Cheap Trick: The original still rocks

Geoff Carter

Tuesday, March 16, 1999 | 11:27 a.m.

Back when I was a third of Scope Magazine's (now the Las Vegas Weekly) staff, former editor James Reza and I had a standing offer, open to any local band willing to claim it: We would give the cover of Scope to the band that performed a serviceable cover of Cheap Trick's "Dream Police."

Almost every musician we knew threatened to learn the rock radio staple, but no one ever came to arrest us, oh no.

In retrospect, we were nothing less than silly. What we should have done was offer the cover to Cheap Trick itself -- all 3,000 words of the cover story, the Andy Hartzell caricature, the whole nine yards. Cheap Trick cannot be approximated, only imitated -- and as their show Sunday at the House of Blues demonstrated, no band is even coming close.

From the go, a wild romp through "I Want You to Want Me," the venerable quartet lived up to the hype it has spent some two decades-plus building upon. Vocalist Robin Zander hasn't begun to lose the pipes that make the material. Drummer Bun E. Carlos continues to beat the drums senseless and look like a service station attendant. Tom Petersson's mastery of the 12-string bass hasn't diminished. And Rick Nielsen, well, he's still Rick Nielsen, and all that entails. The checkered sneakers, the double-necked guitars (five-necked for "Surrender") and the little ball cap still make the man, and the man still makes it.

Drawing on a wealth of material that ran the gamut from found gold ("She's Tight" should have been a bigger hit) to album track obscura ("Heaven Tonight"), the band played a crowd-pleasing set that had an ineffable charm even as it drew heavily on rock band cliches. Nielsen seemed to exhaust a guitar pick every 60 seconds, tossing them to raised hands in the crowd; at the end, he showered the audience with them. Zander took the stage in a knee-length, purple-velvet coat and didn't open one button.

It all seems like humorless overkill, until it hits you: It's not that at all. Everything Cheap Trick does is honest and laced with a goofy, self-deprecating attitude. Sure, cliches abound; the band also invented most of them. They own those cliches, honed them to a point: Why shouldn't they use them?

Entertaining, witty, tough and tuneful, Cheap Trick still has a better grip on rock stardom than most of the bands still fruitlessly attempting to ape its unique take on it -- Smashing Pumpkins, for example. Would James and I have given a cover to Billy Corgan and his crew? I imagine so. But it wouldn't be for the Pumpkins' take on "Dream Police."

There's only one band for that job, and they're still filling it to perfection.