The Cheap Trick book, This Band Has No Past

It’s been a long time since my last post, but I’m ready to get things rolling again.

Last spring I wrote about Brian Kramp’s run-in with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a short-sighted entity who temporarily shut down his music podcast, Rock and/or Roll. The silver lining in this fiasco was that it freed up Kramp’s time to complete This Band Has No Past: How Cheap Trick Became Cheap Trick, available now at Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and other bookstores. I am not a die-hard Cheap Trick fan by any means, though I do think that Dream Police and In Color are nearly perfect power pop albums. Beyond that I’m a modest fan at best. Nonetheless, I found Kramp’s 300-plus-page read to be a delightful trip to the world of live music in the Upper Midwest during the 70s, and a meticulous record of how this band earned their success. If the book can capture the interest of a casual fan, I think that hard-core Cheap Trick followers will be ecstatic.

Kramp conducted more than eighty interviews for the book, including particularly insightful contributions from original drummer Bun E. Carlos and band manager Ken Adamany. The other original band members – Tom Petersson, Rick Nielsen and Robin Zander – didn’t participate, but their words are well-documented from past interviews, and I didn’t find their lack of direct input to be a drawback. If anything, it may have helped to keep the book focused and allow for more contributions from other players in the band’s history.

This Band Has No Past, a title taken from the mock-biography included in the band’s debut album, meticulously covers the origins of Cheap Trick from its modest roots in Rockford, Illinois, with forerunning bands such as The Grim Reapers, Bo Weevils and Fuse, to the recording of the wildly successful Cheap Trick at Budokan, the album that finally garnered the sales that eluded the band through their first three releases. You might be asking, “How the heck can a 300-page book only cover the band’s first few albums?” Kramp does this in a multitude of ways, all of which I found appealing.

First, he put the band’s evolution in context with contemporaneous events like the Vietnam War and the releases of Jaws and Star Wars, plus events that played tangential roles in band members’ lives, such as the details of the Richard Speck murders (which would inspire the song, "The Ballad of TV Violence") and the story of the plane crash that took the lives of Otis Redding and six others in 1967. As it happened, future band manager Ken Adamany owned the Madison, Wisconsin club where Redding was to appear that night, and Rick Nielsen’s band, The Grim Reapers, opened for what turned out to be somber occasion.

Second, Kramp’s devotion to details that other author’s may have deemed unimportant give the story its scope and vibrancy, such as the story of Chris Crowe, a graphic artist who created the band’s logo, the inclusion of setlists from various shows, and an in-depth analysis of which of the debut album’s sides was supposed to be played first (it’s not as obvious as one would think). Kramp scoured seemingly every publication that included even a passing mention to the band – the Racine Journal Times, the Rockford Register Republic, Estherville Daily News, etc. Seriously, I admire the efforts it must have taken for Kramp to amass so much information and portray it in an entertaining fashion. Hell, he included two pages worth of adjectives that various publications used to describe Cheap Trick, and another two pages of adjectives used to describe at Rick Nielsen. Kind of crazy, but really rewarding!

Which brings me to the third point: just as Kramp appears to have worked tirelessly to write This Band Has No Past, the book highlights just how hard-working the members of Cheap Trick and a multitude of other bands were at the time, playing show after show after show at tiny venues throughout the Upper Midwest, from bowling alleys to high school dances to clubs to festivals. The book serves as a time capsule of the gritty but vibrant live music scene during the 70s, a scene that modern day musicians can only long for. While most of the venues were foreign to me, I have to imagine that anyone from the area who came of age during the 70s is going to be thrilled with this trip down memory lane.

Most illuminating for me was the realization that Jack Douglas, the producer of Cheap Trick’s debut album, hand-picked the songs for that 1977 release, overlooking tracks that would later prove to be very important to the band’s success, most notably “I Want You To Want Me” and “Surrender.” And it’s mind-boggling to me that “Hello There” wasn’t chosen to open the first album; it would have rivaled other great debuts such as “Welcome to the Working Week,” “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Chuck E.’s in Love” and “Runnin’ with the Devil.” A fan of alternative history might ponder what would have transpired if these songs had been released earlier. Perhaps success would have come sooner, but perhaps Budokan wouldn’t have become phenomenon it became

Somehow it all worked out. And thanks to Kramp, much of it has been documented in an enjoyable read, and the book itself is an attractive, sturdy publication with color photos and appealing typesetting, making it well worth the price.

