Introduction

STANDING ON THE EDGE (1985)
1) Little Sister; 2) Tonight It's You; 3) She's Got Motion; 4) Love Comes; 5) How About You; 6) Standing On The Edge; 7) This Time Around; 8) Rock All Night; 9) Cover Girl; 10) Wild Wild Women.
Truest album title ever — this is a huge letdown compared to Next Position Please, but if we keep in mind the horror that would follow on its heels, then 1985 does present the band as truly «standing on the edge», before taking the final plunge the following year. Ironically, they are turning back to Jack Douglas here for production, so you'd think the idea was to try and recapture the spirit of their very first album. But in 1985, that just wasn't meant to be. The musical values had changed, the atmospheric demands had changed, and the production standards had «pro­gressed» towards the point when, during the final stage, mixer-extraordinaire Tony Platt came in, mixed the plastic keyboards higher than Nielsen's guitar, put a whole load of ear-splitting elec­tronic effects on Bun E. Carlos' drums (so much so that Carlos allegedly asked to be credited for «acoustic drums» to preserve his reputation), and made it all sound like a bunch of loud, chaotic, and essentially tuneless party-rock with a hair metal flavor.
Of course, we should never place all the blame on the producer. Nielsen and Zander still co-write most of the songs — and they also allow them to be «doctored» by a guy called Mark Radice, who plays the awful keyboards and shares the credits for 8 out of 10 numbers here; considering that his previous work expertise included collaborations with Michael Bolton and Barry Manilow, you can probably understand what that means even without assessing his contributions for the Tricksters. As for the «spiritual content» of the songs, it is largely confined to the same two styles that, although directly contradicting each other, formed the bulk of any popular rock artist's reper­toire at the time — cock-rockers and power ballads.
I am not saying that the songwriting is totally abysmal. If you can stand the production long enough to submit yourself to 3-4 listens, it becomes clear that the guys are still inspired by classic pop and R&B: ʽHow About Youʼ, for instance, hops along to the beat of ʽEverybody Needs Somebody To Loveʼ (been watching a tad too much of The Blues Brothers, eh?); ʽLittle Sisterʼ borrows the verse melody of the Stones' ʽ19th Nervous Breakdownʼ; and ʽCover Girlʼ is — theoretically — an exuberant power pop anthem whose roots lie in the classic singles of The Who; the problem is that you have to adjust your ears past several layers of glossy noise and noisy gloss to understand this, and with this kind of derivativeness, the playing style, the ar­rangement, and the mix are super-important. And they're awful.
The most bombastic and sentimental track on the album, ʽTonight It's Youʼ, was chosen as the lead single, and it even managed to temporarily put them back on the charts — at the expense of drying the last drops of irony and intelligence, leaving behind a completely straightforward sere­nade, capable of waking the neighbors for miles around by way of the electronic drum cannonade and hideously overdriven acoustic guitars that merge with the synthesizers in one silky-glossy whole. It's got a solid construction, for sure, rising from a slow start to a desperate mid-section to the bombastic knight-in-shining-armor chorus, but everything is so obviously calculated that I am not sure how it would be possible to praise this song and put down any given Aerosmith power ballad at the same time — and since I have already done the latter, I am obliged to refuse the former. Which is, by the way, quite easy for me, because I have yet to experience a real tear flowing down my cheek as Zander's voice, singing "all I want is a place in your heart to fall into!", cuts me to the bone and presents the very idea of romantic love in a completely new light. (Also, doesn't Zander have to reduce himself to microscopic proportions in order to achieve this?)
Ultimately, I'd rather go with the playful stuff like ʽLittle Sisterʼ and ʽCover Girlʼ and ʽHow About Youʼ, all of which could be very decent tracks with less obnoxious production. But some­times they go decidedly over the top with the playfulness — ʽShe's Got Motionʼ, somehow for­getting about the romanticism of ʽTonight It's Youʼ, plunges into the joys of totally casual sex and features one of the most absurd musical imitations of the love-making process ever recorded in the history of poodle-metal; and then there's ʽRock All Nightʼ, which was probably the band's worst song recorded up to that point — both of these tunes are a good preview of the sonic night­mare of The Doctor, and the most horrible thing about it is that Nielsen and Zander probably thought that with this crap, they were essentially doing their usual loud-and-ironic schtick. Loud, yes, but any sense of irony is completely lost — atmosphere-wise, this stuff is indistinguishable from your average Def Leppard or Mötley Crüe: really, what is the difference between ʽGirls, Girls, Girlsʼ and ʽWild Wild Womenʼ? Okay, so there's probably no need to hate either, but they're all just leftover curios from the AIDS decade.
