CREEM ONLINE: Cheap Trick — Afternoon Of Reality

CREEM—July 1979

by Richard Riegel

"It’s like I always tell people," says Rick Nielsen, "‘I’m not a conservative, I’m a realist.’"

Sitting in Nielsen’s room (#409, she’s real fine, no less) at the Knoxville, Tennessee, Hyatt Regency, watching Rick’s lanky frame effortlessly bridge the gap between his armchair and the foot of his bed, I’m beginning to wonder just who it was who accused Rick Nielsen of being conservative.

Today, as he claims he is every day, Rick Nielsen is in costume as Rick Nielsen: black ball cap adorned with Cheap Trick badge, and with the bill flipped up a la dip; scarlet cardigan sweater with interwoven Cheap Trick logos; shapeless, beige, essence-of-old-man trousers, held up by suspenders; white socks (white socks!); and overwhelmingly functional gym shoes.

Nielsen’s trousers, in particular, convey such a compelling image of voluntary American decrepitude, that I stare at them in half-expectation that he’s added ersatz pee stains for a final touch of senior-citizen authenticity. Sitting nearby on the bed is Rick’s characteristic carry-on luggage; the man who possessed one of the only four existent mellotrons in the U.S. in 1968 is now content to tote his worldly belongings in a raggedy assemblage of shopping bags, six or seven of them inserted into each other for reinforcement, pasted together with backstage passes and airline stickers from around the world.

The neck of Nielsen’s cavernous shopping bag is ringed with at least fifty identical felt-tipped pens, all the handier for Rick’s compulsive jotting-down of song lyrics as they occur to him, to add to the ever-growing catalogue of potential Cheap Trick classics stored within the bag. "It’s great," says Rick, giving his faithful bag a fond glance. "I carry it with me on planes, and no one dares sit beside me. I don’t have to worry about some sweaty tennis player flopping down beside me, that way."

Hmmm. All this sounds reasonable enough, realistic enough, if you will, so far, but armed as I am with pressing queries from my editors at CREEM, here on the eve of Cheap Trick’s inevitable breakthrough as an international supergroup, I push Rick harder for the story behind the story.

"Okay," I concede, "so Cheap Trick came together in its present form around 1973. Were you dressing like you do"–my italics added as my eyes traverse his funky but funky costume once again-"back then, or did all this come later?" But Rick’s having none of my imputation that Kiss-kalkulations dictated his wardrobe selections.

Leaning back in his chair, snapping his suspenders at me like the wise old grandpa in the Country Time lemonade commercials, Rick Nielsen plainly has me over a cracker barrel: "I’ve always dressed ‘like this,’ in effect. It took the rest of the world a while to catch up with me."

"But what about the stories that you had shoulder-length hair back in the '60s?" I persist, confident that everyone from my generation had to have been touched with the original sin of hippieness at one time or another in his life. "Naw," says Rick, "I never had really long hair, it was like that Frank Zappa song, ‘My Hair Is Getting Long In Back’," and he cranes his 1979 noggin far back, so that his half-inch-long hair just brushes his collar. "See, long hair has always been relative."

It’s never occurred to me until just this moment that maybe Rick Nielsen is getting a bit bald underneath his various ball caps, which never seem to be absent from his clock work skull. If so, he’s come up with the perfect solution to the balding-rockstar syndrome beginning to decimate the ranks of our generation. Unlike the Beach Boys’ Mike Love, who only calls attention to his baldpate with each floppy sombrero he dons, Rick has shifted the observer’s interest to his Cubs caps and Sears cardigans themselves; anybody who dresses with such deliberate lack of fashion as Rick Nielsen just couldn’t be vain about his look, could he? Well, could he?

For now, Nielsen hastens to assure me that each of the other Cheap Trick members remains as organically himself as Rick just claimed to be: "Bun E. Carlos has always looked like Bun E. Carlos, Tom Petersson has always looked like Tom Petersson, Robin Zander has always looked like Robin Zander." But Rick admits also that the rigid separation of the two "pretty" Cheap Tricksters (Petersson and Zander) from the two "not-as-pretty" C.T.’s (Carlos and himself) on several of the group’s previous record jackets was a bit unfortunate and misleading.

The wages of Cheap Trick’s cosmetic dichotomy hit home most forcefully when the band did further publicity-pic sessions, and the photographer persisted in picking up on the group’s popularly-established images: "Put the two ‘zanies’ on the ends now. Okay, this time, put the two ‘zanies’ in the middle." While Rick Nielsen would obviously have stood a rather good chance to being identified as a "zany" in a police lineup, Bun E. Carlos’s only crime of zaniness appeared to have been that he was wearing comfortable clothes, and that, at the time he was slightly "overweight." To live outside the law of the beautiful people, as Cheap Trick have graphically demonstrated to us, you must be zany.

When I quiz Rick Nielsen further about his background, he has me just about convinced that he indeed did emerge from his mother’s womb with cardigan sweater and ball cap intact: "I was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and grew up in Rockford, Illinois. Both my parents were professional opera singers, and I used to travel with my father to his singing jobs, when I wasn’t in school, of course. I got to go to all 48 states, and Canada and Mexico, that way, though I never made it to Alaska or Hawaii. I still haven’t been to Alaska or Hawaii, as a matter of fact," the unspoken implication being that Cheap Trick’s rampaging world conquest will soon polish off even those remote outposts.

