Cheap Trick: ‘We got asked to play for the Republicans – we would have got swastika guitars made’

On Friday 8 April, Cheap Trick took to the stage at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Guitarist Rick Nielsen, singer Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson performed with their original drummer Bun E Carlos for the first time in six years, rattling through hits including I Want You to Want Me, Dream Police and Surrender. It was due recognition, at last, for one of America’s most peculiar groups: on the face of it, a conventional rock’n’roll band, all crunchy guitars and sweet harmonies, but beneath the surface a group more interested in chronicling the perversities and oddness of America than their only US No 1, The Flame, would suggest.

Two days before the ceremony, at a chic, old-money hotel in Manhattan, Nielsen, Zander and Petersson are displaying that perversity. They are accompanied not by Carlos, but by Nielsen’s son Daxx. Though Carlos remains an official member of the group, a quarter-owner of its name, he does not tour or record with them. Nielsen Jr is Cheap Trick’s actual drummer, both live and on their new album, Bang, Zoom, Crazy … Hello. It would also be fair to say, no matter how much dignity the trio exhibit in Carlos’s company at the Hall of Fame show, they are not much looking forward to seeing him.

“He was a wet blanket, mean spirited and a jerk,” Nielsen says, unprompted.

“I don’t have to worry about flying projectiles coming my way on stage,” Zander says.

“We had a great long career, and to be miserable because of one person …” Nielsen continues. “To have one person saying, ‘No, no, no.’ Who needs that crap? I don’t need it when I’m 16 and I don’t need it now. Screw him. That’s the way it is. We have to see him one more time, but he made our lives miserable.”

But he’ll be playing with you at the Hall of Fame?

“I hope not. I mean yes,” Nielsen says. “It’s not our choice. But he’s part of our history. We’re diplomatic enough to do it.”

If this is Cheap Trick being diplomatic, God only knows what they’re like when they say what they really think.

Nielsen may be 67, Petersson 65 and Zander 63, but they are as in love with rock’n’roll as they were 50 years ago. A passing question about the records they loved as kids provokes a long digression into the “nonsense” of the US charts before the British invasion, about the splendour of the Orlons, about tuning into AM radio on a Sunday night to hear a station 1,000 miles away playing the latest British hits – you could only get the signal on a cloudy night – that you never heard elsewhere on American radio.

“In England it seemed like you could have Sabre Dance at No 1, then No 2 would be some polka, then some opera,” Petersson says. “It was the craziest radio you ever heard, and it was interesting even if you didn’t like it.”

Nielsen and Petersson reminisce about coming over to England to see bands in 1968 (“We stayed in Bayswater, at the Inverness Court Hotel,” Nielsen remembers. “You had to put shillings in to have heat”) and catching Jethro Tull at the Marquee. Nielsen bemoans the fact that the Who – “the greatest live band ever” – have never expunged what he considers to be their earliest, wimpiest recordings from the world (“If you were in a porno movie, you’d pay money to get rid of it. Same with the Who. It’s that bad”).

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Cheap Trick’s classic lineup came together in 1974, by which time the members had already been making music in various bands in the Chicago suburbs for several years – one of Nielsen and Petersson’s groups, the Grim Reapers, had opened for Otis Redding at his final show in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1967. They were sick of the flabby, self-indulgent style of American rock, and wanted to make sharp, taut, hard rock with big hooks in the style of the UK bands they loved – Slade, Bowie, Gary Glitter (“We know he’s in prison, but we loved his records,” Zander observes), T Rex, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band and especially the Move. Nielsen, in particular, was a dedicated Anglophile who paid $100 a year in the 60s to have Melody Maker airmailed to his Illinois home – he pulls out his phone to show me a picture of a letter he had printed in Melody Maker asking about Roy Wood’s bass sound, to which Wood had provided an answer. He still sounds excited about this near-50-year-old event.

The nascent Cheap Trick toured the midwest incessantly. “We did cover songs, Slade or whatever. Songs we liked, not songs people necessarily wanted to hear,” Petersson says. “We did our own songs, too, but we did four or five sets a night and we didn’t have that much material. But it seemed to people like it was all ours, because they’d never heard Alex Harvey.”

The group didn’t just sound distinctive – imagine ELO if Jeff Lynne had been obsessed with power chords and social alienation instead of orchestras and spaceships and you’ve got Cheap Trick – they looked it, too.

Petersson and Zander were the long-haired heartthrobs on the front of the records, the other two were the oddballs on the back. Carlos, in shirt, tie, little round specs, and with a fag always dangling from his mouth, looked like a chainsmoking small-town accountant. “People would say to us – they would always say this – ‘Great group, but when is your drummer gonna get with it?’ We liked that,” Petersson says. Nielsen, gurning in a baseball cap with the brim upturned, likely wearing some ghastly, garish cardigan or tank top, looked like a proto-Pee Wee Herman dashing around the stage. “I never wanted to be Keith Richards or Jimmy Page,” he says.

“I did,” Zander interrupts.

“I was never going to be that guy,” Nielsen continues, “And I didn’t want to be something I wasn’t. I’m kind of a goony guy, a dweeb or a geek. I never liked guys who just stood there, but when I see videos of myself, sometimes I did wish I just stood there – because it’s irritating [the frantic dashing around], I know it is.”

Success was far from instant. Though their constant touring had built a solid live following, their first three records did not sell. Then, in April 1978, they went to Japan, where they had heard that they had fans. It turned out that they had a lot. They emerged from their plane, having flown economy, last out, to discover 5,000 screaming teenagers. They recorded a pair of shows for release in Japan, only to find that everywhere wanted the Cheap Trick at Budokan live album. Copies were being imported to the US, I Want You to Want Me was all over the radio, but it still took their label four months from the Japanese release to put the records out back home. Suddenly, they were rock stars.

“It sounds ridiculous,” Petersson says, “but for me one of the first things [about stardom] was thinking, ‘This is great – now I can go into the bookstore and buy any magazine or book I want without thinking about it. Before it used to be, ‘I can’t afford this, I’ll have to read it here – this is $1.98 – that’s four meals.’”

Since then, Cheap Trick have been up and they have been down. The 80s were unkind to them, until their label made them record a pretty wretched power ballad titled The Flame, which set them up for a second lease of life. A third came in the 90s, when kids who had grown up listening to albums such as Budokan, Heaven Tonight and Dream Police started forming groups of their own. Smashing Pumpkins would often cover their songs, Pavement and Green Day hailed them, Guided by Voices toured with them, and so Cheap Trick assumed their rightful position as the godfathers of weird US alt rock.

They’re still at it on Bang, Zoom, Crazy … Hello, which – curiously – finds them back in the majors after more than 20 years outside, thanks to Scott Borchetta – the man who made Taylor Swift a star – signing them to his Big Machine label.

Cheap Trick’s weirdness still goes unrecognised by those who don’t listen closely. Some people do not notice how odd it is that a string-laden pop-rock song such as Dream Police is about being persecuted by imaginary men inside the brain, or they just hear the chorus of Surrender and miss the lyrics about a kid who is left alienated by his parents taking drugs and having sex on the couch while listening to Kiss records.

Maybe the Republican party are among those who hear the hooks, not the horror that lurks inside the very best Cheap Trick songs. “The Republican National Committee called our office and offered us $100,000 to play at their convention in Cleveland [this summer],” Zander says. “We turned it down. Then we had second thoughts. Maybe we should have accepted it – but we would all have got swastika guitars made.”

“We thought better of it,” Petersson adds, smiling a little.

Bang, Zoom, Crazy … Hello is out now on Big Machine.