CHEAP TRICK: ALL SHOOK UP (1980)
1) Stop This Game; 2) Just Got
Back; 3) Baby Loves To Rock; 4) Can't Stop It But I'm Gonna Try; 5) World's
Greatest Lover; 6) High Priest Of Rhythmic Noise; 7) Love Comes A-Tumblin'
Down; 8) I Love You Honey But I Hate Your Friends; 9) Go For The Throat; 10)
Who D'King; 11*) Everything Works If You Let It.
The Eighties are upon us, and this is the
beginning of the end, right from the very first track. "Well I can't stop
the music, I could stop it before...", Zander flings at us
accappella-style, in a perfectly serious, quasi-operatic tone — something far
more suitable for Foreigner's Lou Gramm or some other vocally endowed brawny,
but sentimental arena-rock hero than for Cheap Trick, the (former) kings of
friendly irony and muscular intelligence. As the instruments kick in, the whole
thing gets no better — a stiff pop-rocker, largely dependent on keyboards and
simple, straight-jacketed power riffs. Throughout, Zander yells, bawls and
weeps as if he were totally serious
about this exploding love affair, the vocal harmonies sound like underpaid
extras in a power metal ballad, and the guitar sounds like a complete waste of
Nielsen... and he wrote the song! And they released it as a single! And it
charted super-low! And it was totally justified, because it was honestly the
weakest Cheap Trick single to date.
The horrible thing about the album is that,
alas, it does not get much better
than that. It does get better, occasionally, and much worse things were around
the corner, but the sober truth is that somehow, in some way, the evil fairy
visited Rick Nielsen in his bedroom one night (probably on the very night that
he forgot to take his ward-off-evil baseball hat and bowtie to bed with him),
and he lost most of his songwriting talent overnight — not all of it, charging the unfortunate fanbase with the need to filter
out the small bunches of gems from the large pools of dreck, but most of it, for sure. How the heck did
that happen, so quickly?
The blame is sometimes transferred onto the
producers — nowhere more so than on All
Shook Up, which was produced by George Martin, no less. Now it may have
been inevitable that Cheap Trick, Beatles admirers extraordinaire, would
eventually team up with Martin, but the thing is, Cheap Trick music was really
midway between the Beatles and the Stones, combining Beatles-style pop hooks
with raw rock'n'roll energy, and it should have been clear from the beginning
that Martin's production would suck out most of the raw rock'n'roll energy. I
am not aware of any particular animosity between Martin and the boys during the
sessions for the album (most likely, they were just way too awestruck by the
opportunity), but Martin's «clean» production certainly does not agree with
what the boys do best.
That said, no amount of sterile production
could explain the fact that on All Shook
Up, what we have is Cheap Trick 2.0 — but, as I already began to say in the
Dream Police review, their newly
found superstardom sure can. It is almost as if the band now saw themselves
burdened with a new «responsibility» for their fans, and dropped a large part
of its too-smart-for-its-own-good act in favor of a simpler, more
straightforward approach; and the simpler it got, the less true it rang. Simply
put, Robin Zander as a heart-on-sleeve lyrical troubadour, or, vice versa,
Robin Zander as the basic, brawny, KISS-style cock-rocker just does not work
after four albums in a row where we had Robin Zander, the demolition man for
pop music clichés. Or was it his original intention to demolish all the clichés
just so that he could immediately start rebuilding them from scratch and dust?
And don't even get me started on Nielsen, who pretty much betrayed himself on
this album — just how many good, let alone great, riffs can you count? Or, in
fact, how many tracks that are distinguishable by some above-average guitar
work in general? On Dream Police, one
could complain that ʽGonna Raise Hellʼ and ʽNeed Your Loveʼ overstayed their
welcome, but at least it was for a reason — so that Mr. Nielsen could have
ample time to toy around with his instrument, and every once in a while, get a
brand new, awesome noise out of it. On All
Shook Up, experimental guitar playing is replaced by professional
sterilization.
