Four oddballs make a brilliantly crafted, intricate and deceptively mean tour de fucking force in 30 days, from set up to delivery and then … have to sit on it for 8 months due to the runaway success of a Japanese only live LP that they didn’t even like*.
Welcome to the twists and turns of Cheap Trick and their greatest LP Dream Police.
Dream Police is just power-pop-rock perfection from the opening seconds of the title track on in. That power chord progression over that backing is every brightly-coloured crunchy sugar rush I could ever want from my rock**. This is a tale of dystopian surveillance told as goofily as possible, in true Cheap Trick style. The strings when they slice in, edge everything in goldleaf^ and the bit where it builds into the final chorus …
In act of perfect sequencing we accelerate into ‘Way Of The World’, a great get-over-it song. Discrete strings and Beatles-y harmonies abound along with a interesting song structure and a great beat. A song almost worth disfiguring my LP with a plectrum-shaped sticker for.
You want nasty? ‘The House Is Rockin’ (With Domestic Problems)’ fits that brief. Amongst all the harmony, the carefully applied layers of sophistication and goofiness, Cheap Trick always had real claws; they bare them here. This track is both troubling and decidedly rocking, right up until the possible solution, ‘He went and bought a gun / Heavy, heavy, heavy, problems, yeah’. Rick Nielsen lays down a wonderfully sharp solo on it to gild this dark lily.
Then Dream Police gives us Cheap Trick’s best track, all 9 minutes 20 seconds of it; one of the best rock cuts of the 70’s in fact. The sound is utterly their own^*, a spare menacing groovy drive, gilt around with strings that make it sound at times like a glam rock take on the Temptations and a mean growling simplistic vocal. That’s all words can do, listen instead:
Side 2 doesn’t pack quite the same artillery on Dream Police, but most LPs don’t. I have a real thing for the exquisite vocal harmonies on ‘Voices’ which really is a song post-Beatles Paul McCartney should have written. There is something special about Zander and Petersson’s voices harmonising, right into the point where Steve Luthaker’s guitar*^ joins into the melody seamlessly and again Tom Werman does an incredible production job right here.
The T-Rex touched bar bandisms of ‘Writing On The Wall’ are fun enough, if a bit ordinary in this company but that’s okay because ‘I Know What I Want’ is just over the horizon. IKWIW starts off with a touch of heavy menace, then Tom Petterson’s by turns numb/dumb lusty vocal cuts in and I’m home and hosed. I just love what a shot of unconscious desire this id.
All that’s left is for Cheap Trick to bring it on home with ‘Need Your Love’, which they duly do. It starts with a wonderful Bun E shuffle and then the song slinks into view over the horizon. Zander sings this at the top of his register which gives the song a fragility that jibes against the heavier aspects of the track. The song then accelerates off on a stolen riff into what everything signposts as a big smash finish, before Zander ends the song and Dream Police in an oddly gentle fashion.
Dream Police is a perfect example of an LP crafted as a entity in and of itself. It flows superbly well, there is a unity to the sound, despite all the tangents the band take off on. It is very much more than the sum of its, not inconsiderable, parts. I’m only 12 years into owning it and I still find new things to admire and enjoy every single time I play it.
Cheap Trick were a magnificently good band, it really does bear restating. They were all excellent musicians and fused together by their admiration for the Beatles, which is evident even on the harder cuts here – a Lennon sneer, a gentle harmony, a simple drum shuffle, it all adds up. Tom Werman is another right on top of his game here and hats off to the unthanked string dudes/chicks because Dream Police is an object lesson in how to use strings in rock.
Incidentally I have a theory about life/Cheap Trick. We all start off wanting to be/look like one of the two more handsome chaps – Petersson, Zander, but end up as one of the the oddballs – Nielsen, Carlos. The secret to a happy existence is then just owning that fact. Bun E. Carlos, looking like a jobbing accountant gone very much to seed, cigarette permanently in mouth, is my hero and style guru^^.
I think I have wanged on enough about how perfect this album is. Buy it, get your rock kicks right here because you know what you want.
I know, I know, I know, I know what I want!
I know what I want!
I want it!
My copy of Dream Police is a well-preserved 1979 UK original. I love the Epic Records labels and the gatefold police line-up shot.
1292 Down.
PS: Because I love you all:
*neither do I.
**Ginger Wildheart, a renowned Cheap Trick nut, has said that he owes so many of his own songs to this intro.
^seriously who did the strings here?! there are absolutely no credits at all for playing or arrangement and they are just used brilliantly throughout.
^*until KISS burgled elements of it for Lick It Up, four years later.
*^not sure why him, but he’s there, uncredited.
^^I own a Bun E. Carlos T-shirt. No wonder ladies find me so utterly resistible.
I like this and this band.
Joe, I’ve seen this in stores at semi-decent prices and foolishly not invested.
But after reading this, your enthusiasm is contagious in the best possible way, and I know, I know, I know what I want to do next time I see it in the shops!
Need to listen to this as I’ve never really got into CT. Passed up a chance to see them at the first Shellac-curated All Tomorrow’s Parties, but for the life of me I can’t remember which Albini-sanctioned angular noise peddlers we watched instead. I fear that may have been a mistake.
Presumably the 30 days included typing the back sleeve credits with painstaking use of the underscore key. How, err, cheap!
Classic. Like yourself Joe I love the mug shots, gatefold and everything on the wax. I read that they had Dream Police in the can for almost a year as Budokan kept selling so they didn’t want to saturate the market at the time…
I tried, I really tried. I’m just a “greatest hits” kind of fan.
By far my favorite Cheap Trick album also the first album I ever heard by them outside of Budokan. It don’t get much better than this one.
Hi John, quite agree. They never sounded so balanced again for me, between the Beatlesy bits and the heaviness. Such clever guys.
Friend of mine saw them blow Def Leppard off stage as a support act a few years ago, so they’ve still got it. (I know you’re a big Lep fan but he just said they were too polished and a bit stale sounding that night)
No, I get it. Lep is an organized, well-oiled machine where Trick is out there still killing it…no major production, just the songs. Sometimes that is better.
This is a great album, my favourite one from Cheap Trick! What I realize that when I reviewed the album, I failed to mention one of my top ten favourite bass lines. Tom Pettersen nails it on “Gonna Raise Hell.” Still, they’re driving me insane, those men inside my brain.
Gonna Raise Hell is amazing! Plus it’s got such a groove for 9 minutes.
Tom P is an incredible bass player, very subtle.
I need to spend more time with the full album, but the title track is a perfect song.
Give it another go, I’ve listened to almost nothing else for a week now and I keep hearing new things in it.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High dealt Cheap Trick a hard blow. Nothing quite like it until the Eagles fell under The Big Lebowski’s sword. They didn’t deserve it. My thought was this album and especially their next, could have used a little more time in prep. Maybe slow down a bit, CT. But that was not their style.
I don’t remember the reference to them in Fast Times … it’s been decades since I saw it though.
“That’s kid stuff”
Gotcha!