"My parents also owned a music store, and I used to work in there, sweeping up and stuff." (Visions of Mindy McConnell’s family’s music store, with Rick Nielsen’s opera-singer dad a chrome-domed Conrad Janis-type, presiding behind the counter, while the incipient Cheap Trickster, wearing a beanie with a propeller on top, industriously sweeps up spilled guitar picks.) Rick disclaims formal musical training, but in response to the inescapable musical influences of his family life, he was playing guitar by his teen years. "Lots of R&B at first," he adds, rather intriguingly.

Even though Rick Nielsen’s rock ’n’ roll emergence coincided with the Beatle-bred pop explosion of the mid-'60s, he was fueled with (and this hardly seems unlikely) a dedicated '70s professionalism from the beginning. "It was always a matter of setting progressively higher goals for myself and my music, and then making my best effort to achieve the goals. When I started playing rock 14-1/2 years ago, my first goal was to form a band. Then I wanted to buy decent equipment. Then it was getting better money for our shows." Each goal was achieved in its own proper time, and Cheap Trick’s current worldwide popularity can thus be seen as merely the logical culmination of Rick Nielsen’s dedicated goal-organization.

Which is not to say, of course, that Cheap Trick’s present popularity happened overnight, although it almost seemed instantaneous when Cheap Trick suddenly emerged from the American heartland in 1976-77, after so many years of salting away the fabled R ’n’ R dues in Midwestern oblivion.

Rick Nielsen and Tom Petersson have been playing together since 1967, when they combined with several other musical acquaintances to form Fuse, who were then signed to Epic Records during the psychedelically-euphoric group boom of that season. Epic released Fuse’s first and only album in 1968, but as it was a hasty, poorly produced effort ("Record companies in those days assumed that anybody with long hair knew all about production," says Rick), not at all representative of the band’s already-awesome live capabilities, it quickly stiffed, and Fuse were dropped from Epic’s roster.

Out on the streets again, Nielsen went logically enough to England, where he ran into Todd Rundgren. Todd advised him that he had just broken up with Nazz to go solo, so Nielsen returned to America, hunted up unemployed Nazzniks Thom Mooney and Stewkey Antoni, and, with Tom Petersson back in the fold, formed a new, Philadelphia-based band: "Some nights we were billed as ‘Fuse’, some as ‘Nazz’." Either way, public response was slow in developing, and it was during this period that Nielsen was reduced to working in what he clamis to be the only non-musical employment of his life: six months as a busboy and bartender in a Philadelphia restaurant, with Petersson alongside as a waiter.

By the early '70s, Nielsen and Petersson had returned to their Midwestern homeland, and, with various sidemen coming and going, auditioned the neo-Fuse/incipient-Cheap Trick for Columbia Records in 1972. Despite the presence of early versions of several Nielsen tunes which have since become major hits, Columbia found the band’s repertoire lacking in the dread "commercial potential," and it was back to the road, with the band hitting every Midwestern club they could find, repeatedly, over the next few years.

Petersson left, and rejoined, and Robin Zander and Bun E. Carlos eventually made the Cheap Trick connection complete, by about 1973. Still, the band’s unflinching logic was just a bit too logical for some unfortunately large segments of the rock public; more than one club owner advised Cheap Trick that they’d never have a chance of making it, unless Nielsen would change his clothes.

But Nielsen of course stuck with his form-follows-function garments, and forced the balance of the industry to come around to his (and Cheap Trick’s) peculiar visions; the rest, as they say, is history. Since hooking back up with their traditional label, Epic, in 1976, Cheap Trick haven’t looked back. Each of their last three studio albums has done better than its predecessor, and Cheap Trick have just scored their biggest hit of all with the live Cheap Trick At Budokan, which wasn’t even slated for U.S. release when it was originally recorded.

As a matter of fact, the goal-orientated Cheap Tricksters already had their fourth studio album, Dream Police, completed by December ’78, just as Heaven Tonight was peaking off the charts. The unexpected public demand for import copies of the Japanese-only At Budokan prompted Epic to release a domestic version, with, at the group’s insistence, the Japanese packaging and liner booklet left substantially intact.

So Cheap Trick’s carefully-planned career increments were, for once, disrupted by the will of the people, but d’you suppose a realist like Rick Nielsen is worried? Naah. Dream Police is still sitting safely in the can, just waiting for [At Budokan] to run its course, while Nielsen is meanwhile piling up compositions for the next studio LP. Rick calls Dream Police "our best album; we’re getting away from straight 4/4 tunes, and I wrote strings for some of the cuts. There’s a studio version of 'Need Your Love,' and Tom does the lead vocal on ‘I Know What I want’."

I ask Rick for a definition of the new set’s title tune, and he starts singing: "The dream police come to me in my sleep." As explication, he notes that "dream police" could be translated as "conscience," and that Cheap Trick sometimes function as dream police for their fans.

