Cheap Trick at Potawatomi Casino
Cheap Trick’s most endearing quality has long been its willingness to play anywhere at any time. Whether it’s the local arena or the neighborhood bowling alley, Rockford’s finest will forever be the world’s greatest bar band, priding itself on bringing the same level of showmanship and crunchy British Invasion-style songcraft to any setting. Cheap Trick’s recording career has gone up and down since its late-’70s heyday, but the band’s enduring greatness has always been evident onstage. All you have to do is open your ears (and your hands, so you can catch one of Rick Nielsen’s discarded guitar picks) to appreciate it.
Cheap Trick sounded reliably loud and tight Thursday night at Potawatomi Casino, where it opened a 12-show run of Dream Police performances, where the band is running through its most commercially successful studio album in its entirety, backed by a 25-piece orchestra. Cheap Trick was so loud that it drowned out the string section for much of the two-hour performance—not an altogether bad thing, considering that all the extra instrumentation seemed counterintuitive to the band’s strengths as a live unit. While the sheer magnitude of the sound coming from the stage was considerable when it all gelled, like on “Gonna Raise Hell” or the still-frightening “The Ballad Of TV Violence,” Cheap Trick at its best is still just four guys playing with the amps cranked into the red.
One of those original guys, drummer Bun E. Carlos, is sadly missing from these Potawatomi Casino shows, as he’s still in the midst of an extended hiatus from the band. But while the absence of Carlos sitting behind the drums left a sizeable hole in Cheap Trick’s classic look, it didn’t affect the sound thanks to the able timekeeping of Rick’s son Daxx Nielsen, who was joined by his brother Miles in the gaggle of backing musicians. All parties involved pulled off the Dream Police material beautifully, though the second half of the show was marred a bit by wanderings into the darker corners of Cheap Trick’s catalog, particularly the band’s limp cover of “Don’t Be Cruel.”
With so many wonderful originals to draw from, why waste time with that? (C’mon, you’ve got “Oh Candy” just lying there!) While we’re on the subject of wasting time, it’s possible that the multimedia elements of these performances—including videos about the making of Dream Police and Cheap Trick’s place in pop culture—will come off better once the kinks get ironed out in later shows. But on Thursday they were superfluous momentum killers; honestly, pointing out the inclusion of “If You Want My Love” on the Joe Dirt soundtrack does nothing to fortify Cheap Trick’s legacy. Cheap Trick’s live show is the band’s legacy.