Life's Meaning and Selfish Pursuits

Speaking with my mother on the phone a few weeks ago, she lamented the aches and pains that she and her older friends have been experiencing lately, concluding that today’s elderly are dealing with issues that their parents never encountered because they’re “living too darn long.” While my mother is certainly still active and enjoying various activities, she feels like she’s no longer living a “purpose-driven life,” borrowing a phrase from Rick Warren’s best-selling book. Aside from doing some tutoring and volunteering at a hospital, she doesn’t feel like she’s truly contributing to society or the greater good.

I don’t know that one has to actively contribute to society to live a meaningful life, but I’ve been ruminating about this ever since our conversation. I too am wrestling with what a meaningful existence entails. Back in 2017, I wrote a few blogs that tackled this subject, and I seemed more assured of the answer than ever before. I wrote:

Learn. Explore. Volunteer. Start a hobby. Help others. Learn an instrument. Love, and experience joy with the ones you love. Learn a craft. Grow something. Learn a language. Have fun with friends. And perhaps most importantly, enjoy the little miracles around you every day. 

But for me, 2022 has been a year of saying “no” to things. I resigned from my two biggest volunteering activities: picking up food for a local food pantry and serving on my synagogue’s board. At the end of the summer I am leaving one of my bands, and I’ve also given up baseball this year, having watched not one game this season in person or on TV, an act of defiance which provoked the following response from an old friend of mine: “Oh shit, this is getting real.” It is kind of! I’m used to watching over a hundred games a year. This year I’ve probably freed up somewhere around 300 hours to pursue other things.

But what things, exactly? As a friend of mine once said of retirement: you can’t just retire from something, you have to retire to something. And if 2022 is the year for me to say no to some things, I’m also going to have to say yes to other things. 

So far, it’s a little unresolved, and I echo my mother’s thoughts that perhaps I’m not living a purpose-driven life. But the thing is, I’m happy to have walked away from a few of my volunteer activities. It was time. I’m at peace with leaving one of my bands. It was time. I don’t miss baseball in the least, something I couldn’t fathom saying a few years ago. But what will I walk towards?

I have friends whose purpose in life seems to be to enjoy life itself. Is that enough? It’s a self-centered pursuit for sure, but damn, they seem pretty happy, and after spending years and years doing what I thought I should do, I’m kind of enjoying just doing what I want to. I’m recording a new album that few people will ever hear. I’m playing in a few bands. I’m reading books more proactively. I’m tackling home maintenance projects. I’m reaching out to friends and family, attending concerts, enjoying food and taking walks with my wife and dog.

Is that enough? It isn’t noble. It’s perhaps not the life I can sustain for long before I tell myself to get back in the game and – as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. described in his novel Dead-Eye Dick – stop living life as epilogue and get back to adding to one’s story. It’s tricky. My mom probably feels like her life is epilogue – that her life story is over now. I’m 29 years younger than my mom, and in some ways I’m living a life that’s “short on story and overburdened with epilogue.” But I’m enjoying it except for the part of me that feels guilty for enjoying it! 

For now, I’m going to try to give myself permission to pat myself on my back for twenty years of parenting and volunteering and say it’s okay to have a reprieve. To reset. To just breathe for a while and let my whims take me where they may. Eventually I’ll find something to say yes to, that excites me.

This meaning of life stuff is tricky, whether you’re 83 or 54. It really never gets any easier.

Archie Bunker and the Pentatonic Scale

Cooking in the kitchen the other day, I began humming the theme song to the classic 70s sitcom All in the Family, “Those Were the Days.” (TV theme songs constantly pop up in my head – they were good tunes!). In short order I recognized that nearly the entire song is comprised of the major pentatonic scale. Not until the B section, as Carroll O’Connor pines for the days when “girls were girls and men were men,” is the 7th of the scale introduced. Good stuff! It reminded me of my first introduction to the pentatonic scale as a child, when my sister taught me how to play a version of “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater” using only the black keys of our piano. I didn’t know at the time that the five keys made up a pentatonic scale, but in retrospect I probably became innately familiar with the scale’s sound.  

Years later, when I played baritone horn in my school’s band, one of my favorite pieces was “Variations of a Korean Folk Song” by John Barnes Chance, a ubiquitous piece among band circles at the time. Nearly the entire composition’s melody uses a pentatonic scale, and the impact of the song’s climax is probably heightened because the melody is played over a low brass line that finally introduces the 7th and 4th degrees of the scale, surprising the listener who by that point has grown accustomed to hearing only the five notes of the pentatonic scale. Really lovely.  

Traditional Chinese music utilizes the pentatonic scale, something American composer Alan Menken tapped into when composing songs for the Disney film, Mulan. The A section of the opening track, “Honor to us All,” is comprised solely of the pentatonic scale.

