Pushkin. Before we get started, let's talk about Pushnick. Pushnick is a subscription program available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Subscriptions members will get access to bonus content like extended versions of Our Beastie Boys and Brian Eno episodes. You'll also get ad free listening to many of your favorite podcasts like Pubbishnist, History, Cautionary Tales, The Happiness Lab, and Ours Broken Record. You can try it for free for seven days. Sign up for Pushnick and Apple podcast subscriptions. Rick Nielsen is best known as Cheap Tricks, lead guitarist and mains songwriter, the band that helped popularize power pop in the late seventies with songs like Surrender and I Want You To Want Me, precursors to the pop punk explosion in the nineties with bands like Green Day in Blink one eighty two. In June, Cheap Trick released their twentieth studio album, In Another World. It's chock full of Rick Nielsen's monster riffs that recall their glory days in the nineteen seventies. On today's episode, Bruce held Them talks to Rick Nielsen about Cheap Trick's origin story while Nielsen fiddles around on electric guitar and samples riffs from the new album. Nielsen also talks about how he was hired to bring a hard rock sound to John Lennon's final album with Yoko, Double Fantasy, and what it was like working with the Beatles legendary producer George Martin. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Bruce had them with cheap tricks. Rick Nielsen, we're gonna talk about In Another World, which is your new album. It sounds like you guys were having fun making this album. Well, I think we were. I think we do. Just sounds really kind of joyful and fun. That's kind of the idea. I mean, we make records for ourselves. I mean, we don't have a manager that hangs over us or a producer. That's here's what we're gonna do. We got this going in the record label of BMG's but not Fabulous. I mean they're so fabulous that that they don't bother us. And it's like it's the perfect record label, the first one we've ever had like that. It's like, it's pretty cool. So what's writing like? Are you on a bus? Are you in a hotel and you just pick up your guitar. It's kind of how we all did it. I mean I used to write one hundred percent of the stuff. We just got. Somebody's got an idea and that sounds If it sounds interesting, then we'll go for it. Now, you just picked up a guitar, which is not a surprise because you own how many guitars? Now, do you own about five hundred? Well, I've owned about two thousand instruments. But I've been around for a long time and I've traded. I've traded stuff, I had stuff, I broke stuff, I gave stuff away. I mean, I've got a guitar, a real guitar, in almost every hard rocket around the world. Yeah. So while you've got the guitar in your hand, tell me about writing the first single, which is Summer looks good on you. I think we had a title first seemed like a good idea. Listen, it could be a summer song, you know. So yeah, it comes to summer. Yeah, that's that's that one. That's it. Yeah, because we had two of that came out about the same time that we were doing Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Uh. You know, it's like how we wrote the Parson, we did the deeper the B flat sounds kind of weird in there, but yeah, that was some stuff that we like. When we did a tax Men and Stiff competition, the same thing. I mean, I just kind of like that. That sounds yeah thing, and it sounds different every time. And we use chords that a lot of people don't use. You know, it's like over and over again. Yeah, well and this the song is in E, right, isn't it. Uh well, the chorus is in D and the versus A. Yeah. There you go listening to that and I hadn't really thought of it before. It sounds a lot like Peter Townsend to me. We hit the chords equally hard. Was he an influence on you? Oh yeah? I mean it Loves Who was the best live band ever. You know, I played with them, opened for them when when Keith Moon was still wrong and what was that like? It was great? You know, It's like because we'd read a bomb and actually we knew their songs. We opened for him at Majestic Hills in Late Geneva, Wisconsin in nineteen sixty eight, two weeks after we'd opened for Frank Zapp and the mothers and Wow, yeah, you know you were the band when you came out that everybody liked. The heavy metal guys liked you, the new wave guys liked you. What's not to like? Well, what's not? But you just appealed to such a wide group of like everybody could agree on Cheap Trick, even though if they disagreed about everything else. It seems like that. I mean I heard that from a lot of people. I mean, you know, like the Ramons like cheap Trick, you know, And Joey did a number of our songs. He the Southern Girls. He came to see us, and he's like, you know, he's from New York. We're from the Chicago area. We never, you know, really saw them unless we went to see him, and we didn't know him personally. So it's like when we started meeting these guys, it was kind of fun. And the New York Dolls they came to see us play I want to go way back, Okay. Because you grew up in a musical family, yes, I did tell me about that. My father was an opera sayeron and he was also a religious kind of saying. He's saying with Billy Graham He had a