For the next year or so, Cheap Trick fans will enjoy a multitude of first-hand dreams (which may or may not require policing) about their fave ravers; Cheap Trick will continue to tour non-stop, hitting all those undiscovered cities like Knoxville and Nashville and Memphis, venues they haven’t played before, as well as opening for Kiss in a stadium or three this summer: "I look forward to playing with Kiss," Rick enthuses. "People can say what they want about Kiss’s music, but they’ve always worked really hard, and I respect that in a band."

Having originally turned down what became the Ramones’ starring role in Rock ’n’ Roll High School, Cheap Trick (or at least their music) will nevertheless still make their move into films, as the soundtrack of the upcoming Over The Edge will include ("Surrender") and three other Cheap Trick numbers. After that... well, after that, some Cheap Trick or other undoubtedly will say: "Gee, it’s been six whole months since we played Japan (England) (Ohio) (Fill in hinterland of your choice)," and they’ll be off on yet another nonstop, no-holds-barred tour.

I ask Nielsen if he has any regrets among all this success and exhilaration, and it’s no surprise to me that he’s still goal-directed: "I mean, now people are saying that I’m a great guitarist; I don’t think I’m that hot technically. I’d like some recognition as a writer." I suggest that both his guitar style (in which his technical "limitations" have become positive assets), and his unquestionable writing ability, give him a role in Cheap Trick parallel to Peter Townshend’s in the Who.

"Ah, no," says Rick, "Townshend had all the quantity, but Entwistle wrote their quality stuff. Besides, I don’t put myself on a pedestal (except when I’m on my ‘poodle platform’ on stage); maybe the band will dump me in the end. Actually you should talk to the other guys in the band, too.

Which I proceed to do. When I first encountered Cheap Trick, in the hotel hallway earlier in the afternoon, Nielsen was with Tom Petersson, and Tom’s stunning German girlfriend. Nielsen introduced his entourage to me thusly: "This is Tom Petersson, and this is Bun E. Carlos. Bun’s looking real good on this tour."

When I report to the Cheap Trick dressing room in the Knoxville Coliseum later, I find that the real Bun E. Carlos is indeed looking good on this tour-he’s dropped a great deal of that "zany" weight since the last album cover photo sessions, but he’s also retained his nifty shirts and ties, and comfy drummers’ shoes.

Bun is drumming away at the furniture, while Robin Zander and Tom Petersson are getting dressed in their own respective versions of r’n’r glamour. Rick introduces me to the group as "The one who did the ‘essay’ on that dumb live album." Bun allows that he’s had more comments about that review (and his starring role therein) than just about anything else written about the group thus far, and then he grabs back the potato chip can one of the roadies is trying to swipe: "Hey, I need that as a stage prop."

The Knoxville audience is disappointingly small, as this is a new venue for Cheap Trick, and as Eric Clapton will be playing the same stage the following evening. These hardbitten, red-clay Knoxville kids, limited to one rock concert ticket investment for the week, have gone for the superstar already identified as such in Rolling Stone. Carlos is philosophical: "we’ll get it back in spades next time we play here."

Cheap Trick seem hardly fazed by the small audience, but rock ’n’ roll energetically through their usual stage show, with all of its unique qualities, as already documented and recorded elsewhere. Suffice to say for this report that Rick Nielsen mugs many an expressive face, and plays many a checkerboard-strapped guitar, over the course of the evening. The white-suited-vision-of-pop Robin Zander does his accustomed superlative vocals on "Surrender" and "Clock Strikes Ten." Tom Petersson’s lead vocal on the new "I Know What I Want (And I Know How To Get It)" sounds eerily new wave, almost as though the Sex Pistols had taken up Cheap Trick’s goal-orientation. And Bun E. Carlos’s ever lengthening cigarette ash never seems to fall off, no matter how hard he smacks his drum kit.

When the band are taking their bows at the end of the show, the newly svelte Bun E. Carlos suddenly flings his leftover potato chips, and then the can after them, into the audience. Get thee behind me, Pringles!

In the limo, on the way back to the hotel, Bun and Robin are chuckling about how many pieces those potato chips have undoubtedly been crushed into by now. "Shoot, Bun," I say, "you’re giving your fans a real boon. Think about those collectors who cut up the Beatle’s pillowcases into one-inch squares and sold them. Your chips are divisible into an infinitely greater number of souvenirs, and more kids than ever can own fragments of their favorite rock band."

"I can’t stand reading dry interviews," says Rick Nielsen, in conclusion. "Put in some good jokes, like ‘Take my wife...’" Which is not a joke at all, but the whole truth: I took my wife, Teresa, and my five-year-old daughter, Sarah, along on this story, but Sarah still claims not to like loud music, so Teresa was stuck with babysitting Sarah in the hotel while I was attending to business across the street at the concert. And Teresa a consummate Cheap Trick & "Surrender" fan, at that!

Still, Sarah can name each of the members of Kiss by now, so it’s just a matter of time. Right, Sarah, your mommy’s all right, your daddy’s all right, they just seem a little weird.