Review: 'This Band Has No Past: How Cheap Trick Became Cheap Trick'

When future "Jason Bourne" novelist Eric Van Lustbader began his fanciful liner notes for the first Cheap Trick album with "This band has no past," he was practically issuing a challenge to rock writers. At least that's how it now seems since Brian J. Kramp went to great lengths to prove Van Lustbader wrong in his new book This Band Has No Past: How Cheap Trick Became Cheap Trick. Not only does Cheap Trick--those saviors of old-fashioned rock and ribaldry--have a past, but it's a really involved one. All four original members were already in working bands ten years before Cheap Trick released that debut. Rick Nielsen was playing piano on sessions for The Yardbirds and opening for that group and The Who with his own band The Grim Reapers. With all due tasteless Cheap Trick-style irony, The Grim Reapers were scheduled to open for Otis Redding at a show the headliner could not perform due to his tragic death (The Reapers went on, though). Nielsen and Tom Petersson played in a prog group called Fuse fronted by former Nazz vocalist Thom Mooney. A pre-Robin Zander Cheap Trick opened for and backed Del Shannon, Freddy Boom Boom Cannon, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry at a Rock & Roll Revival show. For a band with no past, those guys really worked their asses off before becoming the Cheap Trick we know and love.

Review: 'Del Shannon: The Essential Collection 1961-1991'

 
Though Del Shannon only managed two top ten hits in his home country, he scored a far more impressive eight in the UK. So it is appropriate that Britain’s Music Club Deluxe Records has put together one of the most comprehensive anthologies of his decades-spanning body of work. The transcendent “Runaway” naturally gets things underway, and is immediately followed by the excellent “Hats Off to Larry,” which is his second best known record in the States. For we Americans, much of the remainder of The Essential Collection 1961-1991 is a trove of treasures screaming to be heard for the first time.

Disc one, which houses all of the US and UK hits, is actually somewhat hit-and-miss. When Shannon had great material, such as the aforementioned hits or lesser-known wonders such as his non-hit his version of his own composition “I Go to Pieces” (a big hit for Pete and Gordon), he could do no wrong. But some of this stuff is middling doo-wop that highlights the limitations of his voice in the days before he became a consistently confident singer. On disc two, he stretches beyond the falsetto and musitron (the eerie keyboard showcased on “Runaway”) formula of his early hits to embrace garage rock, baroque pop, psychedelia, and country pop. Although these recordings aren’t always amazing —his covers of “Under My Thumb” and The Box Tops’ “The Letter” stick too close to the originals to be much more than redundant—they are consistently good. Much of this, such as the four recordings culled from 1967 sessions produced by Andrew Oldham (including a baroque-pop remake of “Runaway”) and the two tracks pulled from his vastly underrated psychedelic opus The Further Adventures of Charles Westover, are superb. Shannon had a lot more than “Runaway” in his arsenal. The Essential Collection 1961-1991 is positive proof of that.