CHEAP TRICK
at the House of Blues Anaheim, July 2001
Last night was the weirdest -- but still great -- Cheap Trick show I've ever seen. For one thing, they played three brand new, unreleased songs, which were all good, and the final one was this really beautiful, creepy, lightly plucked guitar ballad, an instantly striking song, and also very experimental and different sounding than anything they've ever done.That was one thing. The other was that Bun E. Carlos didn't play! They came out onstage with some kid on drums, who we thought was the roadie until we started to wonder, "What happened to Bun. E?" They played a couple songs then Rick explained that Bun E. was about to have back surgery and wouldn't be around for a while, and so they were using Rick Nielsen's teenage son, Zax, who was good, but it was SO strange not seeing Mr. Bun. And at the end of the show, Chad from the Red Hot Chili Peppers came out onstage as a guest, replacing Zax, and make a big goof of himself, overbashing the cymbals, getting the rhythms wrong, showboating . . . why does Rick Nielsen let the lamest celebrities (Smashing Pumpkins, etc.) have the honor of playing onstage with Ch'Trick? Oy vey!
And at one point, Tom Petersson, who looked really haggard or wasted on hard drugs or sick, but still playing great the whole night, wandered offstage for a few minutes, which the others didn't even notice at first. Finally they had to call for him to come back. Where did he go?
It was bizarre in many other ways. You know how one of the band's traditions is that they throw a Kiss LP into the audience when Robin sings the "got my Kiss records out" lyric in "Surrender"? Well, this time, Rick didn't toss out a Kiss LP!! It was some Cheap Trick vinyl!?
And finally, I must mention the audience. There were about six fights. The audience were complete morons, pushing each other, getting drunk, the bouncers tentative to intervene. One guy wanted to fight me, and he later got thrown out when some other guy finally did start shoving and punching the boor back. It was very stupid and bizarre and not like any cheap trick show I'd ever seen. Of course we WERE in Orange County. But on the other hand, we were inside part of the sterile Disney megapolis, so it didn't make sense that people were fighting so much, including after the show, a drunk crazy girl who was assaulting the bouncer and several bystanders cuz she wanted to get backstage and the bouncer wouldn't let her!
When Rick would throw picks into the crowd -- another tradition -- people would fight over them too passionately. When he'd throw just a single pick out randomly, about 10-20 people in the area would all bend over furiously looking for it, for MINUTES AT A TIME, bent over at the collective waist like they were gardening, and meanwhile the band would be playing on unnoticed, bemused. At one point a pick came skidding across the floor or bounced off something and landed right under my show, just as my foot was coming down. This guy immediately starts trying to pry my foot off the ground, like I'm some inanimate object and when I tried to move away, he started grabbing me further up the legs and groping. Since I didn't even care about the pick, I maliciously kicked it away into the densely packed crowd where the zealout couldn't reach and then set about using my arms and angry voice to disentangle his greedy arms from shins! It was that kind of crowd, perhaps the stupidest, collectively, crowd I've ever been a part of. I was groped by a lot of men it seems, like the guy who wanted to fight me, He kept pawing me from behind or shoving me out of the way -- except there was nowhere to go, we were all so tightly packed -- and claimed these imaginary girls were shoving him. He was basically doing it to everyone around him, looking for a fight or some physical contact one way or the other. It was bad because you couldn't just avoid it and it took forever for the bouncer literally five feet away to notice it and do something. I eventually moved a few people lengths away with great difficult, never really getting close to Dennis. We were withing seeing distance, very close to the stage, but so packed with people that all we could do was smile ruefully at each other.
Now all this would make it seem that last night was a horrible concert, right? Dennis Carlin's correctly described it as "Cheap Trick on THE JERRY SPRINGER SHOW."
But it WAS a fucking great show, like every Cheap Trick concert I've seen so far. They're all different, with different set lists, wildly varying venues (I've seen 'em at the county fair, on the Santa Monica Pier in a tiny club, in an outdoor parking lot in Hollywood, at Disneyworld in Orlando Florida, etc. Dennis has seen 'em about 50 times, including once when Rick Nielsen threw his guitar into the water at Tom Sawyer's island at the Anaheim Disneyland, and the stern Disney staff made the roadies fish it out. In some ways, the band's actually getting BETTER in the last few years. So what was so great about this House of Blues, Anaheim clone, performance?
Well, for one thing, Cheap Trick did put on an extra long set last night. And don't forget they debuted several brand new songs, and one was an immediate classic. And they trudged into "Downed," which happens to be my personal favorite song. And they threw in "He's a Whore" near the very end, which I don't believe I'd ever seen 'em do live before.
They did a lot of obscure stuff, like something from WOKE UP WITH A MONSTER, which Rick anticlimactically introduced as the band's least favorite album; nonetheless the song they played was really multifaceted and weird and unusual and came off well, like everything really, even the stuff that the annoying Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer fucked up.
Dennis told me later that he kept wanting to jump onstage and play those songs right. If there's one guy who SHOULDA been up there, it's Dennis, who's been playing like Bun E. Carlos for all of his adult and teenage life. We were so close to the stage, but so far . . . .
Other songs I remember: "Goodnight Now," "She's Tight," "If You Want My Love," "I Want You to Want Me," "You're All Talk," "Big Eyes," "Stiff Competition," "Dream Police," those three brand-new ones, "Downed," "Never Had a Lot to Lose," "I Can't Take It" (I think), and many more.
It probably doesn't matter, but I keep thinking it did/does.
Falling James
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