CHEAP TRICK: IN COLOR (1977)
1) Hello There; 2) Big Eyes;
3) Downed; 4) I Want You To Want Me; 5) You're All Talk; 6) Oh Caroline; 7)
Clock Strikes Ten; 8) Southern Girls; 9) Come On Come On; 10) So Good To See
You.
All right, so this album is neither as crunchy
and raw as its predecessor (because they changed producers) nor as subtly deep
as its follow-up (because they temporarily ran out of truly titillating
subjects) — but it is still the
perfect Cheap Trick album, simply because it has no filler whatsoever. This is
where Nielsen's songwriting powers reach a genuine peak, as does his art of
genre-hopping (and no, it's not nearly
true that Nielsen only knows two subgenres of pop music: the «Lennon Pop» and
the «McCartney Pop» genres, even if they do get unfairly superior coverage on
this record — he also knows all the subgenres that are derived from those
two!!)
For starters, there's probably no single other
song that would explain all the essence of Cheap Trick more effectively than
ʽHello Thereʼ does in one and a half minutes. On the surface, it is a silly,
generic arena-rock winding-up of the fans — "would you like to do a number
with me? would you like to?.. WOULD YOU LIKE TO?..." — but the use of
"hello there, ladies and gentlemen", hardly an appropriate turn of
phrase for a rock'n'roll arena, inverts the message and places the whole thing
under heavy irony: it's like they're a Las Vegas act that accidentally ended up
on a much bigger stage, and now they have to address the rock'n'roll crowds in
the «proverbial» rock'n'roll manner. That's the band's double nature in a
nutshell — they're formally respecting the arena-rock cliches, but they're
also mocking them at the same time — in the same way that some of the more
intelligent hair metal bands, like Extreme, would do this with their genre a decade later. And if I am
not mistaken, that brief guitar solo at the end is lifted almost directly from
Bowie's ʽHang On To Yourselfʼ, which is just as symbolic: a retro-nod from the
current generation of ironic glam-rockers to the Grand Deity of ironic
glam-rock himself.
But just so that you do not forget that Cheap
Trick have a real musical heart behind all the irony and all the «cheap
tricks», the next song is ʽBig Eyesʼ, which, on the guttest of gut levels, is
my personal favorite Cheap Trick song of all time. Yes, it is obviously far
from the most intelligent one, or the most sophisticatedly arranged one, but
there are few, if any, things in the world that beat the absolute MONSTER of a
riff that kicks in right after the brief arpeggiated guitar intro, and then
loyally reappears, doubled by the vocals, in each chorus, the "I keep
falling for those big eyes..." riff. God, what a monster — this is
basically Tony Iommi borrowed for power-pop usage, a caveman declaration of
voodoo lust that screams «bewitched» and «brutal» at the same time. The
contrast between Zander's angry screechy vocals in the verses and the group's
collective «dazed and confused» harmonies in the chorus is priceless by itself,
but it is largely the riff that turns the song into the single Top Headbanging
moment of the band's career. And, believe you me, only very few hard rock acts
in the world are capable of such instantaneous magic.
Cheap, simple, delectable thrills like these
are the word of the day — if ʽHello Thereʼ and ʽBig Eyesʼ are not enough for
you, then we will close the deal with ʽI Want You To Want Meʼ, Nielsen's intentional
attempt to write a very lightweight
pop song that would send the genre up, pretty much like ʽHello Thereʼ sends up the
crowdpleasing rituals of the arena. People like comparing it to McCartney, but
McCartney took those simple love songs more seriously and he'd probably never
write anything quite as simplistic,
not even in 1977 — this is more like, I dunno, Osmonds territory or something,
and yet, still unbeatable, largely due to the "didn't I see you
crying?" bridge where you have the first phrase as tender and caring, the
second one as worried and fearful, and the third one as determined and heroic
(only the fourth one, reprising the first, kind of breaks the flaw — I always
keep thinking of the last one as slightly underwritten. Mail the whole thing to
Macca for some perfection polish?). So, classic rock radio overplay aside (and
who listens to these stations nowadays, anyway?), that makes the single best
pure pop hook in Cheap Trick history closely following up on the heels of their
single best heavy rock hook. Everything's delightfully insincere, of course,
but who cares?