No thumbs down, though, for a couple of reasons — they go real easy on the power ballads for now, and I like it how even through all the sonic muck you have these echoes of traditional Six­ties-style melodicity every once in a while. Indeed, I can easily imagine at least half of these songs done really well: maybe if they'd thought about re-recording them during or after their period of musical convalescence, the results would be more impressive than with the actual new material they penned in the 21st century. But instead, I think they ultimately just forgot this record ever existed — ʽTonight It's Youʼ seems to be the only song from here that keeps crop­ping up in their live shows. Too bad, I'd rather it be ʽLittle Sisterʼ or ʽCover Girlʼ.
THE DOCTOR (1986)
1) It's Up To You; 2) Rearview Mirror Romance; 3) The Doctor; 4) Are You Lonely Tonight; 5) Name Of The Game; 6) Kiss Me Red; 7) Take Me To The Top; 8) Good Girls Go To Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere); 9) Man-u-Lip-u-Lator; 10) It's Only Love.
A more appropriate title for the album would be The Doctor From Hell, which is precisely the kind of function that Tony Platt, now officially promoted to the position of the band's producer, is (largely successfully) trying to exercise for Cheap Trick here. You know what is the most vici­ous­ly sadistic part about it? These songs, most of them still written by Nielsen and Zander, aren't really all that bad — once you get past the initial sugar-shock, two or three listens are enough to prove that the boys still have not completely lost their pop instincts. In fact, with a little stretch of imagination, I could see the album turned into a... well, say, a halfway decent Duran Duran re­cord (although you'd still need to color it a little darker).
The principal problem, on which I agree with popular / critical opinion, is the awful, awful sound: 1986 in all its glory, with all the three main textural elements (Nauseous Synthesizers, Steroid Pop Metal Guitar, and Ridiculously Loud Electronic Drums) taken to the extreme — no, the boys have not yet mastered the art of the tear-jerking power ballad to complete the picture, but they have completely adapted to The Age of Excess, and almost everything that could be declared «good» about The Doctor is instantaneously drowned in such a raging sea of electronic-metallic noise that it makes Standing On The Edge sound like Woody Guthrie in comparison.
Case in point: ʽRearview Mirror Romanceʼ. Strip this song of its ludicrous drum, synth, and ec­static vocal overdubs, and I can totally see it as a fine, enjoyable power pop anthem — roll the tape all the way back to 1977 and give it to Blondie. But as the song goes on, the level of noise and chaos only increases, with more, more, more sonic idiocy (ever louder drums, ever more synth overdubs, ever more stupid tape manipulations with Robin's vocals), leaving you with little more than a confusing headache in the end. And, mind you, this is one of the better songs on the album — relatively catchy, relatively inoffensive, and even with a bit of acceptable humor.
The sleaziness quotient is also increased, with song titles that speak for themselves — ʽMan-u-Lip-u-Latorʼ? ʽGood Girls Go To Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere)ʼ? And ʽThe Doctorʼ sure as hell ain't about lobotomy, which is the only thing that could have truly helped the album: no, it's about "making house calls in the middle of the night" (listening to this song and realizing that there actually may have been impressionable human beings of the female sex in 1986 to feel aroused by this mating call just makes me feel dirty all over, and not even in a good way). This combination of cheap sexual aggression with horrible sonic ideas lands the band square in the same field with contemporary Rod Stewart — not even contemporary (let alone classic) KISS, who at least were consistent enough to keep up a «dirty» visual image along with the «dirty» musical core; whereas hearing this crap from pretty boy Zander and nerdy freak Nielsen leads to nothing but an endless series of facepalms.