radio show in Chicago on w MBI, which is the Moody Bible Institute, where where both my grandfathers graduated from. They were both ministers. So I was around music. And my dad it was a choir director in World War Two. He's a captain and he was served at the Aleutian Islands and in Rosville, New Mexico. But he was always around music. And my dad was choir director at a church in Rockford, but we went to Chicago to the Baptist churches at those times. I here's a white guy with a black woman. It's like and they're singing his great music and everybody's having fun. This is it. Then I go back to the other stuff and was like, put you to sleep. Music for me, It's like, what did I do wrong? God? You know? It's like And when my father also did opera, he did Barbara Saville, which I walked on stage when I was three years old, supposedly, and I walked out on stage when they're doing Barbara Saville and people started to laugh and clap, and I's like, this is what I like this. So I like it when people laugh and clap. And it wasn't a direct route to all this stuff. But so I was around these kind of wacky artists. So I worked in my dad's music store, where I goofed off, mostly so i'd see everybody. You know. Sam Kennison actually rented a PA when he was an evangelist. He and his brother amazing. Was there a moment when sort of pop music came on the scene or rock music. I started out playing drums. Let the b drums, I think it was one of them was Sandy Nelson, and I like Jean Croupa. I liked that stuff in Plus, music on drums is sort of like mathematics, and I was always good at math, you know, like instead of one, two or three four drums one and two E and the three. I could write out music like that. Although I couldn't really read it, I knew how to write it out for me. That really helped me later in songwriting, and then as it progressed, I started playing at bands as a drummer, and the guitar players were always even if we're doing a Rolling Stone song or something. I didn't know how to play guitar, but I knew they were playing the wrong note, so I'd get off the drums and I figure out what the part was, and after too much of that, I just decided to give up the drums and find some other kid that could count to four drums, and I just taught myself how to play guitar. Did you just get a guitar from your dad's shop? I actually got a guitar from my mother was It was a Goya, Swedish brand nylon string guitar. That was my first one. I still have it. It doesn't sound any good, and it's kind of smashed up and broke them, but that's that's how I kind of learned. It was the neck was wider and stuff, so I actually learned how to play a more difficult instrument instead of this easy stuff I got in here. You're the sort of guitar hero to people, but you're not the kind of guy that stays up on stage and plays like ten minutes solos. Oh, I hate that. That's why years ago I used to it's a stack my guitars, one on top of him. I'm a songwriter and an entertainer. I'm not really a virtuoso at all. If my solos are shortened to the point the song is more important than me right, and you have all your solo parts and all your licks worked out before you go on stage. Well, if I know the songs, you know sort of yeah, Like you're not like Angus Young or someone who just gets up there and plays and plays. Well. He plays a lot of the stuff that you know that these worked out, and a lot of stuff that's on the record so that you know, I'll change it if if it's that bad. But it's like usually what I do is like I'll play something that's realistic according to me, and it's like I don't know how to explain. It's like on this new records, like I don't sound like I'm in this old guy. I sound like sometimes I would do a solo that's more like the MC five or Neil Young. He plays one note that's good enough. Yeah, he plays it well. Yeah. When you started playing electric guitar and you were in bands, who are the guitarists who influenced you to get that very particular sound? Well, my favorite and I went to see him. I was, I think the first show of I'm Not Sure what You're sixty four The Yardbirds Jeff Beck right from the start, and I thought he was great. Then I think he's great. Now he's still my kind of my hero. And I sold him a guitar in nineteen sixty eight, the second less Paul you ever owned. Really Yeah, I went and saw him in Chicago at the Connecticut Playground. What was it about his playing you like so much? You know, back then it was like the guitar players that you kind of knew about was Scotty Moore, Jenny Atkins, but they had he played with round wound strings, and he was like, it just didn't sound right, Jeff Beck, sound like, how is you get that sound? It's like I was back then. It were like there was no guitar magazine kind of things. I read in a Hit Parader and it was like, how did Jeff Beck get that? He says, well, I just you know, punched out the speaker, you know, made it kind of raspy and whatever. Of course, so the first thing I did was go punch holes in my speakers and that and that wasn't it. It's it's him. You need Jeff Beck to punch a hole in your speaker, not anybody can do. Yeah, you gotta have the right punch. Yeah. We'll be right back with more from Rick Nielsen. After a quick break, we're back with more of Bruce Headlam's conversation