When I was a junior in high school, after I’d saved up my dishwashing money and skipped my high school’s homecoming dance to purchase by buddy’s older brother’s Peavey T40 bass guitar, I learned the familiar beginning notes to “My Girl,” the Temptations classic. Not only does the opening guitar riff use the pentatonic scale, the melody of the entire tune is comprised of only five notes.

Somewhere along the line my piano teacher Fred Tesch taught me the blues scale, and probably even intimated its association with the pentatonic scale, but it wasn’t until I was older that I truly understood the relationship. When I first learned the intro to Supertramp’s “Bloody Well Right,” it finally sunk in that the blues scale is essentially a major pentatonic scale starting on the 6th degree (which is simply called a minor pentatonic scale), plus one additional “blue” note. When Supertramp pianist Rick Davies plays his fabulous intro on the Wurlitzer, he’s primarily jamming on a G blues scale, though the song is in B-flat. The same technique is employed in Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke.” When I doubled the riff in my horn band years ago, I was well aware that I was doing the same thing Rick Davies had done in Supertramp: playing a major key’s relative minor blues scale (in this case a G-sharp blues scale, though the song is in the key of B).

Over the years, I dutifully took note, and even now when I’m soloing, I’m hopelessly tied to the pentatonic scale (I’m a pretty good keyboard player, but creative soloing is not exactly my forte).

Irving Berlin is famous for (among composing many great songs) preferring to play the black keys of a piano, and he had a transposing piano built so that he could always play in the key of F sharp.  Here he is demonstrating the invention.

It would be wrong to conclude that Berlin only played the black keys – far from it – but it’s nice to know that as the younger me was pounding out “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater,” I was playing the notes that Berlin favored. Not a bad way to begin a musical journey.

The Absence of Physical Engagement

I have a vivid recollection from my teenage years of observing a neighborhood couple seated on their front yard, using weed pullers to extract dandelions from their lawn. I remember looking at them with contempt and thinking, “If I ever consider weeding my lawn a day’s accomplishment, shoot me.” If I had flashed forward thirty years, I would have observed the 50-something version of me happily pulling weeds from his yard. In fact, I’m pretty sure if the fifteen-year-old me could see me today, he’d probably blow his brains out. But the thing is, I’m happy being the fifty something version of me, and tinkering in the yard or in my workshop is – for me – one of life’s simple pleasures. Sure, by the middle of August I want autumn to arrive and cajole my yard into dormancy, but the joys of spring are undeniable.

But a little yard work is a far cry from mankind’s roots. For most of us, the days of hunting, gathering, farming, cutting, chiseling and building are long gone. For the past several hundred years, we’ve done everything we can to delegate our active engagement with our natural surroundings to machines or to other people. I think of the stereotypical commercials from the 1950s geared toward housewives, touting the benefits of a vacuum cleaner or dishwasher and how much time will be freed up as a result, but of course the trend to free our time started long before the post-war years, and we’re all active participants.

Few of us grow our own food. Even fewer of us create our own fabric and sew our own clothing. Not many of us can build our own homes or the furniture and household items in it. And so what, right? Mankind has flourished largely as a result of the increased efficiency of specialization. If experts take care of many of our day-to-day activities, then we can become experts in some other activity, and society as a whole benefits.

But I do wonder what’s been lost along the way, and I wonder if there is any limit to our avoidance of manual and mental labor. Those of us with yards may no longer cut our lawns, plant flowers, lay down mulch, rake leaves or shovel our driveways or sidewalks. Others may have a cleaning service for their home’s interior. Some of us no longer shop for food or other items, having them delivered to our doors instead, and most of us outsource cooking to restaurants on a regular basis. Some hire nannies or daycares to look after their children and hire tutors to manage their kids’ homework or to prepare them for college entrance exams. We may have someone else managing our finances and preparing our taxes. We may also outsource teaching things like driving, playing an instrument, playing sports, etc. And while it might make great sense to hire a company to, say, pour concrete for our driveways or rewire our homes, many of us can’t install a ceiling fan, outlet, toilet or faucet. Even the easiest of activities like painting a room are often outsourced.

And billions of people are now living in urban environments that bear no resemblance to the natural environments that our ancestors tended to. Is there something innate in humans, some connection with the Earth that’s been lost as a result?