The other big hit was ʽSouthern Girlsʼ, Cheap
Trick's personal contribution to the series of anthems to collective female
attraction that already included such obvious influences as ʽCalifornia Girlsʼ
and ʽSeptember Gurlsʼ: Trick's song manages to resemble both of them in spirit (and a bit in form) without being obviously
derivative of either, but also, as could be expected, a little ironic in nature
(after all, the sincerity of a bunch of Illinoisans' love for «Southern girls» might
be put under doubt, not to mention that they hadn't even been more to the South than Oklahoma by early 1977). It is still a
near-perfect power-pop creation: a puffed-up musical march that builds up a
stereotype and then proceeds to demolish it — not that any actual Southern girl
would be happy if she were addressed with "Southern girl, you've got
nothing to lose!"
But that's just the hits anyway, and then
there's everything else, never letting down the quality angle. ʽDownedʼ? One of
their finest early quasi-psychedelic numbers — Zander's "downed, out of my
head...", arching out of your speakers, really feels like he means it.
ʽYou're All Talkʼ? It's like Stevie Wonder's ʽSuperstitionʼ gone hard rock and
sped up: cool, angry, funky bass and guitar interplay, not to mention the hilarious
contrast between Zander's pleading "please don't go... please don't go
away from me" and pissed-off "you're all talk! you're all talk!"
— more of the «confused caveman» emotional angle. ʽOh Carolineʼ? Perhaps the
most Foreigner-like of the lot, but in the general tongue-in-cheek context of
the album, even its falsetto "go to the end of the world... FOR YOUR LOVE!" feels like a post-modernist
deconstruction of the arena love ballad rather than «the real thing». ʽClock
Strikes Tenʼ? Their fastest, head-spinningest piece of rockabilly gone heavy
and mastodontic. ʽCome On Come Onʼ? Until I bothered to listen to the lyrics, I
thought it was one of those "people get together" anthems that
stimulate the listener to action, like breaking a few chairs or pulling a
hunger strike on the White House lawn, but it turns out that the song is actually
an instigation to copulation, which makes those "come on, come on... yeah
yeah, yeah yeah..." group harmonies even more hilarious (and gross),
though I can, like, totally envision Rick
Nielsen in his checkered suit and baseball hat as a perverted voyeur.
By the time the album tells you that "I
want you to stay" in Zander's most seductive falsetto on the last track,
you might just be tempted to follow the admonition and play it from the
beginning all over again — at the very least, it is clear that In Color has fully capitalized upon the
promise of the self-titled debut, and that Cheap Trick have pretty much saved
the day for old school classic rock. They may have been too derivative for
their home country to want them: the album sold significantly better than Cheap Trick, but still barely charted,
and neither did any of the singles. Yet they did gain enough prominence to earn
plenty of bookings in Europe and in Japan, and time only worked in their favor:
these days, it's even hard to guess that the record was produced in 1977, with
not a single trace of the contemporary punk sound (sure sounds a lot like the
New York Dolls in places, but in 1977 that was yesterday's news already), let
alone disco. What really matters,
though, is how great those pop hooks are, song after song after song: these
guys sure knew how to be consistent, if only for a brief while, and that particular lesson that they most
likely did learn from The Beatles really separates them from the majority of
their contemporaries. So, quite an exultated thumbs up here.
Yup, this is the one... The first and third albums are great too (and the highs in each - "Oh Candy" and "Surrender," respectively - are perhaps higher than anything here, with the possible exception of "Downed"). But this is the only CT album that is consistently great from start to finish - ten fantastic songs, zero filler, not a single drop in quality throughout the album - just song after song after song of power-pop heaven.
ReplyDeleteOff topic - but any plans to review Blonde Redhead?
ReplyDeleteLegend has it that the "Southern Girls" are actually Southern *Ontario* girls, which doesn't scan as well...
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ReplyDeleteA true Rock-Pop classic .... however the production seems compressed and somewhat geared to sound great on AM radio, thus lacking the dynamics of the preceding and following albums. I agree, not a single dud amongst this well-sequenced batch of trucks, but to these ears, the sonic potential of numbers like Hello There and Big Eyes was not fully realised until Albini twiddled the knobs for the 1997 In Color re-record (unofficial though it may be, his dry, crunchy production aesthetic was just what the doctor ordered)
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