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: Joe Jackson's 'Summer in the City: Live in New York'

In August 1999, Joe Jackson performed at tiny Joe’s Pub in NYC, his voice and piano accompanied only by Gary Burke’s drums and Graham Maby’s bass. Considering the lack of guitar and the fact that the show took place amidst Jackson’s retreat from pop, one might assume the performance had some sort of jazz trio pretentions. But with Burke’s hard hitting and Maby’s trademark vicious attack, the set was pure Rock & Roll. It also formed the basis of a CD called Summer in the City: Live in New York released in 2000.

With Jackson looking back on his rocker days, it was appropriate that his original selections not only relied exclusively on the seventies and eighties, but that they also included oldies by The Beatles, Yardbirds, Steely Dan, and as the CD’s title reveals, The Lovin’ Spoonful (though there are nods to jazz in his covers of Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and The Ramsey Lewsi Trio version of “The In Crowd”). Refreshingly, the covers and the punkish early cut “One More Time” retain all their thrust in this stripped down setting. This is in no small way due to the awesome Maby. With his 5-string bass, he supplies all the strings any Rock band could need as he adds some (in Joe’s words) “very deep bass” to “Fools in Love” and whips off a thrilling solo on “Another World”. All hail Graham.

Because it was recorded in the dedicatedly digital age, Summer in the City: Live in New York may seem an odd choice for the audiophile label Intervention Records (who’d previously reissued Jackson’s Look Sharp!, I’m the Man, and Night and Day), which normally goes to length to use a completely analog process in its reissues.* But even with only “high quality files” from the original DATs available, this double-vinyl release sounds superb with Maby and Burke rattling the floorboards and Jackson’s voice soaring over them with remarkable clarity on quiet 180-gram vinyl.

*Update: Shane Buettner of Intervention Records had the following to say about the process of mastering Summer in the City: Live in New York:

“I definitely specialize in 100% analog mastering, because so few labels do that. However, my ethos is to be truest to the master source. For this project there was analog tape, but as the master source was native digital, the digital sounded best and that’s what I used. In this case it’s important to note the HUGE impact of going from the 16-bits of the CD to the 24-bit source files we used. 24-bits is 256 times the resolution of 16-bits! In addition, the original CD had several dB of dynamic compression whereas we didn’t employ any.”

Review: 'My British Invasion'

Amidst the pot-scented denim gravity of the early-seventies Rock press, journalist Harold Bronson must have been a refreshing rarity. While the scribes were oohing and aahing over lofty ideas and classical musicianship, Bronson apparently wanted nothing more than to groove to Paul Revere and the Raiders and chat with Peter Noone. That combination of seriousness about the music industry and completely unpretentious music tastes led Bronson to co-found Rhino Records, the ultra-cool reissue label responsible for helping The Monkees make their big eighties comeback and eventually achieve the critical approval they always deserved. In his new memoir, My British Invasion, Bronson admits without a trace of self-consciousness that he wished he could have done the same for Herman’s Hermits. I don’t care if you think “I’m Henry the VIII (I Am)” is twelve pounds of Velveeta—that’s pretty endearing.

Bronson is generally at his most endearing when discussing the British Invasion bands he loved and interviewed during the seventies, which he does in profile chapters devoted to the Hermits, Yardbirds, Kinks, Manfred Mann, Dave Clark Five, Hollies, Zombies, and others of their mop-toppy ilk. Interviews with key band members are the stock in most of these chapters, though unscrupulous ex-manager Larry Page is the only one extensively quoted in the Kinks one. Fortunately, Page also stars in the book’s funniest recollection when he attempts to fool Bronson into thinking he has in his possession a tape of the real Beatles recording dialogue for the delightfully cheesy Beatles cartoon TV series.

Bronson’s interviewees are interesting and the simplicity of his old-fashioned, pre-serious-rock press writing fits his band profiles fine. Marc Bolan provides enough zing for both himself and Bronson in a late 1971 rap session, and the infuriating nature of Bronson’s dealings with Dave Clark still booms through clearly despite the author’s refusal to get worked up about it. That neutral style does not suit his more personal, diary-like chapters as well, which read as flat and choppy and contain too many details about his own band and personal romances to interest the majority of readers who will likely buy their tickets to this show because of its big-name attractions. These readers will probably also be well familiar with the basic British Invasion history that Bronson spends too much time rehashing, but there are enough enlightening bits to make My British Invasion a fitfully interesting read for the mop tops of today.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 134

The Date: February 11

The Movie: Blow-Up (1966)

What Is It?: Michelangelo Antonioni uses a shaggy-dog murder mystery as a way into critiquing the superficiality of Swinging London culture, inadvertently glorifying its great music (The Yardbirds impersonate The Who), fashions, and free-love ethos.

Why Today?: On this day in 1934, iconic Swinging London fashion designer Mary Quant is born.

Review: Expanded Editions of The Mascots' 'Your Mascots' and 'Ellpee'

Garage rock aficionados know The Mascots because of “Words Enough to Tell You”, a romantic jangler that earned a spot on Rhino’s Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond box set. Aside from that one track, they’re pretty obscure outside of Sweden, apparently because they weren’t too concerned about international success. At home, they were considered a Scandinavian Beatles, though The Zombies seemed to have had an equally heavy influence on the band. Their debut album, Your Mascots, blended the Fabs’ buoyancy with The Zombies’ sullenness for a sound a lot like the early Beau Brummels. They were actually darker than any of those groups. Even Lennon hadn’t written anything as nasty as “I hope that this is forever goodbye / I hope that you forever will die” (“Goodbye”) at this point in his career (though he would pretty soon with “Run for Your Life”) and Harrison never sounded as dour as The Mascots do on the pitch-black “For Him”. On a version of Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business” sung with the blinding speed of the guy from the Micro Machines commercials, The Mascots just sound crazy. All of this makes for one of the most interesting pseudo-Mersey Beat records of 1965.