No Surrender

It's the type of scene that all but restores a cynic's faith in popular music. Cheap Trick, rock's greatest underdog, selling out three nights at New York's Irving Plaza. It may be a far cry from the enormodomes haunted by Kiss lately, but at 1,200 fans a night, hardly chump change. Throw in the fact that recent opening acts for Cheap Trick -- a quintessential opening act themselves -- have included Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins, and it becomes clear that Cheap Trick in '98 is a pretty hot ticket.

The band is in the home-stretch of a mini-tour promoting the reissue of its first three albums, playing an album plus forty-five minutes of additional tunes a night. Night one, a celebration of their 1977 manic blitzkrieg debut, Cheap Trick, draws the die-hard fans and metal-heads, the room a sea of mullets, web-heads and probably a disproportionate number of dungeon masters. In Color night, marked by undeniable power-pop classics like "Southern Girls" and the hit single "I Want You To Want Me," draws a younger, hipper crowd, many perhaps tipped to the Trick by way of endorsements from Billy Corgan. Night three, Heaven Tonight, just happens to fall on Halloween, which accounts for the numerous Trick or Treaters wearing cut-out masks of bald, mustachioed drummer Bun E. Carlos or Pee Wee Herman suspenders in honor of the band's guitarist and principal songwriter, Rick Nielsen. Somewhere in the throng there might even be a Robin Zander doppelganger or two, though it's hard to imagine anyone but the golden-haired singer himself being able to pull off a purple velvet suit without looking like a twit.

And of course, let's not forget the numerous threepeats, the nuts who return each night and still beg for more even as the band finishes Saturday's final song, "Gonna Raise Hell" right at the witching hour.

"I've seen some people go, 'This is my eightieth show!'" says (twelve-string) bassist Tom Petersson incredulously. "I haven't seen eighty shows total, of *any* act. They've got to be so damn sick of us, it's unbelievable."

Not likely. To the Cheap Trick faithful, the last two years have been surely as thrilling as the early Nineties were to Dallas Cowboys fans. Nothing beats seeing one's long-suffering team weather a decade of hard knocks to emerge at the top of their game, and that's precisely where Cheap Trick stand today. Although they haven't had a radio hit to speak of in nearly a decade, 1997 saw the release of the outstanding Cheap Trick, which critics hailed as the Chicago outfit's best effort since, well, 1977's Cheap Trick. Throw in a brief jaunt on Metallicapalooza, a Steve Albini-produced Sup Pop single, an opening stint with Stone Temple Pilots and a sold-out club tour, and you've got all the makings of a storybook comeback, albeit one in which the heroes languished for a spell in State Fair and record company hell instead of ever really going away. And though Cheap Trick have enjoyed two previous boon periods in their twenty-year career (1978's At Budokan adrenaline boost and 1988's "The Flame," an outside-penned song force-fed to them by their label), the crucial difference is, this time they're doing things on their own terms.

Granted, the three-night stands are a concession to the band's old label, Epic, whose Cheap Trick reissue campaign began with the 1996 box set Sex, America, Cheap Trick. But this time around, the band has been allowed to call the shots. "To Sony's credit, they let us pick 100 percent of the box set," says Carlos. "We were like, 'We're not putting 'Don't Be Cruel' or 'Ain't That a Shame' on it,' and they were like, 'Yeah, we know, and they're screaming about it back at the office.' It's a completely different scene with the people we're working with there now from the people we were working with back in the Eighties, that's for sure.

"The thing is, with the reissues, the company's gonna put them out, and it's a nice way to help them promote them, to go out and do this. But you definitely only want to make it a visit, you don't want to make it a permanent stay," continues Carlos. "Last summer it was a lot more fun going out and playing with a bunch of newster acts, and we look forward to doing that again next year. That's about the only reason to stay together. If we're going to do this oldie stuff and there's no new stuff, why do it? Why get up there and sound twenty years older than you did when you were famous and da-da-da just to sell some records everybody has anyway? So we're trying to stay new."

Toward that end, Cheap Trick are already penning a new album, though it won't be released until after a live album culled from the current tour. Carlos and Petersson admit that Albini has been discussed as a possible producer for the next studio effort, though they're a ways yet from getting down to such brass tacks. Outside of the Epic reissues, Cheap Trick are currently without a label, though both Carlos and Petersson maintain that they are currently weighing multiple prospects.

"When things fell through with Red Ant [which released last year's album], we were like, okay, let's just wait until we have something together here," says Petersson. "And it seems to be coming around. We could definitely have a record label right now, but that's kind of the kiss of death, because it wouldn't be quite right. Looking back, I'm always thinking, 'God, I can't believe that we got railroaded into a lot of things we did.' But when you're young and you don't know what you're doing, pretty much everyone's an expert except you. So it's not much fun, and years later, it's like, wow, I'm surprised we got away with anything. Now, I don't think we're going to be involved with people who are hiring us or working with us for the wrong reason. I think now people are kind of letting us do what we want, and the people that don't like that just stay away."

RICHARD SKANSE
(November 3, 1998)