Jeff Miers: Sound Check
Cheap Trick marks 35 years of playing with ‘The Latest’ and greatest
When a band marks its 35th anniversary, it is usually either as a massive stadium act (a la the Rolling Stones), or as an oldies act content to milk the casino circuit until the day they’re given their gold watch and severance check (a la pretty much everyone else).
Yet for power-pop pioneers Cheap Trick, birthday number 35 finds the band at another of several artistic peaks, with a boatload of new songs to perform, some exciting plans for the future, a hot summer tour and an influence on the modern music scene that is tough to miss.
When Cheap Trick arrives at Darien Lake Performing Arts Center next Friday, on a bill also including Poison and Def Leppard, the band will have just released its new album, appropriately titled “The Latest,” on its own record label.
The record that will most likely be sitting at, or very near, the top of the charts on that day — Green Day’s “21st Century Breakdown”— is marked by more than a hint of Cheap Trick’s influence. In fact, calling the new Green Day platter a modern-day recasting of classic Cheap Trick records is not mere hyperbole. (Interestingly, “21st Century Breakdown” was initially supposed to conclude with Green Day’s version of Cheap Trick’s evergreen “Surrender.” That didn’t come to pass, but on its current tour, Green Day is playing the song as an encore.)
Following its 40-city tour with Def Leppard, Cheap Trick — guitarist/vocalist Rick Nielsen, vocalist/guitarist Robin Zander, bassist Tom Petersson and drummer Bun E. Carlos— will commence an extended engagement in Las Vegas, one that will find the band joined by a symphony orchestra and a cadre of world musicians in the painstaking re-creation of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Legendary Beatles recording engineer Geoff Emerick will be handling the live sound during this nine-date run at the Las Vegas Hilton in September.
None of this would mean as much as it does if “The Latest” wasn’t also one of the greatest recordings to be released by this iconic American band.
Though it has sold some 20 million records worldwide since first emerging from the Chicago suburb of Rockford, Ill., back in 1974, Cheap Trick’s commercial fortunes waned following the blockbuster success of its 1979 live album “At Budokan” and its follow-up studio effort, “Dream Police.” Rather than simply reprising its biggest hits for the duration of the decades since, however, Cheap Trick has kept moving, touring relentlessly and releasing several albums that stand proudly alongside the ’70s records that made the band’s reputation, and a few more that came awfully close.
“The Latest,” however, is the band’s most lush, ornate, sophisticated and multitextured album yet. It’s as grandiose as Coldplay at one turn, and as raucous as the Sex Pistols at the next.
“I think that, when we were first asked by the people at the Hollywood Bowl to do ‘Sgt. Pepper’ with an orchestra, for a one-off show in 2007, we were kind of blown away by just what you could do with an orchestra,” says Nielsen, speaking to The News from Chicago prior to the commencement of the Def Leppard tour.
“We were flattered to be asked to do it, but then we were like, ‘Well, why us?’ And the people at the Hollywood Bowl seemed to feel we were the perfect band to do it. Which was nice, until I realized that, as long as I’ve been listening to the album, now I’d actually have to learn it! [Laughs.]
“Anyway, I think that, since we were working on this new album at the same time, and we had the orchestra available to us in the studio pretty often, we really felt like we should take advantage of that opportunity. So, yeah, doing ‘Pepper’ the first time definitely had an influence on this new record.”
It’s hard to miss the depth of Cheap Trick’s maturity within the first two minutes of the new album’s unfolding. Opener “Sleep Forever” finds singer Zander displaying his broad, near-operatic tenor over an ambient wash of piano and electronic effects. The piece is clearly a pained eulogy, and so powerful is Zander’s emotion-soaked delivery that the song is almost painful to listen to.
“Yeah, it’s a little bit creepy, isn’t it?” laughs Nielsen. “That song was written for a friend of ours, someone who worked for the band, who died right around the time of 9/11. The funeral was days afterward and, of course, everyone was staying close to their families, nobody wanted to fly. But we — myself, Tom and Bun E. — went to the funeral, and it was just really heavy. They were playing another kind of sad song of ours at the funeral, ‘Shelter,’ and that was hard enough, you know? Then I was asked to get up and speak. Not the easiest day.
“Anyway, I wrote the song afterward, as, I guess, a song that might be used for such occasions, rather than, you know, singing ‘Rock of Ages’ or whatever every single time.”
Here’s the twisted beauty that has always been at the center of Cheap Trick’s magic, however: After 1:30 of this heart-rending threnody, Carlos erupts into his patented glamrock march, recalling the 1976 burner “ ’Elo Kiddies,” and Cheap Trick is off and running into a delicious bit of lusty power-pop in the form of “When the Lights Go Out.”
It’s the classic Trick trick, the contrasting of the heaviest of sentiments — death, often, or anger and resentment — with the lightest — sex, love, loud guitars, etc. “The Latest” is filled with such light-shade dichotomys. It’s also filled with that blend of Beatles-esque chord progressions, raucous guitar figures, Who-like rhythm section propulsion, and peerless singing that has marked every Trick classic since the band’s debut.
“I’ve always felt that working with Robin was like having John Lennon and Paul McCartney in one person,” says Nielsen, speaking of the bandmate he still clearly reveres after 40 years of friendship. “It’s like a ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’ thing; the guy just doesn’t seem to age. If anything, he’s a better singer now than ever.
“For some reason, he keeps putting up with the rest of us, so I can’t complain!”•
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