Since most of the rockers are so deeply infected with cocky crap-ola, it is no wonder that the sentimental songs stand out as the finest on the album — in particular, the single ʽIt's Only Loveʼ, based on a sad little riff that I think these guys pinched from solo McCartney, though the name of the song escapes me at the moment; and I'd also have to mention the triumphant chorus of ʽTake Me To The Topʼ, which is really a cool melodic find and even contains a bit of emotional cathar­sis (no, really). That is not to say they are wonderful or anything, but they are a wee bit less clut­tered and obnoxious than the rockers. And, for honesty's sake, I must also tip the proverbial hat to Zander's falsetto hook on the "take each and every day as if it is your last" line from the opening moralistic number ʽIt's Up To Youʼ, which basically invokes us to shake awake and enjoy The Doctor with all the strength of our hearts because, who knows, maybe the next thing happening is a brick falling on our head, and do we really want to end our life overcome with such negative emotions? It's a good chorus anyway — too bad you have to chop your way through an electronic jungle to get to it.
The bottomline is — contrary to rumors, The Doctor is so goshdarn awful not because Nielsen and Zander have completely run out of talent (which is what the record executives thought, and saddled them with corporate songwriters for the next album), but because they have completely run out of taste. For classic Cheap Trick, irony and multi-layered composition were their regular trademarks; by the time we reach The Doctor, «straightforward stupidity» is the word of the day. Thumbs down are inescapable here, but the record is worth hearing at least once as a strong purgative — and if your stomach is strong enough, hearing twice or thrice to understand what it really means to take some potentially decent songs and spoil them so thoroughly that no self-respecting person of good breeding would ever want to marry them.
LAP OF LUXURY (1988)
1) Let Go; 2) No Mercy; 3) The Flame; 4) Space; 5) Never Had A Lot To Lose; 6) Don't Be Cruel; 7) Wrong Side Of Love; 8) All We Need Is A Dream; 9) Ghost Town; 10) All Wound Up.
Oh boys, you've got me all wound up — this is one really messed-up Cheap Trick album, with quite a few good things and bad things going on at the same time. On the positive side, as you can quickly see from the album cover, this is where they happily reunite with their original bass player: Petersson's solo career never took flight, his attempts to get other bands going all flopped, and it took him half a decade to under­stand that his only viable future was with Cheap Trick (or peddling shoe polish). They also got rid of Tony Platt, although his replacement in the producer's seat, Richie Zito, was not much more of a blessing (his future credits would include Bad English, Heart, Cher, Poison, Ratt... you get the picture), but at least he did not make such a big point about covering the band's guitar sound with a ridiculously thick synth coating.
On the other side, this is where Epic Records came up to them and threatened to dump their contract un­less they agreed for a bunch of outside songwriters to take over the lion's share of creative duties — the result being that only one song out of ten here belongs exclusively to the band, everything else being either completely written by corporate craftsmen, or «doctored» to the extent that you never ever know where Nielsen and Zander end and the big Eighties song­writing machine begins. There are altogether a whoppin' ten contemporary writers co-credited (of course, that's nothing compared to, say, a Britney Spears album from the 2010s, but in 1988, it was not yet common practice to co-credit a songwriter for contributing one vocal harmony line or modifying one chord sequence), which is kind of an insult for a band once known for penning some of the finest power-pop anthems in the business.
Nevertheless, next to the overall sound of The Doctor, Lap Of Luxury does feel like a come­back. In fact, if the average level of the songs here were up to the level of the enthusiastic opener, ʽLet Goʼ, it could easily qualify as their best record of the decade — of course, it does have those booming Eighties drums, and its jangly guitar opening is directly lifted from George Harrison's ʽIf I Needed Someoneʼ, but... it's, like, a Beatles rip-off! On an Eighties Cheap Trick album! A real Beatles rip-off, right off the heels of The Doctor — fascinating. With psychedelic Revolver-style vocal harmonies, too. The chorus, though, ain't Beatles at all — much more modern, screamy, and muscular, but still well-constructed. Really good song, thanks to co-writer Todd Cerney (his other contribution, ʽWrong Side Of Loveʼ, however, is a generic glam-pop load of crap, with boring tough guy riffs and ugly synth punctuations).
Other halfway decent pop-rockers include ʽNever Had A Lot To Loseʼ (this is the one and only completely original tune, by Zander and Petersson), fast-paced, playful, and featuring some more Beatlesque harmonies; ʽAll Wound Upʼ, co-written by Hall & Oates associate Janna Allen (so it does sound kinda like Hall & Oates, but not the bad kind of Hall & Oates) — it's fairly hard for me to resist the "you've got me all wound up — we're ready to go — hey hey hey!" combination, and even if they weren't actually having fun, it still sounds like they are; and as corny as it is, I still have an affection for their cover of ʽDon't Be Cruelʼ, if only because it is a throwback to the good old days, when Nielsen would perform his wild antics and pull his crazy faces to ironically reinterpreted retro stuff like ʽAin't That A Shameʼ — and he does pull off some classy lead licks and a good solo, in addition to generally reinterpreting the song as a glam-rock number while at the same time retaining all its hooks and that subtle innocent charm.
