Home Town HeroesTim W. Brown
Post-Rockford
"You didn't know what you were looking for / Till you heard the voices in your ear."--"Voices" Lyrics
The voices in my ear kept telling me to move the hell out of Rockford, which I promptly did in fall of 1979. I went away to college to study music, followed by graduate school in the Pacific Northwest, and then I settled into adult life elsewhere, first in Chicago and then in New York. My departure from Rockford and my break with the Rockford mindset coincided with the downward trajectory of Cheap Trick's fortunes. The band spent a long period wandering through the wilderness, eventually bottoming out when Petersson, affable fellow whippersnapper of Zander, left the band to pursue solo projects. (He has since rejoined the band.)
With new influences in my life, I stopped following Cheap Trick as closely as before. First, Punk and New Wave captured the attention of avid music listeners. I started listening to the likes of the Clash and Joy Division, two bands that spoke to my emerging depressive cosmopolitan identity. Second, the albums weren't as strong. Cheap Trick's first five albums forever will stand as the peak of their influence on a considerable segment of rock and roll stoner kids from the Midwest and beyond. With the global success of Budokan, everybody on earth was a Rockforder for a brief moment.
Still, I monitored their career from afar. A few years ago (okay, 15-plus) "The Flame" recaptured my attention, and many other record buyers', too, when it reached the top of the charts, becoming Cheap Trick's only Number One hit. The song was sappier than the band's usually sardonic take on the theme of love, and it departed from their traditionally raucous sound--not surprising given it was written by someone else, Bob Mitchell and Nick Graham. Still, I loved it, and I saluted its success, despite its eventual use as easy listening fodder in malls and elevators.
In the late 1990s, knowing my fondness for the band, my wife took me as treat to see Cheap Trick at Chicago's Park West nightclub. She never was a fan particularly, and she had never seen them perform live nor listened to their albums much. After only a few bars of their standard concert opener, "Hello There"--"Hello there, ladies and gentlemen. / Hello there, ladies and gents. / Are your ready to rock? / ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?"--she shouted in my ear, "They're really LOUD!" to which I responded, "DUH!!!" She was expecting the overproduced sound of "I Want You to Want Me" and heard instead Nielsen's cumulo-nimbic guitar stylings and Zander's growls and screams.
Speaking of "I Want You to Want Me," a bootleg CD, In Color: The Steve Albini Mix, has made the rounds the past couple of years. Most Tricksters agree that the original 1977 album featured too many bells and whistles. Albini, the Chicago record producer and leader of the band Ministry, mixed a stripped-down version of In Color that is much more faithful to the band's live sound. Correcting the unfortunate choices made by the original producer, Epic Records' Tom Werman, Albini removed the cutesy piano tracks wherever they appeared, which especially improved "I Want You to Want Me." Unfortunately, I've heard the original version so many times that my brain fills in the piano tinkles when I listen to Albini's mix.
These days, I'm trying to introduce Cheap Trick's talents to the next generation. Specifically, I'm trying to educate my eight-year-old daughter about their merits in spite of her abiding interest in Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. I already persuaded her to like "Surrender" when she was three. To this song I taught her the universal sign for heavy metal, the first and fourth fingers extended in the sign of the goat.
Recently, when my daughter learned to play "London Bells" from her beginning piano book, I put on the stereo the live Budokon version of "Clock Strikes Ten," which opens with the same eight chiming notes she was playing--"ding dong dong ding, dong ding ding dong"--and had her flipping me the sign of the goat in no time. I tell her that the band is from my hometown of Rockford. She doesn't particularly care about this fact right now, but I hope that she appreciates someday her father came from a place that could produce such tuneful yet hard-rocking music.
Tim W. Brown is the author of four novels, Deconstruction Acres, Left of the Loop, the recently completed Time Trek, and the yet-to-be-published Walking Man. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in over 200 publications, including The Blomsbury Review, Chelsea, and Chirron Review. He is a member of the National Book Critics' Circle.