

Richard Riegel

Deep within the concrete-block entrails of Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum, there are still many minutes to go before Cheap Trick will be bounding onstage, but the girls are already lining up along the hallway outside the headliners’ dressing room. I take a casual glance at these ladies, resplendent in their pass-plastered shiny blouses and French jeans and stiletto heels, and automatically think: “Groupies,” remind myself that that’s a sexist assumption, and then recall further that it’s also probably true. This is big-league rock ’n’ roll, after all.

Still, an inordinate number of these supposed groupies are carrying cameras tonight—it could very well be that they’re enterprising freelancers out for an honest night’s work, just like your (male) reporter. (And it could also be that they’re actually ' Japanese teens in disguise as occidental ladies of die media, out to get near those delectably round-eyed Cheap Trick bodies! —Ah so, Yoko and Mika! Your cameras gave you away!)

Cheap Trick costume engineer Rick Nielsen, resplendent in his emerald cardigan sweater interwoven with white Cheap Trick' logos and self caricatures, appears at the dressing room door at this moment. One of the plainer ladies in waiting, a chunky blonde, approaches Nielsen and requests that he autograph the backstage pass pasted to her jeans. Nielsen bends oyer her proffered thigh, scrawls his portrait-signature over the wobbly surface—“Do you feel the whole arena shaking?” chuckles Rick. The girl glances at her cryptic acquisition a second, looks puezedly at Nielsen’s ballcap-crownedface, and saysif Now, let’s see, which one are you?”

You might well ask. Rick Nielsen and I had; just discussed identities—his and Cheap Trick’s—a few hours before, in j^s room at the Terrace Hilton. I had last caught Cheap Trick in Knoxville, in the spring, five months before tonight, and Rick informs me blandly that the band’s still on the same tour that took them through Knoxville. After mopping up all the Southern arenas, Cheap Trick had, among other routine feats, opened for Kiss in Detroit’s mammoth Pontiac Stadium, co-headlined the prestigious Reading Festival in England, took in more European dates, and then returned to the U.S. to pick up all those bread-andbutter venues—Kalamazoo, Erie, and Buffalo, just the last three nights, for instance— which had meanwhile propelled Cheap Trick At Budokan to quadruple-platinum status, deep in the heart of the rock recession.

I remind Nielsen of Cheap Trick’s quantum leap in popularity in Cincinnati alone, from playing the cozy Bogart’s club on their first visit, in 1977, to headlining the 18,000-seat Riverfront Coliseum their next time around. “Right,” says Rick, as his photocomputer memory instantly clicks the video cassette of the Bogart’s show onto his brain scan, “and it wasn’t even half-full that night!”

Cheap Trick’s burgeoning success during 1979 has turned out largely as sweet as Rick Nielsen had always mandated the group’s future, over their many years of Midwestern dues-compounding, though some of the rewards of fame have come true as bittersweetly as the teenager in “Surrender” found his bewildering universe. Nielsen notes astronomical increases in the volume of his own fan mail, including people sending him “gold and silver” (but no Krugerands, so far), “weirdo porno letters,” and, inevitably enough in this continuing ballad of TV violence, “death threats.”

Nielsen tells me proudly of his recent purchase of a nineteenth century house, rich in American and rock ’n’ roll history: Abraham Lincoln had spoken there, and the house had apparently been a station on the Underground Railroad (leading, of course, to the freeing of the Negroes, and their grateful recompense in inventing blues, jazz, and finally ROCK ’N’ ROLL!); in later times, Clarence Darrow had played pool in the future chez Nielsen (Darrow’s defense of evolution in 1925 thereby culminating in the phenomenology of Devo, some fifty years later). For all his interest in the house, Rick won’t pinpoint the location for me beyond conceding that it’s “in Illinois;” he doesn’t need any more incidents like the recent occasion in which a psychotic Cheap Trick “fan” persisted in “driving steak knives into the front porch” of his old place.

As it happens, Nielsen is regretting his loss of privacy on the eve of even greater fame for Cheap Trick; the new Cheap Trick album, Dream Police, has just been released, a few days before the Cincinnati date, and the couple of times I’ve been able to spin my copy through so far, it’s sounded like the band’s strongest collection yet.

In the best tradition of the grand mal ironies that have defined Cheap Trick’s fantastically universal appeal, Dream Police was completely recorded and mixed by late 1978, before Epic had ever envisioned releasing a domestic version of At Budokan, just at the time when Cheap Trick’s ultimate breakthrough appeared probable, but by no means certain. Thus Dream Police was conceived by a still overwhelmingly aspiring band, but also by a band With enough taste of success to confidently experiment with some new styles, and to polish them off thoroughly; And, irony of supreme ironies, this tough make-it-or-JbuSt set ends up coming out just at the time when Cheap Trick are sitting on top of the record world, literally and six-figuratively—millions of satisfied consumers introduced" to the band by At Budokan will snap up copies of Dream Police automatically, and they’ll be getting one of the best “followup” albums ever, in the bargain.