Alas, none of this is sufficiently enough to atone for one of the greatest sins of the 20th century. As far as the general public is concerned, Cheap Trick's greatest song — greatness, of course, implied by the fact that it was their only single to rise to the top of the charts — is ʽThe Flameʼ, a slow, soulful, hyper-tear-jerking power ballad that none of the band's members had anything to do with in the first place. As hideous as it sounds, I actually prefer the Diane Warren-co-written ʽGhost Townʼ — you know that I usually regard Ms. Warren as Satan incarnate, but in this case, I am almost ready to make an exception, because ʽGhost Townʼ is a ballad written rather intentio­nally in the style of Roy Orbison (and faithfully sung by Zander in the same style), and it is hard not to be taken in by the gradual build-up from verse to bridge to chorus, and the gentle fall-down to the "until you come back to me" resolution. Even Nielsen, turning his guitar into an emulation of the Hammond organ, delivers a poignant solo.
ʽThe Flameʼ, however, has none of that retro cuteness: it is as straightforwardly Eighties as they come, and very similar in style to that other equally nauseating power ballad, the Bangles' ʽEternal Flameʼ — what is it with 1988 and this «flame» idea? Big drums, big synths, big acoustic and electric guitars, grand operatic vocals, visions of knights in shining hairdos, plastic hearts on plastic sleeves, the works. Everything about it is just so outrageously bombastic and formulaic that it seems incredible how it could work that cheap magic on millions, but then, 1988 was all about puffed-up sentimental bombast; too bad Cheap Trick had to fall into that trap. (For that matter, I'd even take Aerosmith power ballads over this stuff — at least with Steven Tyler's voice, you get that «nastyness» angle that, even so obviously manufactured, is still preferable to Zander's dead-on chivalrous delivery).
So, as you can see, this one's totally a mixed bag. It got them out of one bunch of troubles (ridi­culously overwrought electronic production splattered over embarrassing cock-rock posturing) at the expense of getting them into another one (faceless corporate songwriters providing them with bland and boring «adult» material). Fortunately, the peak of that second bunch was yet to come: Lap Of Luxury is their transitional record from the cesspool of glam-rock into the cesspool of adult-pop, and in between, they (almost accidentally) managed to gulp a few breaths of fresh air for a life-saving change.
BUSTED (1990)
1) Back 'n' Blue; 2) I Can't Understand It; 3) Wherever Would I Be; 4) If You Need Me; 5) Can't Stop Fallin' Into Love; 6) Busted; 7) Walk Away; 8) You Drive, I'll Steer; 9) When You Need Someone; 10) Had To Make You Mine; 11) Rock'n'Roll Tonight; 12) Big Bang.
Foreword/spoiler: I do indeed fully and completely conform to the general consensus that Busted is the worst Cheap Trick album, ever — with one important addition: most of the time, it does not even feel as if I'm listening to a Cheap Trick album here. This is more like a Bon-Jovi-meet-Michael-Bolton album, for some unexplained reason given to Cheap Trick to record. Where The Doctor was at least «rambunctious» — loud, cartoonish, irreverent, kicking up the dust, even if it did it all in a sonically disgusting manner — Busted is well-combed, sterile, polite, one hundred percent predictable adult pop. For all I know, these guys could get behind Celine Dion on one of her «rockier» nights out and nobody would even notice.
Of course, it all has to do with the success of ʽThe Flameʼ. The music industry saw that it was good (because it sold), and wasted no time in moving in for the kill, saddling Cheap Trick with tons of power ballads and sentimental rockers to confirm and expand the suave image — and no matter how much they would complain about it in the future, at the time they seemed happy to oblige, because much of that schlock was written by the band members themselves. Outside songwriters still remain involved on a casual basis, though, including Diane Warren, who gets the chance to rectify her silly mistake with ʽGhost Townʼ (i. e., writing a decent retro-pop song) and come up with a solid, bullet-proof, totally reliable musical atrocity called ʽWherever Would I Beʼ (amazingly, it didn't sell all that well — probably needed a brain-numbing Hollywood block­buster to go along with it, with Rick Nielsen starring as Bruce Willis).