Some lines of critical or fan defense have been
put up around the album, claiming that it was simply more «quirky» and
«experimental» than their previous releases. Well, the only «quirky» thing
about ʽStop This Gameʼ is that it seemingly fades in on the same piano chord on
which Sgt. Pepper had faded out
thirteen years earlier — which is a fun idea in theory, but a disgrace in
practice: ʽStop This Gameʼ relates to ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ in about the same way
in which a Dimitri Tiomkin soundtrack would relate to a Beethoven symphony.
Other «quirky» elements include: (a) symmetric sound effect overdubs in the
bridge section of the otherwise generic glam rocker ʽBaby Loves To Rockʼ —
"in the morning!" accompanied by cock-a-doodle-doos, "in the
evening!" by chirping crickets (for some reason, "baby loves to
rock" everywhere but "not in Russia!" — which, I daresay, is a
blatant lie!); (b) robotically encoded vocals on the chorus section of the
dark sci-fi rocker ʽHigh Priest Of Rhythmic Noiseʼ, one of the few songs here,
perhaps, that could feel at home — with different production — on earlier
records; (c) an obvious parody on the mid-Seventies sound of Rod Stewart (ʽHot
Legsʼ, etc.) called ʽI Love You Honey But I Hate Your Friendsʼ, a little out of
time since Rod Stewart's sound had already deteriorated even way beyond that barroom
boogie level by 1980; (d) a ridiculous mash-up of Fleetwood Mac's ʽTuskʼ and
Queen's ʽWe Will Rock Youʼ, called ʽWho D'Kingʼ and possessing neither the
humor and menace of the former nor the true stadium power of the latter.
It's not all
bad — there are still some fast 'n' catchy power-pop numbers like ʽEverything
Works If You Let Itʼ (actually, a bonus track on the CD re-issue, from the
soundtrack to the movie Roadie
starring Meat Loaf — fine, healthy company for the boys!); a cleverly built-up
power ballad (ʽWorld's Greatest Loverʼ) with Zander at his absolute vocal best
— even if you generally hate the bombast of power balladry, you still have to
admit that the man shows a master class in self-winding-up here; and if you
ever wondered what it would have been like to take a circa-Flick Of The Switch AC/DC rocker and run it past the magic hands of
George Martin, ʽLove Comes A-Tumblin' Downʼ will give you the answer — I'd
still take AC/DC's ʽLandslideʼ over this any time of day, but it is a curiosity, and it's at least fun.
(For the record, the connection is not spurious: lines like "From the
cabaret to the highway of hell / Had a monkey on his back it was easy to
tell" clearly suggest that the song was intended as an obituary — and the
fun thing is, Flick Of The Switch
hadn't even come out yet, so you could say AC/DC themselves were influenced by
Cheap Trick in 1983. Also, the song sounds much better in concert without the
George Martin production).
But even with all the excuses, there is no
denying it: Cheap Trick are trying to go way too serious on our asses, and this
is a negative influence on their songwriting. A major part of the band's charm
was precisely in the fact that they could take the popular genre conventions of
the mid-Seventies and play around them with sly wit and intelligence — now, it
seems, they are beginning to succumb to them, and the arena-rocker masks are
beginning to stick to their faces way too seamlessly for comfort. Simply put, I
don't need Robin Zander to educate me
that "everything'll work out if you let it / Let it in your heart";
I'd rather prefer him to spoof that banal premise. And somehow it seems to me
that, perhaps, he'd prefer that, too — but now they had this moral responsibility
for all their post-Budokan fans, you
know, or at least that's what they (and/or their recording industry superiors)
thought at the time — ironically, the more serious they got, the fewer records
they sold.
Yeah. This is a seriously messy album from the cover all the way to the sounds. Even though one can blame later disasters on record company and producers who had them under their thumb in the quest for the next hit, Neilson and the band are front and center to blame for this.
ReplyDeleteVery little here is fresh or catchy. Messy is the only way to describe it. Only thing I can think of about their next few records (up to BUSTED) is that Neilson was ALL SHOOK UP by this albums failures that he lost his confidence in his songwriting. The next few albums feel a little desperate.