I Know What Boys Like

Last Sunday, I went to Golden Gate Park to see Cheap Trick perform for free. I don’t know what possessed me to do that – I think I thought I liked Cheap Trick better than I actually do. Actually, I don’t. Like them, I mean. They are a boy’s band. There was a time, though, when I was a teenager, when I only liked the records that boys like. It wasn’t exactly deliberate, but of course that was all I ever heard about, since boys were the only ones who told me about bands.

do you remember laughter?

Cheap Trick are a case in point. I think I probably heard about them from Creem magazine, and what I heard was that they were such an awesome band. Creem being my Bible, I wouldn’t have dreamed of questioning that opinion about them. But I can faintly remember listening to one of their songs, “I Want You To Want Me,” or “Dream Police,” and secretly thinking, wait, why is this supposed to be good? But, I thought, something was good about it, or there wouldn’t have been such unanimity about that opinion. I think I thought the same thing about Ernest Hemingway.

Musically, Cheap Trick fell into a big bucket of bands that weren’t considered good – bands like REO Speedwagon, Foreigner and Journey. Also, Boston, Kansas, and April Wine. The only difference I could determine between those ‘bad’ bands was that Cheap Trick – like Kiss -- sort of dressed up. There was one who wore a hat, and one who wore a glasses, and two who were “cute” – that is to say, I was supposed to think they were cute, though in fact, I didn’t. (Note: this was in the days before videos, so all we knew about them, and their costumes, was from their album covers.)

Creem liked Kiss a lot, also, but I understood that to be an ironic stance. I don’t think they were being ironic about Cheap Trick, although “Cheap Trick at Budokan,” the band’s best-selling record, was originally pressed on colored vinyl, a novelty at the time, and the background screaming of 12,000 Japanese fans was clearly meant as kitsch. In 1978, it sold 3 million copies, which certainly helped me somehow internalized the idea that Cheap Trick was a really good band.

Then I never thought about them again until last week, when they appeared on the bill of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.

Having them on the roster seemed like a funny and cute idea: they are so far from hippies. So far from folkies. So far from anything you associate with free festivals in Golden Gate Park, although at the same time that they bleach the genre, one can’t deny they play the epitome of a certain kind of American Music. It seemed like it would be a real laugh, and as it was a beautiful day last Sunday and I had nothing else to do, around three in the afternoon, I dashed over the Park, getting there so fast that I had time to drop by the Rooster Stage to see the Bob Mould Band. That was interesting, especially as he played three Husker Du songs in the first six minutes. Do you know what hearing Husker Du is like to me now? It’s akin to hearing the theme song from “Totoro” or the Hello Kitty song from the videos my daughter watched as a baby. It gives me that indescribable fuzzy feeling of awwwwwwww, where your stomach clenches and you tear up a little.

I feel this may not have been the case for the majority of Hardly Strictly attendees who were at the Rooster stage right then, some of whom were leftover from the Emmylou Harris-Steve Earle - Bob Weir-augmented super group who had just finished playing Tom Petty songs. To them, Mould’s trademark power trio/tuneful thrash sound may have sounded strangely un-funky, unfolky, and definitely white  - though I did see a hippie couple attempting to boogie to “I Apologize.” I don’t think the whole point of Husker Du has made it down through the ages in the same way the Tom Petty’s point has – but for a very few of us in that glade that afternoon, “Never Talking To You Again” was Free-Falling-esque.

The best fucking...oh, whoops.

Thanks to the magic of twitter, I ran into my friends Tim and Donna at the Rooster stage, and the three of us decided to hoof it to the Cheap Trick stage before Bob Mould was done, passing by Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile in transit. We found a nice place on a grassy green hillside to spread our blanket, and busted out some nachos and salsa.  

It was super nice on that hillside, surrounded by sunshine, and the incongruity of it all had somehow convinced me that Cheap Trick would provide one of those Only-At-Hardly moments, like when Dolly Parton played “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” or when Marianne Faithfull sings “Down to Dover,” but in practice, it wasn’t quite that transformative. Indeed,  their more ironic moments fell a bit flat, as when the band appeared on stage foreshadowed by an announcement by a sultry female voice saying, “Ladies And Gentlemen, introducing the best fucking rock band you’ve ever seen!” That statement just doesn’t work that well when the crowd has just seen Big Freedia, Ozomatli, or kinda-sorta Husker Du.

 Also, some bands can pull off playing in daylight better. Sunlit glades are not that problematic for blues and folk acts, but it does not suit what a friend of mine described later as ‘unsexual cock rock.’ That is the kind of thing, with its sparkles and posturing, that craves darkness and a spotlight and a large cement arena where you can’t see any of it to close up. Also helpful: alcohol. Without that, the arena rock staging and silliness -- Rick Nielson’s goofy five neck guitar, for example; Robin Zander’s tailor-made suit in camo – look cheap and tawdry, like something your nerdy neighbors decided to do one Sunday afternoon and you were forced into listening.

The cheapest tricks.

One thing that struck me is that Cheap Trick is somehow essentially a boy’s band. Despite the good looks of Robin Zander and Tom Peterson, their music is practically vehicular in its rhetorical appeal to a certain type of lowkey masculinity. This isn’t meant as a diss of lowkey masculinity, of which I am generally a fan. But there are certain masculine-appealing things, like carburetors, batting averages, and I guess Cheap Trick, that simply crowd out my brain.

Near the end, Cheap Trick played their best song “Surrender,” and the whole crowd really got into it, including Jon Langford of the Mekons who joined the band onstage to sing the chorus. But sadly, given the glee it was met with, it wasn’t the last song, which just shows that Cheap Trick also has issues with pacing.  Honestly, though, the real problem wasn’t even pacing or sunlight or tempo or cock rock. It was just that Cheap Trick’s cheap tricks are all the things I hated about seventies rock bands in the first place. To begin, its tempos are decidedly mid – that is, mid-to-slow, sludgy, and punctuated with pointless arpeggios. Yet, despite the constant WEEDLE WEE of Nielson’s histrionic solo-ing, the songs never had a minor chord or rose to using more than three. Also, their output is somewhat meagre. At one point, they played not one but TWO Lou Reed songs – and they played them wrong. Also, they played long instrumental solos.

Basically, what Cheap Trick made me realize is we all know too much now: we’ve been spoiled, or intervened with, or overeducated, however you want to look at it, by punk rock and rap and by thirty years of plenty. And thank god we were, is all I can say, because what if we hadn’t been? What if the pop and rock world really HAD been ruled by Cheap Trick – rather than messed up in the head by the Sugar Hill Gang and the Sex Pistols, by Queen Latifah and the Raincoats? What if you’d had to hear an endless loop of this kind of music, instead of stuff by the Talking Heads, by Grandmaster Flash, by Bruce Springsteen and Blondie and Madonna? It hardly bears thinking about.