Rant #1,649: Cheap Trick

Everyone who regularly visits this site knows how I feel about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

I think that while its original intentions were good, it has fallen into its own abyss of politics, and I don't think that it generally honors the acts that it should be honoring for enshrinement.

It has gone way off based in acknowledging performers that don't belong in its hallowed halls, even when stretching the imagination to the breaking point.

It ignores acts that were groundbreakers, in particular those mid-1960s acts which set the table for those that followed them.

Ironically, one of the acts that benefited from these mid-1960s bands' work, an act which became popular in the 1970s and still puts out new material today, got its kudos this past Friday night, as Cheap Trick was inducted into the Hall of Fame during a ceremony at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.

The ceremony was open to the public to sit in the the nosebleed seats, and I knew a few people that went, and they saw the ceremonies of the other inductees, including Chicago and Steve Miller.

But I will focus on Cheap Trick, because I have been a huge fan of theirs for 40 years, and they are what is right--and what is wrong--with the HoF, right in one band.

What is right is that they are deserving.

If the Rolling Stones are rock and roll's greatest band, then Cheap Trick is rock and roll's greatest touring band.

They play more than 200 dates each and every year, have been doing it since the mid 1970s, and even though the band members are all getting up there in age, they show no signs of slowing down at all.

In fact, their greatest album, "Live at Budokan," shows them off where they are the most comfortable, right on stage playing to large audiences.

And they have been very successful doing this for decades.

Their recorded output is extremely inconsistent, but they have had a good bushel of hit records, including "I Want You To Want Me" from the previously mentioned LP, the No. 1 "The Flame," and "Dream Police," and they have had platinum albums in addition to the Budokan collection.

Their brand of pop, rock, bubblegum and metal is a mix that is their own, and the way that they are able to straddle all of those genres really makes them special, and I, for one, am happy that they are in the HoF.

But on the down side, how can you honor an act and not honor the predecessors that made it possible for this act to have reached their level of success, one that got them into the HoF?

Cheap Trick is really a 1960s band that found itself becoming huge in the 1970s.

Its entire ethos seems to be both visual and musical, as they were something of a gimmick band at first, with two members looking like real rock stars and the other two members looking like either your 9-5 work bum or a grown up kid, not like rock and rollers at all.

Each of their LPs feature fantastic singles, mixed with a lot of filler and other stuff that ranks from very good to kind of lacking.

The marketing of this act is also so 1960ish, with T-shirts and even Cheap Trick bow-ties and guitar picks letting one know exactly where they stood with the band. And their logo is right out of the 1960s, when most bands had a logo which was marketed on everything related to the band.

This is a mid-1960s band masquerading as an album rock radio staple, going for the good song over everything else, songs that are radio-ready and ready for the Billboard Hot 100.

Sounds to me that with this type of rock and roll personality, they harken back to a different era, not the one that they came up in, where album oriented rock and disco clashed, and radio stations started to veer one way or the other in what they played on the air.

If Cheap Trick would have been a musical entity 10 years before they hit the scene, they would have been a consistent hitmaker, had probably about 20 hit singles and albums, and thus, would have been shunned by the HoF; as it is, they are in, happy to have come on the scene not in 1965, but in 1975.

Cheap Trick owes a lot to the Beatles, but they certainly also owe a debt of gratitude to bands like Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Monkees, two acts that will never, ever find their way into the Hall of Fame, or at least until the present Hall administration moves onto something else and hands the reigns to people who are more accepting of what these acts accomplished.

How can you honor Cheap Trick without also honoring those who made it possible for them to be enshrined in the first place?

But whatever the case, Cheap Trick are now Hall of Famers, and I congratulate them for this accomplishment, whatever it means to them.

I interviewed Rick Nielsen some years ago, and the band's leader--the guy who looks like a grown up kid, like Bowery Boy Huntz Hall with a guitar--was very down to earth, and I think that this is another reason that the band appeals to so many, because what you see is what you get, without the usual rock star trappings.

They are who they are, and they are the real deal here, not cardboard cutouts. They have had their own set of legal entanglements lately, but it seems that they are now headed in the right direction, and again, I applaud them for this honor.

I just wish that it would open the door for others, but I know that it probably won't.