with Rick Nielsen. You were playing in bands. The other guys in Cheap Trick, we're playing in bands. How did you finally all get together? So? I met Tom in high school and a new bunny. Bunny was in an imposing band. He was in the Pagans and I was in the Grim Reapers, and I was like, okay, So I thought they were whimpy, and he thought I was a Ballahoonian? What does that mean? They carry knives like a hood. I was a troublemaker. He had a single out, Good Day Sunshine of the Beatles, Good Day of Sunshine. You imagine that's like, that's even whimpier than the than when I'm sixty four. So then when did you meet Robin? Robin? Uh? Bunny knew him and because Robin hit you know, he's like five years younger, so I never to him. But we had heard that there's a singer. Was it's called bb Kems or something. He was in a duo. He was doing BG's songs and Neil Young and Beatles. We heard that this guy was really good. So we're up there with with my manager at the time. It's like, because we're looking for a serm. No, he picked the other guy. But Robin I, you know, I could tell you he had he'd been in quirer and stuff growing up, and so he was a real singer legit. Later he actually took some singing lessons from my father. Who's that right? Yeah? Now, you guys when you were playing just because where you were near Chicago, you go to Wisconsin, you went, you went. You must have spent a lot of time in vans. Oh yeah, who did it? Like crazy? Yeah? I read somewhere that you preferred playing suburban places because the crowds were bigger, Like if you went into Chicago. Some of the clubs just weren't They weren't big, and they weren't big enough. And it's like, uh, for the most part, they liked their horn bands and it's like they go ahead and play original stuff. Was not easy, you know, because you get the jobs. You know, what what rolling Stone Strong, what do you do from the top forty We'd always say, well, you know, we got a whole bunch of stuff, and we never did. So we did get fired a couple of places because we didn't do what they wanted did playing like bigger holes out in the suburbs. That that affect your sound. That helped shape how you came out. You know, being a three piece, you gotta do what you do. I mean when like that chord, I played to that a chord if you let it ring out, there's certain ways to play. It's like I didn't go chick chick chick like some some guitar parts and stuff and played like that. It's like I've played to fill the sound out. And so we'd go to those places. And we always had our built our own PA. So we go to these places like so we we knew we wanted. We used to use a TC thirty three forty as the slap echo on the voice to sound like John Lennon. Oh that's interesting. Yeah, it's a real to real. We had to you know, it was running all the time. But it was like if I go back and listen to some of the tapes we did. We were playing in clubs and we sounded good. Yeah, and we had good amps. In nineteen sixty eight, when I bought my melotron at Orange Music, I bought it used. I also bought the very first Orange amp, which I still had today. I just liked it. You know. It's like, you know, we happened to be smart enough or lucky enough to surround myself with good equipment. Yeah, so when did you get signed to do the first Cheap Trick album? Seventy six? Jack Douglas came to see us, and we got turned down by a bunch of people saying tapes out or whatever. And Jack Douglas had heard our stuff and liked it but wanted to see us. So he came to Walkershaw, Wisconsin because it's his in laws lived there the Sunset Bowling Alley that had bands on the weekend or where and we'd played there a number of times and Jack came that night and it plays a packed and everybody's drunk and it's like and then we came up and played and he immediately liked us. I don't know who. You talked to, Tom Worman or somebody at the record company and says, you gotta sign these guys. I said, I'll do him, you know, And here's Jack done Aerosmith record. So I mean it's like his name meant a bunch. So we actually went in not long after that and I went to New York and went to the record plant and I did twenty some songs in eight days or something like that. By that point, had you guys kind of figured out your look? I think it was Jeff Tweedy. You had a great line about like how you guys perfected the two good looking guys two weird looking guys thing for a band. I never wanted to be anybody else. I don't know. I wanted to be me. But I was always a class clown and I was always the the wise guy, and so I didn't look like a rock star. You know, like there's a lot of bands back then they you know, they were their mother's makeup and used their mother's hair spray, and it's like that wasn't me. It was like, so I kind of perfect it because like, yeah, I had fun being the goof off, you know guy I played the guitar solos or whatever it's like, and you people look at me, He's like, that's that guy. You know, he doesn't look like he has a nickel in his pocket. And your first album, I don't think sold, but your second album had did. Have I Want You to Want Me? I think it did. Yeah, that was in color, and we did that. That came out on seventy and seventy seven, also between the first album coming out and that and Uh, that came out and that was the Rolling Stone