The boys themselves turn out to be strong competitors for Diane the Terrible, contributing ʽCan't Stop Fallin' Into Loveʼ — never mind that "falling into love" is not wholly grammatical, but any romantic power ballad that begins with the line "hey little ladies, there's some cool young dude" is guilty before it has a chance to get to the bridge, let alone the chorus. That said, the chorus is an overblown nightmare in itself — bringing on visions of the National Football League singing it in unison at the Super Bowl rather than anything subtle and emotional. Not that subtle and emotio­nal had ever been Cheap Trick's forte, but this is the first album where their understanding of «love» completely eludes both subtlety and irony, leaving only power. If you were a girl and you had to marry Zander in 1990, I'd bet he'd never let you out of the gym.
Other notable details: (a) the first song is co-written with Taylor Rhodes, who later went on to co-write ʽCryin'ʼ with Aerosmith and some other shit with Celine Dion; (b) the fourth song is co-written with Foreigner's Mick Jones, who also plays guest guitar so that it would sound even more like Foreigner; (c) the ninth song is co-written with Rick Kelly, whose musical talents are described on his own website in the following words: "Rick Kelly has the kind of voice and a knack for melody that is both richly and warmly familiar, ranging from the pop styles of Adam Levine to John Mayer to Billy Joel". In case you might be wondering, the track itself (ʽWhen You Need Someoneʼ) does sound «warmly familiar» — as in, when you've just finished barfing and whatever you puked up is still warm on the floor... okay, sorry, got a bit carried away there.
So, anything good here? Well, if you put a gun to my head and demanded to extract at least one track for a comprehensive anthology or something like that, I would probably go along with ʽI Can't Understand Itʼ, free of outside songwriters and basically functioning as a normal power pop song, still spoiled by production (the drums are too loud, the guitars too out of focus, etc.) but at least upbeat, catchy, and mildly funny. Their cover of Roy Wood's ʽRock'n'Roll Tonightʼ, round­ing out the record, is also OK, although, unfortunately, it comes round way too late to save the day — it's in the vein of ʽCalifornia Manʼ, and it shows that the boys can still have moderately tasteful fun when they put their minds to it. Also, ʽWalk Awayʼ is sort of an okay ballad, with that nostalgic chord progression and retro-pop harmonies, arguably the only one that you can listen on here without getting the urge to... well, you know.
Interestingly, one of the guest stars is Sparks' Russell Mael himself, but his presence is largely wasted on the glam-rock swaggerfest ʽYou Drive, I'll Steerʼ (admittedly, this particular period was not the hottest one in the history of Sparks, either). All I manage to remember about the song is that every time Zander and Mael duet on the line "I'm in the lap of luxury", I always hear "I'm living at the grocery", which, if it were true, could, perhaps, partially explain the abysmal quality of the album — at least, you'd really have to give it away as a freebie at the local grocery to get anybody interested. Anyway, a complete and total disaster here, critical, commercial, and artistic, best summed up in the band's own words in the prophetic title track: "Busted, busted for what I did / I didn't think it so wrong". Thumbs down with a vengeance.
WOKE UP WITH A MONSTER (1994)
1) My Gang; 2) Woke Up With A Monster; 3) You're All I Wanna Do; 4) Never Run Out Of Love; 5) Didn't Know I Had It; 6) Ride The Pony; 7) Girlfriends; 8) Let Her Go; 9) Tell Me Everything; 10) Cry Baby; 11) Love Me For A Minute.
Ugh, no wonder this album was a total commercial disaster — I mean, just look at that album cover: looks like a perfect one for a fetish porn movie soundtrack. Who the hell would buy some­thing like that in a music store? It's okay to opt for a little change after the last two records, where the boys' looks always reflected the degree of the musical inspiration, but not at such a terrible cost — just by looking at the sleeve, one already might experience visions of dusty, tattered, cracked CD cases in used bins with fifty-cent stickers on them.
Pitiful, that, because the record was actually an attempt at a fresh start. After Busted showed that ʽThe Flameʼ was really a fluke, and that the world was not particularly interested in putting Zander and Nielsen on the regular payroll for power balladeers — and after the grunge revolu­tion happened and burst the bubble of the hair metal era in general, the band gradually began coming back to its senses. For their next producer, they chose Ted Templeman (of Van Halen fame); the number of outside songwriters was seriously reduced, though questionable figures like Survivor's Jim Peterik still wound up on the list; and the emphasis was placed squarely on the heavy rock sound again, with adult contemporary overtones limited to an absolute minimum. Oh, and the keyboards are out — for good.
