In “Surrender,” Nielsen nails the loss of innocence and price of experience in jarring snapshots of GIs hooked on junk and a middle-aged mom and dad baked on pot. Nielsen’s raging paranoia in “Dream Police” is vividly rendered in a meltdown compound of charging guitars, tense orchestration and Zander’s high, wired whine. “I Want You to Want Me,” which sent Japanese schoolgirls into paroxysmal joy on the live ’78 hit single, is a stalker’s valentine spiked with the atomic pep of the Dave Clark Five. Carlos’ laconic-gangster slouch and the amphetamine-doofus act of guitarist and dominant songwriter Rick Nielsen - was a psychoerotic tension that surges through even the most apparently innocent nuggets on Sex, America, Cheap Trick. But encoded in the band’s split-personality gag - the babe-hound glow of singer Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson vs. RS Recommends: 5 Devices You Need to Set Up Your Smart HomeĮvery Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to BestĬheap Trick first achieved notoriety the old-fashioned way: They gave good shtick. The noise, though, speaks for itself and for the revolt into style - away from bullshit purism and angst by numbers - that both Ubu and the Tricksters brought to the punk Zeitgeist with their luminous energy and bent genius.
These two box sets, together containing almost 10 hours of music, may seem like valedictory overkill. Cheap Trick, an explosive hit machine whose TV-cartoon image belied a padded-cell lyric streak, and Pere Ubu, Cleveland’s avant-rock answer to the Velvet Underground, wrote big chunks of the secret history of the ’70s-rock mutiny - crucial chapters that still fall through the cracks between the Ramones’ eternal farewell, the Sex Pistols’ reunion and the CBGB campfire tales recounted in Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me. The other toiled in a remote quadrant of the underground, peddling a career-suicide line in literate, post-adolescent complaint and sing-along, garage-rock surrealism.īut don’t let the rose-colored fog of punk nostalgia fool you. One band made the leap from midwestern bars and the hors d’oeuvres slot on Rush and Kiss tours to Top 40 glory via three-minute grenades of razor-guitar pop and bubblicious song hooks.
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