POP MUSIC REVIEW : Cheap Trick: It’s Not an Adventure, It’s a Job

Boy, did I ever used to be a huge Cheap Trick fan, starting back in the mid-’70s days when it was just another unknown band playing the Whisky. And boy, is it ever embarrassing when a band you tout as one of the greatest rock groups ever becomes a success and blows it.

For a few years the Wisconsin-based quartet certainly seemed to warrant touting. While as loud as other hard-rock bands, the group threw out all the other conventions, making music that was both gut-level exciting and possessed of a sly intelligence.

Guitarist Rick Nielsen played surprising Jeff Beck-inspired solos and invented distinctive riffs; drummer Bun E. Carlos pounded out driving rhythms with Ringo-worthy fills; bassist Tom Petersson created huge landscapes of sound with his 12-string bass; and singer Robin Zander clearly ranked as one of the all-time great rock shouters, starting where John Lennon’s primal scream left off.

Their power pop was infectious stuff, to the degree that the small record store I ran in the ‘70s sold several boxes of the live “Cheap Trick at Budokan” album, an expensive Japanese import, just by playing it in the store.

This was months before the group’s label wised up and issued the album domestically. Once the company did, the rest was history, albeit brief.

The group became an arena-level success, put out one more pretty good album, and then became a leaden bore, cranking out predictable bloated arena-rock with no individual stamp. While many bands following such a formula stay on top for eons, Cheap Trick justly sank from view.

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When a change like that happens, usually you can only speculate on what happened, like wondering if the industry scooped out the band’s brains or something. But in Cheap Trick’s case, Nielsen pretty well spelled out the cause in an interview in Trouser Press magazine at the time.

In it, he talked about the band’s pre-fame days, when they could do anything they wanted, including nights when he’d play much of their set on accordion. Once they had an audience, he lamented, they had to do what the audience wanted.

Which brings us to Cheap Trick’s show Monday at the Coach House, where the latter ethic still prevailed. What was once an adventure is now clearly a job.

They do that job very well, giving fans value for their dollar, but even as musical shopkeepers, they should know to rotate their stock more.

“We have some good news and some great news,” Nielsen announced during the show. “The good news is that we have a new album coming out in a month and a half. The great news is that the next song is not from that album.”

Indeed, there was only one song less than 15 years old in the 80-minute set, and that, “The Flame,” was an ‘80s anthem-rocker the group didn’t even write. The Cheap Trick of old would have been all over its new material, or anything else that would give its show an edge. They at least might have allowed a song or two from Zander’s respectable 1993 solo album.

It might not be great news, but there is some good in seeing the band. For starters, the players all still have their chops, especially Zander, who sings with as much fury and control as he did 15 years ago.

When he wasn’t mugging or hurling picks to the crowd like he was feeding squirrels, Nielsen picked some Beck-like gonzo solos. The rhythm section is still a thunder lizard (and, yes, it was Petersson on bass, not his replacement of a few years Jon Brant, as erroneously reported in Monday’s Times).

While the old songs weren’t the unexplored territory they once were, neither were they a dead end. “He’s a Whore” and Terry Reid’s “Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace” were still fine showcases for Zander’s overwhelming pipes.

“Surrender” and “I Want You to Want Me” floated with their gooney pop buoyancy, while 1978’s “Heaven Tonight” still stood as a harrowing epic of cocaine paranoia, not just lyrically, but with music that seemed to spiral simultaneously skyward and hell-bound.

The only ingredients missing were vision and immediacy. The performance wasn’t much of an indicator that the band will ever grasp those qualities again, but it at least showed that they might know what to do with them if they did.

Frequent opening act Cisco Poison has improved a bit by losing a member and becoming a trio. The advantage is this puts the focus even more on front man Joe Wood, once of T.S.O.L. Wood is a sufficiently engaging performer that one can nearly enjoy his music just by watching him enjoy it. It’s certainly easier than trying to appreciate the stuff directly, as it is largely a cliched and derivative repackaging of ‘70s hard-rock excess.