perfidy

Cheap Trick have always seemed pretty ludicrous to me. In part, I'm sure that the band meant it to be this way. The visual gag that pits the gawky geekiness of guitarist Rick Neilsen and the pudgy accountant chic of drummer Bun E. Carlos against the pouffy prettiness of bassist Tom Petersson and singer Robin Zander has been sustaining the band's stage presence for years. And anybody who shows up with five necks on his guitar isn't exactly going for gravitas.

But the rest of their ludicrousness is purely my problem. My first introduction to Cheap Trick came in 1988, when as an impressionable 14 year old, I thought that their big comeback hit, "The Flame" was the hottest thing in a long, hot summer. But even though I was young, impressionable, more than a little stupid and utterly oblivious to the finer things in life, the band's total committment to the drecky, schmaltzy silliness that was "The Flame" even then struck me as, well, pretty ludicrous. Around the same time they put out their cover of "Don't Be Cruel," a slight and little recording dressed up in studio trickery. One day it hit me; these guys are cheesy, they know it, and I love it.

But if Cheap Trick have run for thirty years now on an inexhaustible supply of silliness, loud guitars, and giant hooks, it is a testament to the durability of those eternal virtues. They are a band who have always seemed to be more than the sum of their parts. With the exception of one or two absolutely flawless songs that should be presented to future generations as emblems of perfection (I'm thinking of "Surrender" and "I Want You To Want Me"), I have always been hard pressed to define what makes Cheap Trick's music so compelling, so endlessly entertaining, when it is also so insubstantial.

Well, I think I've figured it out: it's a trick. Smoke and mirrors. The closer you look, the more it melts away and the more the baby unicorn behind the curtain looks like a badly malformed cow fetus floating in formaldehyde. But just as people never tire of Penn & Teller, David Copperfield, and the guys running the three card monte game outside the bus depot, I can't ever get tired of Cheap Trick. Take my money! This is fun!!

As part of their ongoing effort to monetize every niche and corner of their prodigious back catalog (it's called churn), Sony/Legacy have finally taken it upon themselves to reissue a number of Cheap Trick's mid-period albums in slick new remastered and expanded packages. The pick of these is probably 1979's Dream Police, which for my money is probably the last Cheap Trick album I'd urge anyone to run and by. Wait. That didn't come out right. It's not that Dream Police is a bad album, not that. What I mean is, it's the last solid album they made, and after 1980 the band's output became decidedly... let's be generous; uneven.

The reissue of Dream Police is a definite improvement over previous CD versions available in the USA. The new mastering job puts every instrument in its place, from the steely multioctave thronk of Tom Petersson's 12-string bass to the keening strings that overlay the title track. The bonus tracks too add value: live versions of "The House is Rockin' (With Domestic Problems)", "Way of the World", and "I Know What I Want" revisit the band's classic hard-hitting Live At Budokan sound, and a stringless version of "Dream Police" reveals just what a slight creation that song is.

And I think that's the key to Cheap Trick. When Bob Dylan writes a song, he builds you a 12-cylinder Duesenberg - a juggernaut clad in steel and burlwood that purrs and roars and can top 200 miles per hour. When Cheap Trick write a song, it has two pedals and a little propeller on top, and if you pump your legs fast enough and pray, you might get airborne and not die. Songs like that rely completely on the strength of the personalities behind them, and dedication to minimalism is Cheap Trick's greatest strength. No matter how you slice it, "Dream Police" is a ludicrous song, practically sub-Spinal Tap in its lyrical complexities and burdened with a hook that labors a little more than it should. But it all works in spite of that. Minimalism means not burdening songs down with more than they can carry, and there is an underappreciated art to that. I defy you to listen to "Dream Police" all the way through and not be gripped with an inescapable urge to keen out "Police, Police!" with Robin Zander during the rideout chorus. The band have enough charisma, enough goofy-pretty conviction, that the primary colors they work with end up seeming as subtle in their way as Van Gogh's "Starry Night."

The album itself is enough of a hooky ride to make it worth having, with the unsubtle thrills of the grinding "Gonna Raise Hell" (about raising hell), the barely restrained throbbing of "Need Your Love" (about needing love), and the Beatles-meet- Alice-Cooper rocker "I'll Be With You Tonight" (which is about how tonight he's gonna be with her, tonight). But the bonus tracks do act as welcome reminders of the greatness that was Cheap Trick on stage, and the track-by-track commentary notes by the band in the liner notes are more informative than most. While I will probably wait a lifetime to read liner notes as brutally honest as the ones Elvis Costello wrote for the Rykodisc reissue of Goodbye Cruel World, which began "Congratulations! You've just purchased our worst album," it is still fun to read Bun E. Carlos' thoughts on Cheap Trick's songwriting, or to discover that the band in general agree that the album would have been better if they'd have laid off touring so much during recording.

It is also a surprise to realize that the band started recording Dream Police before they hit it big. If you listen to the albums in order of release, it definitely seems like Cheap Trick hit their stride with 1977's In Color and 1978's Heaven Tonight. After that came their commercial breakthrough with the platinum smash of Live at Budokan and then their first dealing-with-success album, Dream Police, which seems a little forced; the ideas just a little thinner, the songs not quite as transcendent.

But that chronology is wrong. Cheap Trick recorded started recording Dream Police before they toured Japan. They surely weren't feeling the pressure of following up a smash hit at the time. Therefore if Dream Police is cheesier and kitschier than their four prior albums, it because the band were rushing to put out a followup; it's an intrinsic part of Cheap Trick's nature, part of what made them who they were. No, their first true post-success album was 1980's fairly wretched George Martin Production, All Shook Up. And although they would continue to produce albums of varying quality, becoming ever more professional as they went, it's pretty clear that sky-high success was too big a thing for the little band from Rockford, Illinois. (The runaway success of "The Flame" notwithstanding; all four members of the band have expressed regret, saying they hate the song. (Of course, it's easy to say that when you're sitting on a big pile of money.))

Not that Cheap Trick ever really seemed like they needed success. Their act was never arena-sized. If you see Cheap Trick today, you will get what you always got; a pudgy accountant playing drums like Gene Krupa, a skinny weirdo in tapered trousers with a five-necked guitar, a bass player who covers three octaves at once, and a big-voiced singer delivering giant choruses. Cheap Trick are a quintessential bar band, one who lucked into grabbing the brass ring and nearly let it undermine them. Dream Police is a slight but rewarding artifact of late-70's power pop. What more do you want?

(This post also appears at blogcritics.org)