The problem is, having breathed so much poison over an entire decade, it's hardly possible to get it out of your lungs all at once, and the album still suffers from two serious problems. First, even despite the sparse and familiar instrumentation, the production is fairly shitty. Nielsen's electric guitars sound either overcompressed or just too glossy much of the time, and his sprightly acous­tic sound, reserved for the more sentimental tunes, consists of dull, bombastic power chords that anybody could have played — and Zander's vocals are often buried so deep in the mix, you'd think they were expressly interested in squashing his personality. (On the other hand, this might have been a good idea for some of the more sexually explicit numbers: the less lyrics of ʽRide The Ponyʼ you manage to make out, the better for your digestive system. Is it even grammatical­ly possible, let alone sexually, to "satisfy your funk"?).
Second, in Cheap Trick's endless battle of Irony vs. Sleaze, Woke Up With A Monster is still firmly on the Sleaze side — in a way, that album cover does reflect the fact that too much of the record still presents the band as intentionally «anti-intellectual» cock-rockers, pandering to an AC/DC-type audience but without the Spartan qualities of AC/DC that make the Young brothers such a delightful un-guilty pleasure for certain intellectual types as well. And I'm not mentioning AC/DC just like that, out of the blue: ʽGirlfriendsʼ, one of the record's hardest-rocking tracks, is basically just a minor rewrite of ʽBad Boy Boogieʼ (although the way they play the opening riff also reminds me that ʽBad Boy Boogieʼ itself had copped its riff from ʽRoute 66ʼ), so much so that, when after the guitar break Zander begins to sing the exact same vocal melody that Bon Scott does, the words "ain't the same old line from a rock'n'roll song!" have to be taken quite literally. The tight little number, with Bun E. Carlos kicking away like a trusty old packmule, is still fun — but when the very next one, ʽLet Her Goʼ, opens with a riff that is a minor variation on ʽDirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheapʼ, it's like, «No way! They can't be that obvious, can they?»
The one and only number that steps a little beyond the formula of the sentimental ballad and the cock-rocker is the title track — slower, moodier, with disturbing lyrics and a bit of creepy vocal acting from Zander; most memorable, of course, is the combination of its chorus riff with sup­porting vocals, sort of like a mix between the Beatles' ʽI Want Youʼ and a middle-Eastern ʽKash­mirʼ-like epic. The last time they tried something like that was probably with ʽHeaven Tonightʼ, although ʽWoke Up With A Monsterʼ is, of course, a far cry from the inspired melody and arran­gement of their creepiest song — among other things, it suffers from the same overcompression as everything else here, and it could certainly use a denser arrangement, maybe with some cellos thrown in for good measure. Still, as a conscious attempt to write an art-rock song, it is clearly a standout here, and how long has it been since we were able to talk about «standouts»?..
Other than that, well, bad lyrics aside, the album is generally listenable and occasionally enjoy­able. The upbeat power-pop tracks like ʽMy Gangʼ and ʽYou're All I Wanna Doʼ (ugh, that title!) work well, and even the few power ballads here are a big step up from the level of Busted — ʽNever Run Out Of Loveʼ has a thoughtfully crafted vocal melody with perfectly placed falsettos, a living-and-breathing rhythm section, and a gritty rather than pompous lead guitar part, and ʽTell Me Everythingʼ once again returns them to Roy Orbison mode, which is much better than the Michael Bolton mode anyway.
So, if anything, this record is in bad need of a complete re-recording — maybe throw away some of the worst lyrical offenders like ʽRide The Ponyʼ, correct production issues, and somewhere within this package lies a perfectly normal Cheap Trick album (much like The Doctor, although that one could only be salvaged with some top-level surgery). At the very least, there seems to be a near-common consensus that this was a major step up from Busted at the time, and I fully con­cur — too bad that the album flopped so badly (the band blamed Warner Bros. for lack of pro­motion, but I think there were deeper issues as well... then again, there's always that matter of the clown and the tattooed lady), although at least the flop did serve its purpose: it taught the band to finally stay away from big labels, corporate songwriters, and fickle contemporary trends.