issue that where Elvis had died. He's on the cover and our reviews on the inside, and we got I think we got pretty good reviews, and that one sold a little bit more but that. But in Japan we had a number one song, Clock Strikes ten, which never got any airplane in the airplace. And so it must have been strange though, because you were a struggling band here. You put out some albums, you hadn't had a lot of success, but then you went to Japan. You did the live album, but you were like the Beatles in Japan. That sort of seemed like, didn't it. It was frightening, but it was like they were the coolest people I'd ever met, you know, or never met. You know, It's like these guys like us. There was so much screaming at the concerts. I know, it was fantastic. And then was it strange to come back to the States where you're, oh, yeah, we're big in Japan. You weren't so big here yet. Yeah, I was like, man, you got a taste of that. Now that's cool. You know. It's like we can play these arenas and do do okay, you know, because we're slaying them over there. And I was like, yeah, you know, but they liked us. I remember we were a good we're a good band. I remember we're not great or whatever. But but you want you're a very distinctive band because you've written most of the songs. Can you tell me what is is there some secret sauce to a cheap trick song? What is it that makes your songs distinctive that people like about them. I think we're diverse, which I think is probably you know, it's like somebody might like this one and then it's like, oh but there's other stuff. You can listen. It's not like one song and then they're they're ninety five ninety percent more, but they're just not as good as that one. And you know, different people like different stuff. I mean, clocks are extend. It's like that's a hit. It's like here if you'd play and nobody knew it. And one of those things that we had done on our early records, it's like I wrote hello there as a for a sound check. Hello, they're late. You know. It starts out drums boom boom, boom. Okay, now that's in. Okay, now the basoom boom, here's the guitar. Day. It was a sound check for doing these big shows we're doing, because if you think about what intros, what's the first song we should play in our set with Queen or or who ended, whoever, you gotta get their attention. Let's let's play this one. That's real moody and in the middle part, you know, it's like, don't overthink it. So that's how those songs came above. We'll be right back with more from Rick Nielsen. After a quick break. We're back with the rest of Bruce Helen's conversation with Rick Nielsen. You've had a long relationship with the Beatles. Now I'm not quite sure. I know. George Martin produced your album in nineteen eighty and that's also when you were working with John Lennon, which came first. We worked with George in aer Studios, Monsterrot and that was as the beginning of nineteen eighty and then we went to England to finish it and then it was in August of eighty August twelfth. That went and worked with John Lennon. So tell me what was it like to work with George Martin or George of great He was like the smartest musician, producer overall arrangement whatever. I mean, he was the he liked us stute. I mean that was that was We were kind of shocked at that. You know, we got it. We got them to come to Madison. He and Jeff Emeric come to Madison the middle of winter for pre production. You can imagine, George Martin, you want to go to magazine Wisconsin three foot of snow and where your goloshes now? And he came to see us. He liked the band enough and the songs enough and us enough that he said yes, and so hey, we're gonna go to Montserrat in the British West Indies, my new studio Air Studios. Okay, you know it's like you know. So he packed up and went down there and did the tracks there and finished it. Then we flew to New York and took the concord over to London and we took the go to over and then we took it back. When we were done, we went to stay in London and finished the record there. But I'm fascinated just because there's so many stories about George Martin with the Beatles. What was he like in the studio. It was great. It was like very professional and to experiment on stuff. We did. Stop this game was one of them, and he uh, the intro, so I did that, but we did it with the orchestra dot dot that that that, but the very beginning of the songs like well, I can't stop the music. I seven we did recorded an e notte and then he went to the second track on a piano and recorded that, and we left the attack off on each one, so we didn't he didn't hit the die. You hit that and then the next one, and we did like I don't know how many twelve or twelve tracks of that, you know, delaying the next one by a beat and then the next one and so it's just a continuous loop. And it was like and I think he said, well, that's what they use at the end of one of the Beatle tracks. So so we were privy to that, you know, working with the best guy on Earth and some of those tricks. And later when we did all the Sergeant Pepper shows, which I went to Georgia's house out in the country and he cooked lunch for for us, and uh I got his blessing and the and the charts for Sergeant Pepper to do that. Oh, he gave you the original charts. Yeah, you