VINTAGE CHEAP TRICK

Cheap Trick is a much better band than its riches-to-rags tale would suggest: On New Year’s Eve eight years ago, the quartet headlined the Long Beach Arena; a few blocks away on Sunday, Cheap Trick played Fender’s--a room about one-tenth that size.

The diminished popularity isn’t a complete mystery. After late-’70s power-pop gems like the “Heaven Tonight” and “Live at Budokan” LPs, the band began releasing hit-and-miss records. But these days, the band’s misfortune seems as much a product of record buyers’ capriciousness as anything else. Its recent LPs have been uniformly solid, and Cheap Trick is hardly one of those washed-up outfits shuffling from club to club and rendering its past hits with feigned enthusiasm.

Indeed, Sunday’s show was a delightful mixture of old (“On Top of the World,” “I Want You to Want Me”) and new (“Are You Lonely Tonight,” “The Doctor”), delivered with the feisty spirit and humor of vintage Cheap Trick.

Rick Nielsen roamed the stage in all his nerdy splendor, reeling off tasteful power chords and speedy, melodic leads on his array of weird guitars (the one he played on “Surrender” had five necks). Bun E. Carlos still looks every bit the pudgy accountant who somehow commandeered a drum kit.

It’s been an odd career, but the quartet (augmented Sunday by a singer-keyboardist) is still a fine hard-pop band.