Up to Their Old Tricks? No Way

Five years ago, Rick Nielsen was sitting in his Rockford, Ill., living room marveling at Cheap Trick’s longevity.

“At our age, our career should have been over a long time ago, and maybe it was, but nobody bothered to tell us,” he was saying from underneath his ubiquitous baseball cap and shades. “For whatever reason, though, we still like to try things, still like the hassles of being a rock band.” Nielsen had no idea, but that resolve was about to be tested in a major way over the next few years, with everything from bankrupt record labels to damaged vertebrae bedeviling one of the finest rock bands ever to emerge from the Midwest. But as the quartet prepared to ring in its 28th year with a series of concerts--including New Year’s Eve at Chicago’s Navy Pier Grand Ballroom--the future once again looks bright, with new music at long last on the horizon.

But first, there was a litany of disappointments that would have killed a less resilient band. In 1994, the group released a fine album, “Woke Up With a Monster,” on Warner Bros., only to see the executives who signed the band, Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker, booted in a corporate merger. The most artist-friendly of labels instantly became a shell of its former self, and Cheap Trick was left homeless. The band returned with a self-titled studio album in 1996 that was its strongest since the early ‘80s, only to see the Red Ant label declare bankruptcy soon after releasing the disc. “We lost our shirt on the road promoting a record that wasn’t in the stores,” is how drummer Bun E. Carlos sums up the experience.

But Nielsen, Carlos, singer Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson regrouped, pulling their business under the Cheap Trick Unlimited umbrella, and releasing “Music for Hangovers,” a document of the quartet’s legendary four-night stand at Metro in 1998, with liner notes by Billy Corgan, and the double-CD and DVD “Silver,” from their 25th anniversary concert in Rockford in 1999.

Meanwhile, Cheap Trick’s hugely influential studio albums from the ‘70s have been reissued, and the band continued to play more than 150 shows a year around the world. The mainstream may have forgotten about Cheap Trick, but the band remained very much alive on the road, one of the few classic-rock bands left that had not become simply a nostalgia act. Cheap Trick continues to go for the throat; no band makes high-decibel pop packed with Who-like wallop, madcap humor and subversive wit this consistently.

The grind eventually wore down Carlos, however. Last July, the drummer took his first summer off since 1976 to have long-overdue back surgery. “There was a lot of fast songs and certain bass patterns that I couldn’t handle anymore because the nerves in my bass-drum leg were getting pinched off,” he says. Yet the band forged on, with Nielsen’s son Daxx, a drummer in Chicago pop-rockers Harmony Riley, filling in. Now Carlos is healthy and the band has been recording new songs for an album due out next year.

“Our last two studio efforts made us kind of gun-shy--we put out good stuff that nobody heard,” Nielsen says. “But we just got the rights back to ‘Woke Up With a Monster’ and the Red Ant record, and we intend to get them back out there, because those records weren’t throwaways. Take a song like ‘You Let a Lot of People Down’ [from ‘Cheap Trick’]: It could have been written about lousy ex-managers or about Robert McNamara--who led a lot of people to their death in Vietnam. Now hearing the new revelations about the war, with the release of the LBJ tapes, I think to myself that I wish people could’ve heard this song. That’s just one. They got away. Now we’re bringing them back.”

Carlos is even more encouraged by the songs the band has been preparing for its new album. Unlike the late ‘80s, when Cheap Trick started to spread the songwriting out among outsiders at the behest of its hit-obsessed record label, the band is once again a self-contained enterprise, with Nielsen, Zander and Petersson sharing all the songwriting.

“I think the new songs are even stronger than the ones for the Red Ant album, because Rick is contributing more this time,” Carlos says. “Since he quit drinking about a year ago, he’s been writing a lot more. The new songs are more adventurous; some we’re not sure if they’re ‘Cheap Trick songs’ or not, but these days we’re not feeling hemmed in anymore.” Nielsen says some of the new songs are surfacing in the set lists, as well as older songs that haven’t been performed in years. Perfection isn’t the point when boredom and nostalgia are the enemies. “If it’s a three-minute song,” the guitarist says, “within 2 minutes and 59 seconds I usually get it down.”

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Greg Kot is the rock critic for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.