Postcards from the Edge of the Screw Factory: Cheap Trick and the New Cars

Yes, next time you open a package of screws from Home Depot or some other pillar of the American knack for do-it-yourself super stores, or cheap Mexican day labor farms, look at the back, the white cardboard you just shredded in haste to make those Ikea shelves stay together longer than three months. Right there, under the company title, the mini-logo, will be the place, the mecca of such products, likely Rockford, IL, home to Cheap Trick, made famous by Michael Moore in Downsize This! (in the film, he actually hangs out with Rick Nielsen after being told by a chain store that Cheap Trick were never around). By the way, Rockford, which once voted for left wing mayors and had streets built by “reds” before a wave of disillusioned East Europeans landed in the cornfields, is also the former childhood home of Ginger Lynn, one of porn’s true old-timey 1980s video queen giants (who still shows up here and there, more plainer MILF than sun-baked girl-next-door, but insatiable in her own way), the one Charlie Sheen dallied with, much to his father’s heart-clogging dismay. Located in the former armpit of the rust belt, Rockford straddles a dirty river, a half-abandoned downtown, and miles of suburbs just a hiccup west of Chicago, measured in toll roads and former farm fields. This is defacto Middle America, I suppose, the land of Lincoln and Blackhawk, shades of Swedish pancake houses and anglicized names and current Russian white slaves and Laotian ghettoes.

I grew up with guys who strode through my parent’s basement with black satin jackets that unveiled the words “Cheap Trick” in blaring white logos. I remember going to neighbors’ homes, especially the guy around the block whose right-hand fingers were mysteriously missing, well, they were there, partly, like squiggly lumps, just another factory floor casualty, and hearing ‘Dream Police’ like a ubiquitous message from a pop rock heaven that I would soon be squashed by, forever.

However, I didn’t even own a Cheap Trick record until my 20s because I took them for granted. Bun E. Carlos would scour the record store I worked at, Appletree, looking for something to prick his ears. He had a side-project, the Bun E. Carlos Experiment, and they’d thrown down tunes like “Detroit is Burning” by the MC5, but hell, Bun E. Carlos was in a band that put out a vinyl single in Southern Wisconsin in the late 1960s. He epitomized old school, loved the Dave Clark Five, and had only sour stories of Patti Smith getting doted upon by Epic while Cheap Trick worked their asses off. Then again, he also offered up an early Patti Smith bootleg to me, so, the hard feelings must have been tempered by her piano poetry at some point. He saw the Ramones blister through Rockford (with the Nerves, in tow, if I remember correctly) at the Red Apple, out near my parent’s home and the dirt racetrack. Basically, the guy had good taste.

I made him homemade cassettes of Mudhoney, Sonic Youth, and other Northwest or Midwest stuff that was fuzzy, careening sludge-rock. He thanked me, and later on when I saw them play to thousands of hometown fans at the downtown “stadium,” where my sister had seen Blondie years before, the intro music was almost the entire album Goo by Sonic Youth. I was floored, and said, “Right on,” before my older buddy Allen passed the pot pipe. Or was that the AC/DC show, hmmm.

A few years ago, I watched their concert Silver, set besides the same river I boated in as a kid, the same river that would ransack entire neighborhoods when the flood waters rumbled, and they even brought back their mid-period bassist to sit in for their early 1980’s songs. Besides Bun E., the rest of the band were always aloof or testy or simply ducked the public. For instance, Tom lived in Madison, I believe, but Rick did run into the record shop one lazy afternoon, after the Beastie Boys had sampled their infamous Live at Budakon album intro, “This is the first song off of our new record,” yelping, “I am going to sue them!” A natural reaction, I suppose, to being eclipsed by smarmy white boy hip hop.

By the way, they have a new album, called Rockford, and last seen, were playing the Indian casino circuit. Still, don’t chuckle on your chains, I saw them with a gracious Wayne Kramer (the iconoclast from the MC5) a few years back, to a crowd of 1,200 in sweat-infested, post-Enron, big city bright lights Houston, and they were sublime, when they weren’t busking on the ‘ol acoustic version of “The Flame,” though it made some aerobic and bottle blond moms contented. Even Steve Albini (who produced their comeback kids “Baby Talk” Sub Pop single) and Tony Reflex (one of the hardcore nation former fired-up freshman turned dad from the infamous Adolescents…selected as one of the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s primal and fave L.A. bands, and who in fact just played with them July 2 for Vegas Rocks 100!, and were featured on a free RHCP-stapled together Mojo sampler, the track “L.A. Girl” chosen by the Red Hots to represent the hardcore era, along with the Circle Jerks and others…), know what I am talking about: He writes in the liner notes of the 2004 Adolescents release on Frontier Records, The Complete Demos:

“I recently went to see Cheap Trick because my eight-year-old daughter insisted on seeing them. I hadn’t seen them since 1978 and really didn’t know what to expect. Their fans were wonderful – among the most courteous and embracing of any I’ve ever met, and the band was as fun as I remembered them. We stood on Rick Nielsen’s side, and he gestured to my daughter to walk toward the stage, which she did timidly – and he snapped a pick at her, and then bombarded her with twenty more. It was priceless.

As I watched, I remembered being 15 years old and gushing praise on this band, firing off multiple letters to them; receiving answers, guitar picks, bow ties. It was a magical thing – the band and the fan actually communicated. I mean it literally, I actually talked to Bun E. Carlos on the phone once on the Rodney on the ROQ show and I just blabbed on and on about another band and Bun E. patiently allowed it, sharing that he too, was a music fan.
So I stood there in Long Beach, 2004, at a night club – reflecting on how I had seen this same fine band a few blocks away at an arena 200 times the size of this club, some 26 or so years ago – and how the music and the experience was every bit as magical now as it was back then… back when I was starting a band with a guy named Steve who had a love of hooks, melodies, played bass, and loved the Beatles – and a guy named Frank who played an Gibson Explorer just like my hero Rick Nielsen did, and how this lady at the record label – Lisa Fancher – didn’t laugh at me when I asked her to have someone design a typewriter logo for my record, kinda like Cheap Trick’s, and she came back with the logo we all know today…”

So, the working class princes of pop forever shaped the pioneers of second wave US west coast punk, all hair-splitting toxic kid rock with an undercurrent of Southern Girl/Taxman/Dream Police melody milestones.

Also, the Cars have returned, sort of, now featuring Todd Rundgren on vocals, in lieu of Rick Ocasek. What’s happening these days when bands have famous migrants working with them? Like Tom Verlaine pitching in for Patti Smith off and on, and his former cohort Richard Lloyd working with Rocket From the Tombs, and even Mike Peter’s newfangled, poppier than ever Alarm, with guitarist James Stevenson from Chelsea, Generation X and Gene Loves Jezebel and bass player Craig Adams from The Sisters Of Mercy, The Mission and The Cult. That is super-group, post-punk, pop-smeared territory, ala carte. Oh, and Wayne Kramer plays with a handful of musical misfits all the time, for his MC5-esque incarnations, which have featured fellows from the Cult, Damned, and so on.

Anyway the New Cars album is live, replete with big stage sounding, slightly mutated versions of Cars standards, and Todd does, well, just fine, without Rick’s warble, though there is still a warble, but it does not have Rick’s peculiarity stamped on it. There’s two “new” tracks pasted on the end, not unlike afterthoughts, just like the new Replacements anthology, and the songs remain the same, mostly. Is it hollow memories? Mere karaoke nostalgia? Or like Sammy Hagar with Van Halen? I’ll leave that up to you slick sleuths, but I found myself smiling and nodding in approval, just so I wouldn’t have to dig up my ratty Cars vinyl records.