Things You Might NOT Know About Cheap Trick

There are certain things you don't need to explain to people from Rockford.

We know what a sock monkey is. We know why there's a giant Symbol sitting by the river. We know Rockford used to make a lot of screws. And we certainly don't need anybody to tell us Cheap Trick is from Rockford.

Cheap Trick may be the most internationally famous thing Rockford ever produced that wasn't manufactured in a factory. The band has sold millions of records, played thousands of concerts, entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and made At Budokan, one of the most famous live rock albums ever recorded.

You already know that stuff.

So let's try something harder.

Here are some things you might NOT know about Cheap Trick.

1. Cheap Trick wasn't really the beginning

Before Cheap Trick there was Fuse. Before Fuse there were still more Rockford bands.

Rick Nielsen played with a local group called the Grim Reapers, while Tom Petersson was associated with another Rockford band, Toast and Jam. In 1967, members of those groups came together as Fuse. Fuse actually got signed to Epic Records and released an album in 1969.

It didn't make them stars.

Fuse eventually relocated to Philadelphia and evolved into another band with the wonderfully cheerful name Sick Man of Europe. After that adventure ran its course, Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos returned to Rockford and started putting together what became Cheap Trick.

In other words, Cheap Trick wasn't four guys who suddenly decided to form a band and became famous. It was the result of years of Rockford bands forming, breaking up, recombining, leaving town, coming home and trying again.

There's probably a lesson in there somewhere.

2. Robin Zander wasn't Cheap Trick's original singer

This one might surprise casual fans.

When Cheap Trick first came together, Robin Zander wasn't standing at the microphone. The band's original lead singer was Randy "Xeno" Hogan.

Zander had actually been approached earlier and declined. Hogan fronted the early version of Cheap Trick before leaving, and Zander finally joined in 1974.

It's difficult now to imagine Cheap Trick without Zander's voice, but for a brief period, that version of Cheap Trick existed.

Somewhere in the multiverse there is probably a Cheap Trick greatest-hits album sung by Xeno Hogan.

3. The name supposedly came from watching Slade

One of the best stories in Cheap Trick history involves British glam-rock band Slade.

According to the band's oft-repeated origin story, the future members of Cheap Trick were watching Slade perform when Tom Petersson remarked that the band used every cheap trick in the book.

A band name was born.

Cheap Trick adopted the name in August 1973.

Considering Rick Nielsen's later stage wardrobe, checkerboards, guitar picks, novelty guitars and general philosophy that anything worth doing is worth doing with five guitar necks, the name turned out to be remarkably appropriate.

4. Three members went to Guilford

Here's a particularly Rockford fact.

Rick Nielsen, Tom Petersson and Bun E. Carlos all attended Guilford High School. Robin Zander was the geographic outlier: he attended Harlem High School.

And Guilford looked considerably different then. The school that now sits in the middle of a heavily developed part of northeast Rockford was surrounded by cornfields when the future members of Cheap Trick attended in the 1960s.

Somewhere in those cornfields were three-fourths of a future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band.

5. Bun E. Carlos and Rick Nielsen's friendship reportedly started because Rick was throwing rocks at Bun's sister

Rock and roll friendships have begun in recording studios, nightclubs and backstage dressing rooms.

This one apparently began with projectile geology.

According to accounts of Bun E. Carlos's early life, he and Nielsen became friends in 1963 after Bun's sister came home from school and reported that Rick Nielsen had been throwing rocks at her.

That is an extremely Rockford origin story.

6. Bun E. Carlos bought his first drum kit from Rick Nielsen's family

It gets better.

When Carlos became interested in drums as a teenager, his mother bought him a drum kit for his 14th birthday.

The store?

Ralph Nielsen Music House in Rockford, owned by Rick Nielsen's father.

Years before Cheap Trick existed, the Nielsen family was therefore involved in putting drumsticks into the hands of the kid who would eventually sit behind Cheap Trick's drum kit.

Rockford can sometimes be a very small town disguised as a medium-sized city.

7. Bun E. Carlos had already made a record as a Rockford teenager

Before Cheap Trick, Carlos played in a local band called The Pagans.

The Pagans released a 45 featuring a cover of the Beatles' "Good Day Sunshine" backed with "I Can Only Give You Everything." According to biographical accounts, the record received airplay on WROK in Rockford and WCFL in Chicago and sold around 1,500 copies through local record stores.

And in 1967, The Pagans participated in a Battle of the Bands at Rockford's Sherwood Lodge.

One of their opponents?

Rick Nielsen's Grim Reapers.

Cheap Trick was apparently assembling itself before anybody realized it.

8. Rick Nielsen wasn't originally just "the guitar player"

Nielsen's identity is now so connected to guitars that this seems almost impossible.

But in Fuse, Nielsen served as a keyboard player and second guitarist. He didn't fully become the Rick-Nielsen-as-lead-guitarist figure we recognize today until Cheap Trick came together.

Which means somewhere in Cheap Trick's evolutionary tree is keyboard-player Rick Nielsen.

Sadly, there appears to have been no five-neck keyboard.

9. Rick bought one of his famous guitars in Rockford for $65

Nielsen's guitar collection became legendary, but one of the great stories goes back to Rockford in 1965.