I appreciate the apparently greater fullband collaboration in the songwriting for Dream Police, thpugh, even there, one finds the beloved Cheap Trick kidding: Tom Petersson Sings the lead vocal on the punky “I Know What I Want,” instead of the usual Robin Zander, So it’s gotta be Tom’s song, right? Wrong, it’s a pure Rick Nielsen composition, while Petersson’s and Nielsen’s own "The House Is Rockin’ (With Domestic Problems)” has Zander doing the vocal. Got that straight, now? There’s no room for overweening egos among these Beatle-heirs.

My own favorite cut on Dream Police happens to be the title track, which is also fortunately enough jumping out as the first single from the album. Put me down for all 3:49 Of Rick Nielsen’s cheerful-paranoiac, dream-policed fantasies (“I’ve carried the idea for this song for years,” says a beaming Rick), brilliantly interpreted by Robin Zander. Nielsen describes the new “Gpnna Raise Hell” as “written for fanatics of all kinds, religious, moral, and nuclear” (your reporter having already noted, with sly gratitude, that at least one major rock ’n’ roll band won’t be donating their presence to James’ and Carly’s arid John’s desperate defense of their WASP private-property rights in N.Y.C. this very evening, 9/23/ 79).

History-conscious Rick claims that “Gpnna Raise Hell,” which was written just before tfie event, accurately foretold the Jonestown Massacre of last year, while “Writing On The Wall” turns out to be a nifty, presciently retroactive snapshot of? Cheap Trick’s booming 1979 success.

Dream Police is classic but also avantgarde Cheap Trick music, from beginning to end, and that’s just the start of a frenetic Cheap Trick year for the fans; after finishing this U.S. tour (just four more dates), Cheap Trick will take a couple of weeks off, then tour Australia and New Zealand for the first time, record the next album somewhere along the line, and when those minor details are out of the way, they’ll start compulsively touring the U.S. once again, bringing along an all-new, full-scale Dream Police concert package, complete with a D.P. video, and who knows what other cheap tricks now up their sleeves. Hey, and that’s not to mention the upcoming, ushering-in-the-80’s TV special, featuring Cheap Trick, Blondie, and The Cars.

*Gonna Raise Heir was written for fanatics of all kinds, religious, moral and nuclear. -Rick Nielsen

Still, the world according to Rick Nielsen must be orif song-inspiring identity crisis after another: “See, people are still talking about me as a guitarist, and I want recognition as a writer (I’ve written songs and magazine articles), as a designer of guitars, of sweaters, and of structural concepts...” (“HOLY SHIT!!!” suddenly sonic-booms through Nielsen’s hotel-room wall, as we notice on his silent television screen that the Reds’ Dave Collins has just stretched his triple to an inside-the-park home run, when the Astros fumbled the ball—“Tom must be watching the game too,” comments Rick.) “...I mean, people still ask me why I wear these sweaters, and if they’d just look at my wardrobe”—he motions to his closet, and to the rainbowhued collection of custom cardigans neatly awaiting future rock ’n’ roll functionalism— “they’d see that that’s all I’ve got to wear.”

Duly noted, Rick. Duly noted.

CHEAP TRICK INTERVIEW BONUS EP:

Cheap Trick’s Cincinnati show was great, just as you and I knew it would be. Further off the beaten track were the cinema verite pre-concert dressing room festivities: while a charmingly accomodating Tom Petersson poses for a photo with two nervously giggling girls who have brought him a crudely-but-reverently-drawn portrait of his r’n’r glamour, Bun E. Carlos methodically Band-Aids his fingers for tonight’s tubsmashing. Bun tosses the empty Band-Aid wrappers into an ever-mounting pile on the floor, as though he’s starring in some hilariously dry Monty Python short, and meanwhile runs down the band’s recent vehicular acquisitions for me: “Yeah, I just got a 1979 (pre-downsized) Lincoln 4-door, and Robin bopght a ’67 Maserati. Rick? Oh, he’s had a Pinto for years; I always used to drive it before 1 had a car.” So that’s what the obligatory ballcaps and cardigans must be hiding—maybe Rick Nielsen was horribly burned in a Pinto gas explosion, and he wants,to spare us the sight now. Let’s see you surrender that one without giving yourself away, Rick! \