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COURTESY OF EPIC RECORDS
Cheap Trick's new collection of hits will appeal to a wider audience, unlike their 1996 box set "Sex, America, Cheap Trick."
Cheap Trick’s CD
is value-packed
From 1976 to '79, Cheap Trick was my favorite rock band. The music was a deft combination of rock solid hooks and riffs, with an uncanny sense of pop melodies. And, as illustrated with this double-CD collection, the great majority of the tunes still is pure ear candy. Even the band's look in its heyday was groomed to illustrate the canny melding of pop and sneakily subversive rock 'n' roll.
Bringing together the talents of pretty-boys Robin Zander and Tom Petersson and goofy-looking Rick Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos was a musical match made in heaven ... or, at least, Rockford, Ill., where the band originally hailed from.
"The Essential Cheap Trick"
(Epic/Legacy)
It was the female Japanese fans that made Cheap Trick famous in their own home country with the breakout success of 1978's concert recording in Tokyo's Budokan arena. "I Want You to Want Me" was the band's first hit, but it took another 10 years before they charted again with the slickly produced power ballad "The Flame."
By then, it seemed Cheap Trick was only a shadow of their former rockin' selves, and while most of the fans moaned over what seemed to have happened to their favorite band, they didn't give the band enough credit for getting their collective second wind six years later with the "Woke Up With a Monster" album on the Warner Bros. label.
Nowadays, the band sounds better than ever and with a renewed vigor, so listeners can celebrate "The Essential Cheap Trick" as a document of a glorious start, survival through the lean years, and a rebirth of one of the best rock bands around.
This concise collection, in some ways, is better than the band's 1996 box set, "Sex, America, Cheap Trick," because it appeals as well to a wider audience than just the completists and hard-core fans the box set seemed more suited for.
Besides the aforementioned hits, "Essential" includes equally important songs that originally weren't in the box set, in particular the raucous "He's a Whore," "Downed," "Takin' Me Back," and the rave-up cover of British band The Move's "California Man."
And since this collection appears eight years after the box set, compilation producer Bruce Dickinson smartly includes such post-'96 material as a couple of live recordings of earlier songs like "Mandocello" (with guest Billy Corgan) and "Gonna Raise Hell," a song that gets an aptly brisk, near brutal performance. An outtake version of "Walk Away" with guest vocals by Chrissie Hynde, unfortunately, seems rather aimless, but the anthology ends with a strong four-song attack of "Woke Up With a Monster," "Hard to Tell" from the band's 25th anniversary concert, "Say Goodbye" and "Scent of a Woman."
Even though Disc 2's songs aren't as consistently sweet as the first, there's still good stuff that gets a welcome reevaluation. (I just wish that the comparatively mediocre "Can't Stop Falling Into Love" was replaced with something better. Although the strong-voiced Zander and company try their mightiest to make it work, the song, for me anyway, represents the band's career nadir.)
It's a testament to Cheap Trick's musical strength that, even during their survivalist period in the '80s when they were working with name producers like George Martin, Roy Thomas Baker and Todd Rundgren (all known for molding bands to each of their own distinctive recorded sound), the band's unique sensibility still comes through. The most intriguing work came with Martin, a man the band had campaigned to work for because of his association with the Beatles. At one point in their career, Cheap Trick was seriously considered the heir apparent to the Fab Four, even to the point of backing John Lennon in the studio during the "Double Fantasy" sessions.
Anyhoo, do yourself a favor after your tastes are whetted by this "Essential" set -- go out and get their first four albums, "Cheap Trick," "In Color," "Heaven Tonight" and "Dream Police," now reissued and remastered. You'll thank me later.
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