He found a 1955 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop at a Rockford store called A Bookstore.

Price:

$65.

He still had the guitar decades later.

Nielsen also bought a 1951 Telecaster for $70. That guitar would eventually be played by Robin Zander during the At Budokan performances.

There are probably people reading this who remember when you could walk into a Rockford shop and find instruments like that.

Please don't tell the rest of us what you sold them for in 1974.

We don't want to know.

10. Rick Nielsen helped put some very famous guitars into some very famous hands

Nielsen wasn't merely accumulating guitars. He was buying and trading vintage instruments before guitar collecting became the enormous business it is today.

Among the more remarkable stories: Nielsen sold a 1959 Les Paul to Jeff Beck in 1968 after Beck's guitar had been damaged, and Nielsen later sold a left-handed 1960 Les Paul to Paul McCartney.

Imagine having enough legendary guitars pass through your hands that selling one to a Beatle becomes merely another story.

11. Cheap Trick helped make Hamer guitars famous

The connection between Cheap Trick and Hamer is much deeper than simply Rick Nielsen playing their guitars.

Nielsen knew Paul Hamer from the Illinois vintage-guitar world and became one of the company's earliest and most visible supporters. He acquired some of Hamer's earliest instruments and then began challenging the company with increasingly ridiculous ideas.

Checkerboard guitar?

Sure.

Five-neck guitar?

Why not?

A double-neck guitar shaped like Rick Nielsen himself?

Apparently somebody had to do it.

Cheap Trick didn't just use unusual guitars. Nielsen became part of the creative culture that produced them.

12. The five-neck guitar started as a joke

Before the famous five-neck Hamer existed, Nielsen had a stage routine in which he would hang several guitars around his neck simultaneously.

He'd play one, discard it, then move on to the guitar underneath.

Eventually a thought occurred to him:

Why not just make one guitar with all the necks?

Hamer constructed the original orange five-neck in 1981 by cutting apart five Hamer guitar bodies and joining them together. Nielsen wanted different sounds and configurations available on the same monstrous instrument, including a 12-string and fretless neck.

Nielsen had even contemplated a six-neck guitar that would rotate like a roulette wheel.

He abandoned that idea after ZZ Top started using spinning guitars because he didn't want people thinking he'd copied them.

There is a sentence you don't get to write very often.

13. Tom Petersson helped invent the 12-string bass

Rick Nielsen wasn't the only Cheap Trick member pushing instrument design into strange territory.

Tom Petersson became closely associated with the 12-string bass, an instrument he helped develop with Hamer.

Instead of the normal four strings, Petersson's instrument essentially paired each bass string with additional octave strings, producing the enormous, almost orchestral bass sound that became part of Cheap Trick's musical identity.

So one of rock music's strangest guitars and one of its strangest basses both emerged from the same band from Rockford.

Naturally.

14. Cheap Trick once played Rockford's Riverview Ice House at something called "Disco '77"

Yes.

Cheap Trick.

Disco.

On April 2, 1977, Cheap Trick headlined a WROK event at Rockford's Riverview Ice House called Disco '77.

Their debut album had just been released that year.

It's a nice reminder that history rarely looks like history while it's happening. Sometimes the future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band is simply playing the local ice rink at something called Disco '77.

15. One of the great Rockford concerts happened at the Armory

By 1979, things had changed considerably.

Cheap Trick returned home for a July 4 concert at the Rockford Armory.

Also on the bill:

AC/DC and Molly Hatchet.

Cheap Trick had gone from grinding through Midwestern clubs to international fame, but they came back to Rockford with one of the most formidable rock bills imaginable.

Anybody who attended that show now possesses one of the better "Yeah, I was there" cards available to a Rockford resident.

16. The Midway Theater became part of Cheap Trick history

Here's another piece of downtown Rockford embedded in the band's story.

In 1997, Cheap Trick used the historic Midway Theater to film the video for "Say Goodbye." Rick Nielsen also performed an electric concerto there with the Rockford Symphony Orchestra.

That's one of the things I love about Cheap Trick's relationship with Rockford. The band's history isn't confined to a plaque saying CHEAP TRICK WAS FROM HERE.

It's scattered all over town.

Schools. Bars. Music stores. The Armory. The Ice House. The Midway. Places that disappeared and places still standing.

Cheap Trick Is Part of the Geography

That's probably the thing outsiders don't completely understand.

Cheap Trick isn't merely a famous band whose biography happens to list "Rockford, Illinois" as its place of origin.

For people here, Cheap Trick exists in the geography.

You can drive past the schools they attended. You can find buildings where they played before most of the world knew who they were. Rick Nielsen found guitars in Rockford shops that became part of rock history. Bun E. Carlos bought his first drums from Nielsen's family. Their teenage bands competed against each other before Cheap Trick even existed.

Then those kids from Rockford went out into the world.

Japan went crazy for them. At Budokan became a landmark live album. "I Want You to Want Me" became one of those songs almost everybody knows whether they own a Cheap Trick record or not. Eventually the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came calling.

But follow the story backward far enough and you keep ending up in the same place.

Rockford, Illinois.