The Story Behind The Song: Understanding ‘Surrender’ by Cheap Trick
It’s safe to say that alternative rock would be very different if it weren’t for power pop masters Cheap Trick. Bridging punk and heavy metal with the melodies of 1960s guitar pop, their anthemic style provided a blueprint for many future artists, with prominent subsequent acts such as Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins citing their brilliance. Whilst ‘I Want You to Want Me’ and ‘Dream Police’ rank amongst their most vital songs, it is 1978’s ‘Surrender’ that remains particularly resonant.
Notably, the song is a highlight of the late 1970s and early 1980s and is one of the ultimate teen anthems from this era because of the way it describes the teenage baby boomer narrator’s relationship with their GI Generation parents. However, despite this era-specific character, the discrepancy between parent and child can be attributed to any generation. Given the obvious differences from their parents, it was particularly effective with a Generation X audience.
In ‘Surrender’, the narrator’s mother warns him about the girls he will meet in life and urges him to stay away from them because of potential venereal diseases. She relays to him a rumour about “a soldier’s [penis] falling off” as a result of “some Indonesian junk that’s going around”.
A particularly resonant angle for those with conservative parents, things are taken to another level when the mother’s supposed truth and expertise are endorsed by the father. He reminds the narrator that she served with the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in the Philippines during the Second World War, which amazes the young man, who had been led to believe that the WAC only recruited “old maids”, but “Mommy isn’t one of those”, so that’s pretty cool.
Interestingly, the line “now I had heard the WACs recruited old maids for the war” doesn’t make much sense. That’s because the original lyrics were deemed far too obscene and offensive, according to Songfacts. They were: “Now I had heard the WACs were either old maids, d***s or w****s.”
After the section discussing the WAC, in the chorus, the narrator describes his parents as being hipper than people of his age would believe, as to them, there’s no way that parents could be in any way cool. He sings: “Mommy’s alright, Daddy’s alright / They just seem a little weird / Surrender, surrender / But don’t give yourself away”. This point is later reinforced after he discovers his parents “rolling numbers” on the sofa while listening to his Kiss records, “Rolling numbers, rock-and-rolling, got my Kiss records out”. As well as being a surreal image, the mention of Kiss was intended to thank the New York band, who had been early proponents of Cheap Trick and given them support slots.
When speaking to Rolling Stone in 2004, the ‘Surrender’ songwriter Rick Nielsen explained his secret to writing such an impactful track. He elucidated that he achieved such tangible excellence on this number by putting himself in the boots of a teenager. He told the publication: “I [had] to go back and put myself in the head of a 14-year-old.”
Elsewhere, Nielsen told Gary Graff in 1982 that he used his own life for inspiration when writing ‘Surrender’. Displaying how his parents didn’t fit the typical description, his family owned a music shop with both mother and father opera singers and a symphony and choir director. Additionally, Nielsen’s mother wasn’t in the WAC, but his Aunt Ruth was. “Growing up, it was like, ‘Oh, there’s mom wearing a Viking helmet and horns – again,” Nielsen told Graff. “That was just normal to me.”
“Growing up, every kid I knew, their parents were weird,” Nielsen recalled to Uproxx. “Whether they were hippies or straight or religious nuts or whatever, every parent is weird. ‘Hey, you want to come over to my house?’ ‘No, your parents are weird. Do you want to come to my place?’ No, no, your parents are weird!’ You’ve got to know how to stretch the truth with your parents. You’ve got to listen to them, but you don’t always have to heed it. That’s ‘Surrender’: Don’t give yourself away. Don’t turn into one of them.”
Later, when speaking to Blender, Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos expressed that ‘Surrender’ had been a song for years before the quartet released it. He said: “We had that track back in 1975. We used to rehearse in the basement of Rick [Nielsen] ‘s dad’s music shop on Seventh Avenue in Rockford, Illinois. As soon as I heard it, I thought it was a really interesting lyric.”
Meanwhile, during a conversation with Guitar Player, Nielsen explained how he penned the 1978 classic. He said he wrote it on an unplugged electric guitar in his bedroom, with the lyrics emerging in a “kind of stream of consciousness” as he played along. “I had a rhythm thing going on,” he told the publication. “Then I started singing to myself, ‘Mother told me, yes she told me, I’d meet girls like you.’ It kind of sounded like a nursery rhyme to me, only it was a rock nursery rhyme for somebody in high school wearing a leather jacket.”
Providing further detail about the origins of ‘Surrender’ in the same Blender conversation as Carlos, Nielsen affirmed that his friends also provided inspiration for his lyrical content, as everyone’s parents seemed weird at 14. He also revealed that there’s a subtle reference to a classic Shirelles hit included in the track.
He said: “I used to hear my friends saying they thought their parents were strange. The first thing I got was the opening of the chorus: ‘Mommy’s all right, daddy’s all right.’ It just rolled off at one sitting. Those opening lines, ‘Mother told me, yes, she told me I’d meet girls like you.’ That’s advice to the lovelorn and obviously inspired by the old Shirelles hit, ‘Mama said that there’d be days like this’. It’s a good way to start a song if you can make it go with a chord progression.”
‘Surrender’ is also memorable for its impactful key change. Per the accounts of Nielsen, the track begins in B flat before sitting on B sharp for two verses and then changes to C around 2:15 as frontman Robin Zander sings: “Whatever happened to all this season’s losers of the year…” Another classic aspect is the spacey keyboard sound heard throughout the song. Instead of the notes being played manually, as they appear on the recording, it was done on an arpeggiator.
During the chat with Guitar Player in 2020, Nielsen informed the interviewer that he played “the first Orange amp ever built” on the recording – a momentous point, given how ubiquitous and important the brand is to rock musicians today. He said: “There are two tracks of me on guitar and one of Robin [Zander]. I played a Les Paul through an Orange amp. I had the first Orange amp ever built – it had two 12s in it. The thing had a lot of punch. Robin played his blonde Rickenbacker like the one John Lennon used. We got some good guitar tracks on that song.”
Regarding the mixing, he continued: “Because of time constraints, I wasn’t around for the mixing. I actually heard it over the phone in an airport. There’s that old line – ‘We’ll fix it in the mix’ – and with this one, it was like, ‘Uh-oh…’ There’s some keyboards on the song, and I thought they were way too loud. Eventually, it got sorted out.”
In the same interview, Nielsen outlined how ‘Surrender’ positively affected the band moving forward. “The live version of ‘Surrender’ changed things for us,” the guitarist said. “Now we weren’t just an opening band. We were played on the radio all the time. It was tremendously exciting.” Not surprisingly, he said, “I still love to play the song live. People laugh, they cheer, they sing along. I never get tired of that.”