When I made this mix in 2010, I titled it “We’re All Alright,” a phrase from a classic Seventies Cheap Trick song that also describes the band’s shocking renaissance after a long, long period of being lame. A bad thing had happened, but now it was alright, those guys were alright, and they were picking up the dropped threads with great enthusiasm.
In 2017, the band released a new album with that same title, so now I’ve gone to Plan B with my mix titling.
My target audience is probably anyone who loves early Cheap Trick and doesn’t have much idea of what happened afterwards. You will be pleased.
This mix draws from four albums, singles, soundtrack & tribute contributions, and bootlegs. In the same period, the band re-recorded “In Color” with Steve Albini and performed the “Sgt. Pepper” album live. You can find the former on the internet and buy the latter on Amazon.
My split into two volumes roughly follows the original yin/yang of the band, which was that they were half Electric Light Orchestra and half a CBGB band, sharing bills with The Ramones. They were extremely talented writers and musicians, who wrote and played soaring, baroque, Beatlesque songs and caveman head-bangers with equal authority and impact. By mixing these modes up into pop hits, they paved a lot of road in rock music that less talented people drove down.
So, start wherever you want – with the more Beatley one or the thrashier one. Neither is a sequel to “Heaven Tonight” or “Dream Police,” or wherever the “classic period” is supposed to end. However, the band that can seemingly do anything is intact, the songs are strong, and the performances are sharp. Even when the song is a commercial jingle, it's Cheap Trick – and there are plenty of reminders here of what forms of commercially successful music were enabled by Cheap Trick's early groundbreaking.
An example of the general mix of originality and homage here is the band's cover of Big Star's "In the Street," compared with the original composition, "Dream the Night Away." The vertically-oriented Big Star melody becomes a harder, more horizontal story in Cheap Trick's reading, largely organized around a version of Aerosmith's "Draw the Line" riff. Meanwhile, the lost Big Star melodic verticality manifests itself in the original song, "Dream the Night Away," which also pulls in Byrds moves. There's a sense of endless recombination of instinctual and homage-conscious moves in latter day Cheap Trick, but who else is keeping track of and reengineering these moves? The song "Everyday She Makes Me Crazy" is a slight revision of a literal Pepsi jingle, but it's also an amped-up take on '65-'66 Beatles. That's the excellent line that Cheap Trick always walked, in one way or another.
Both volumes in mp3 zipped up here.
Volume 1: After a Brief Interruption (55 minutes)
- Miss Tomorrow
- Sick Man of Europe
- My Obsession
- Mondo Raga
- Everybody Knows
- Carnival Game
- Words
- Dream the Night Away
- Low Life in High Heels
- Everyday You Make Me Crazy
- California Girl
- Say Goodbye
- Closer, The Ballad of Burt and Linda
- O Claire
- When the Lights are Out
- Shelter
Volume 2: Garage Days Revisited (47 minutes)
- Baby No More
- Baby Talk
- Radio Lover
- Brontosaurus
- In the Street
- Sorry Boy
- Transformers Theme
- Wrong All Wrong
- Stone Cold Crazy
- The Riff That Won’t Quit
- I Hear You Knockin’
- Rosie
- Bonus Track