When famed rock producer Jack Douglas (Aerosmith, John Lennon, do you need any more names than that?) ventured into a bowling alley in Waukesha, WI on a fateful night back in 1976, he wasn't just jonesing to rent a pair of shoes. On the recommendation of a local acquaintance while visiting family in Wisconsin, Douglas was referred to Sunset Bowl to catch a regional rock band by the name of Cheap Trick.
Now, I'm not exactly sure of Douglas's mindset as he walked into the establishment, but one can guess that his expectations were, shall we say, modest. After all, while a few bowling alleys in the midwest were infamous musical destinations for fans and bands alike (Shula's in Niles, MI, for example), your average bowling alley tended to stick a cover band in the corner of the lounge you never knew was there and let the pins fall where they may.
So when Douglas dragged his jaw across the parking lot after having his head torn off by the crazed musical juggernaut that was Cheap Trick, one has to believe that seeing a band like that in place like that must have only added to the allure.
That he immediately thought to call his friend at Epic Records, Tom Werman, and tell him to get his ass to Wisco says a lot about a big-time record producer's mindset. After all, the Cheap Trick of 1975-76 was a decidedly not-ready-for-prime-time music act.
By that, we mean that many of their original tunes contained lyrical themes that spoke of serial killers and playground perverts while the antics that took place during those early club shows were as politically incorrect as they came and the band's fans loved every sick second of it.
To even think that any of this was something a major label might be looking for seems hilariously misguided in retrospect, but that was the world where Douglas lived at the time. If he'd been a tour promoter instead, for example, he'd have called somebody else entirely.
So, in a way, Douglas finding himself in Wisconsin at that exact moment was a stroke of fate that, had it not happened, would have not interrupted Cheap Trick's natural ascendance to greatness or, at the very least, notoriety.
What if Douglas had blown off the suggestion to visit a bowling alley and spent the night chatting with Aunt Betsy instead?
One has to believe that Cheap Trick, in their inimitably brash style, would have gone on playing any hole-in-the-wall bar that would have them, thereby continuing to build their regional rep by good old hard work and word-of-mouth and that major labels would have gone on ignoring the band for obvious reasons.
After all, what label in their right mind was going to go anywhere near a song called "The Ballad Of Richard Speck" or "He's A Whore"?
The most obvious answer is "A label that is going to immediately try to make said band look and sound more commercial."
In the case of Epic Records, it is almost as if Werman gave Douglas full license to make an honest, no-holds-barred Cheap Trick record, but that Werman fully intended to see to it that the next album would be Epic's version of the band - a decision from which the band never quite recovered.
After all, once the darkly subversive version of the band gave way to the corporate-friendly one just a few months into their contract, it is safe to say that all bets were off and that it would only be a matter of time before suits who had never played a note of music in their lives were telling the band which songs to record - all the while trying to keep a certain live album from ever seeing the light of day in the band's homeland.
Is this writer attempting to suggest that Epic Records was a bad fit for the band?
No, without an unsavory level of compromise on the band's part, ANY major label would have been a bad fit for the band.
See, the one thing that major labels do more than anything else is tinker with shit.
What's most infuriating is that, they tinker with the very things that make a band great in the first place. In the case of Cheap Trick, the one thing you don't tinker with is Rick Nielsen's head.
It is, after all, the very head from which all of the band's humorously sinister songs and campy stage hi-jinx originated and now Epic Records was filling it with doubt and bad suggestions ("Change that song title", "Write us a hit!").
That, my friends, is how a band that gave us "Elo Kiddies" and "Daddy Should Have Stayed In High School" wound up also giving us "Wild Wild Women" and "She's Got Motion" with the same producer eight years later.
While I could ramble on about what might have become of the band if they'd been left to develop naturally and sign to a label of their choosing, I choose instead to express my continued amazement that Epic Records even released the band's first record at all, knowing how they must have been holding their tongue the whole time.
At the time of its release, yours truly was a wee lad of eleven, but even I had the ability to take one look at the album cover and dismiss it for any number of reasons. Admittedly, my initial impression was that it was a comedy album of some sort, which kept me from discovering the album for another few years. Had I bought the album, I suspect that my young ears at the time might have been incapable of grasping what was, in truth, a very adult album.
That same part of me, however, wishes Epic would have left Cheap Trick alone to keep making adult records for a crowd that would have eventually found them once our musical palettes became nuanced enough to appreciate the band's masterful blend of sophistication and subversion.
Ah, what could have been.
Tags:
epic mistake