I imagine there are loads of anthropological studies on this subject, but I’ll be damned if I know the correct key words to search for them. I couldn’t find anything relevant when I searched for articles that apply to this blog entry. But here’s my hunch:

I believe that man’s evolution away from physical engagement results in a disengagement from and a loss of empathy for our fellow human beings, the environment, and Earth itself. I think there’s some primal need we have to engage with the ground we walk upon, the air we breathe, and the waters we sail, and in foregoing engagement with our environment, we are likely denying ourselves our most meaningful existence.

I know, I sound like fricking Henry David Thoreau from Walden, a book I tried to read three times as a young adult and hated it, never getting past more than a few chapters. I wonder now if it might speak to me.

Nevertheless, those of us who can afford to write and read this blog entry have likely achieved the goal that mankind set out centuries ago: loads of free time so that we can achieve great ends. I’ve always claimed that creativity required two things: time and silence. Agatha Christie once said, "I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.” After all, we probably don’t get Monet, Beethoven, Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hemingway, Martin Luther King, and The Beatles if they are busily tilling their farms for survival. 

On the other hand, long before Agatha Christie, the Bible’s book of Proverbs stated, “Idleness is the devil’s workshop,” and I think there’s something to this as well. Would an 18-year-old ever consider gunning down people in a Buffalo grocery store if he was tending to his crops?

Fortunately, most of us don’t go to such wicked lengths to fill our time. Instead, we play Wordl, watch gameshows and sports, read blogs, drink, snort and inject foreign substances, watch porn, get spoon-fed soundbites on social media, and happily believe whatever lies we’re told with nary a glimmer of critical thinking.

It just might be that using weed pullers to extract dandelions from your yard could be the cure that ails you.

Touring for Today's Musician

Last month I discussed the current state of new music (conclusion: it isn’t good, not because of the music, but because of nearly everything else), and I questioned how a smaller artist can financially justify touring. More specifically, I estimated how much the artist Sammy Rae and her amazing band might have earned at a show in Milwaukee that I attended last November. I concluded very little, if anything.

Right on cue, bassist and YouTuber Adam Neely posted a video this week on how his band, Sungazer, barely broke even on their recent tour of the West Coast. Neely is far more eloquent than I am, and I highly encourage anyone who wonders about how their favorite artists survive to check out this video. In it, Neely specifies the costs associated with his tour, some of which may surprise you. Neely discusses how important the size of the band is in determining the cost-effectiveness of touring. For Sungazer’s tour, they typically played with four musicians, and the fourth was sometimes a luxury they weren’t so sure they could afford. Compare that to Sammy Rae’s six-piece backing band; I have no idea how she was able to pull this off and whether any of her band made enough to justify being away from home and, presumably, away from their other gigging or teaching jobs that pay the bills.

A few years ago, touring was challenging enough for independent artists, but Neely highlights just how precarious such an endeavor is in the age of COVID, as his band had to postpone tour dates when two of its members contracted the virus. This took away from the bottom line, as it extended lodging requirements and added costs to its van rental and gas. There’s also the issue of insurance, and Neely points to a CBC article from last September that examines this issue.

What was most illuminating about the video for me were the negative comments Neely shared about people’s perceptions of how touring musicians “should” live: to-wit, destitute, sleeping in vans, unshowered, presumably living off of nothing but the thrill of playing music. Worse, many of these vitriolic viewpoints were from fellow musicians who, as Neely states, “had sacrificed personal comfort indignities to stretch thin budgets on the behalf of those who might exploit their labor” and were now eager to chastise those who have chosen to live the way most sane human beings live.

Neely concludes (I’ve edited his remarks for smoother reading): “Musicians are expected to struggle. It is part of the narrative. The idea of a bed to sleep in seem(s) especially controversial. But this DIY ethos metastasizes quickly into anti-labor rhetoric. and (in) relentlessly questioning the necessity of fair working conditions and compensation, the argument being made, effectively, is that living expenses are shameful and the idea of paying for labor is downright offensive.

“I would argue that live music has value. It is work. And those who do it deserves to do it with dignity, like anybody who works.”

Nicely said, Adam. Please consider subscribing to his channel.

Neely also refers to several other worthy reads, including the following:

• the band Pomplamoose’s balance sheet from its 2014 tour.

• Stereogum’s article, “Why Are Musicians Expected to be Miserable on Tour Just to Break Even?”

• If you have access, you can also check out Rolling Stone’s article that references some of the above, including the band Wednesday’s tweet about it’s appearance at South by Southwest Festival, which earned the band a net of $98.39.

I’ve been writing about music for the past couple of months. Next week I’m going to start addressing some other issues that have been on my mind, starting with the importance of physical labor for one’s well-being.