guys did a big performance of Sergeant Pepper. Yeah we didn't ninety shows and uh so I got his blessing for that, and you know, we just got along. Well, it's like and here I am. You know, I always think of myself. I'm Rick from Rockford. You know. It's like, you know, it's like, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anyways. I said, if you can make it Rockford, you can make it any ways. So then when he then when he passed away, I got an email from from him and his family or whatever. It's like, we'd like invite to his memorial service. So I went flew to England and went to this thing, and uh I go, I said, family sider in the back of my invitation. And so I sat there. I'm like, right up front behind me, it's Elvis Costello, here's Genes Inspector, there's Pink Floyd, all these you knows all these famous people and they're way way behind me in this place. And uh. And as we file out to leave and go and talk to Yoko, Sean and Julian because they were right ahead of me, and we talked for about a second, and then all of a sudden, somebody comes up to me. Hello, Rick, I said, hello, Paulo. You know paul the guitar he plays I got for him too, not not that far, but yeah, yeah, that's the left handed lest Polity plays. So I had one. I was like, what am I doing with this thing? It's like it's a piece of art, but I have no I can't play it. So I said McCartney should have it, you know. And then I said that in a guitar magazine and a few months later and he ended up getting it. Wow. Yeah. But later that year, after you recorded the album with George Martin, you worked on Double Fantasy with John What was that like? Oh, it's terrific. You know, It's like I treated it like a guy to guy. I did you know? Musician a musician? You know, he's one of my favorites. You know, what can you say? Well, I see I was asked by Jack to do it to rock up this stuff that John was doing. If you listen to the original Double Fantasy, it's like it sounds like a lounge man. I mean, it's too produced. So Earl Slick learned my my riffs and did them. But you know, it's like it's not you know, I like to do this. You know, it's like the way it is on the record is you know, it's like my version was heavier. And then I came up with this. I came up with the riff. So when I was doing it, here's Buddy and Jack in the in the booth. When I was playing the guitar. After we had done the initial track, John says, God, I wish I would have had Rick on Cold Turkey, Clapton choked up or Clapton froze. You could only play the one riff. Wow, that's a high compliment. So how how were they to work with? How were John? And they were great? They were great. You know, it's like they were they were terrific in the musician it's like it's just cool. And he was a great rhythm player too, and I'm a good rhythm player. And it's like together it just kind of worked out and it's like we enjoyed each other's company, and I'd hope to take him out guitar shopping after after the sessions, not that day, but you know, I gave him one of my guitars because I said, we're going to Japan the next day and after the session, and I'll get it back later. I got it back three years after he was murdered. Yeah, that's very sad. Yeah, So into the eighties with with Cheap Trick, and I still can't quite believe this, but you guys had this run of great hits and great albums, but then your record label decided that you had to like bring in professional writers. Yeah, that beat up my ego pretty emotion. It was like, you know, we weren't gonna we weren't somebody else, and we don't try to make us into somebody else. And we didn't have a label or a producer or a management that stuck up for us, you know, you know, we we we've always done other people's material, like we did the first album, did Terry Reid song, and we did Roy Woods songs. You know, Beatles, you did Beatles stuff too, you know, but that was our own picking. You know. It's like and here we got. Now we're doing something that's not written by us as like, it just didn't make sense to me. It still doesn't, but there you go. Did you have to co write with them or these were I told wrote some songs. I mean, I'm not opposed to that, but this was already sign seal delivered. Yeah, before we had the Flame. When that came out, we did they We did a record with Todd Rundgren next position, pleasing on that. They had us doing a Motors song dance No no I, no way, Bob, Bob jesus. So are you the kind of guy that just walks around with here iPhone and if you've get an idea, you just record it. So you've got these little snatches of ideas, got tons of tons of bad ideas. But I've always kind of done that. I mean I've written stuff down. It's like my one is like in the middle of the night, wake up, you write something. Oh man, this is something here. Then you wake up is chocolate milk? You know, what are the uh? You know, it's like how did that turn in? Why was that important enough to write it down? So there's there's usually something there. So I mean I've got tons of that kind of stuff from my wife says the F word finish, you know, finish it. We're writing songs, it's like, uh, like a producer would come say something to me like, well, what's the third verse? Like I said, what do you like the first one? Before I spend the time to write the third one? You know it? You know, that goes into the arranging all stuff like in Surrender starts off at B flat and then the first verse and second verse there would be third verses and c modulates up. That's an arrangement, you know. It's not really so much to the song. You love doing those kind of modulations and songs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's cool. Yeah, it's better than us going na na na hey hey yeah a lot of those songs are a good song turn into junk and you have too much nana hey. All right, what's been great talking to you? Well? Cool, great, great album. I hope everybody listens. It's just a lot of fun. Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Rick Nielsen for running through some of the highlights of his career with us to Hear in Another World and our favorite cheap Trick tracks Head to Broken Record Podcast got where we also have a playlist of some of our favorite power pop songs. You should have subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcasts. We can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced helpfully Rose Jason Gambrel, Martinozzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez with engineering help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is Miola bet. If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider becoming a Pushnick. Pushnick is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine amus look for Pushnick exclusively on Apple Podcasts subscriptions. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. Are the music by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Mitchell

Pushkin. Before we get started, let's talk about Pushnick. Pushnick is a subscription program available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Subscriptions members will get access to bonus content like extended versions of Our Beastie Boys and Brian Eno episodes. You'll also get ad free listening to many of your favorite podcasts like Pubbishnist, History, Cautionary Tales, The Happiness Lab, and Ours Broken Record. You can try it for free for seven days. Sign up for Pushnick and Apple podcast subscriptions. Rick Nielsen is best known as Cheap Tricks, lead guitarist and mains songwriter, the band that helped popularize power pop in the late seventies with songs like Surrender and I Want You To Want Me, precursors to the pop punk explosion in the nineties with bands like Green Day in Blink one eighty two. In June, Cheap Trick released their twentieth studio album, In Another World. It's chock full of Rick Nielsen's monster riffs that recall their glory days in the nineteen seventies. On today's episode, Bruce held Them talks to Rick Nielsen about Cheap Trick's origin story while Nielsen fiddles around on electric guitar and samples riffs from the new album. Nielsen also talks about how he was hired to bring a hard rock sound to John Lennon's final album with Yoko, Double Fantasy, and what it was like working with the Beatles legendary producer George Martin. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Bruce had them with cheap tricks. Rick Nielsen, we're gonna talk about In Another World, which is your new album. It sounds like you guys were having fun making this album. Well, I think we were. I think we do. Just sounds really kind of joyful and fun. That's kind of the idea. I mean, we make records for ourselves. I mean, we don't have a manager that hangs over us or a producer. That's here's what we're gonna do. We got this going in the record label of BMG's but not Fabulous. I mean they're so fabulous that that they don't bother us. And it's like it's the perfect record label, the first one we've ever had like that. It's like, it's pretty cool. So what's writing like? Are you on a bus? Are you in a hotel and you just pick up your guitar. It's kind of how we all did it. I mean I used to write one hundred percent of the stuff. We just got. Somebody's got an idea and that sounds If it sounds interesting, then we'll go for it. Now, you just picked up a guitar, which is not a surprise because you own how many guitars? Now, do you own about five hundred? Well, I've owned about two thousand instruments. But I've been around for a long time and I've traded. I've traded stuff, I had stuff, I broke stuff, I gave stuff away. I mean, I've got a guitar, a real guitar, in almost every hard rocket around the world. Yeah. So while you've got the guitar in your hand, tell me about writing the first single, which is Summer looks good on you. I think we had a title first seemed like a good idea. Listen, it could be a summer song, you know. So yeah, it comes to summer. Yeah, that's that's that one. That's it. Yeah, because we had two of that came out about the same time that we were doing Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Uh. You know, it's like how we wrote the Parson, we did the deeper the B flat sounds kind of weird in there, but yeah, that was some stuff that we like. When we did a tax Men and Stiff competition, the same thing. I mean, I just kind of like that. That sounds yeah thing, and it sounds different every time. And we use chords that a lot of people don't use. You know, it's like over and over again. Yeah, well and this the song is in E, right, isn't it. Uh well, the chorus is in D and the versus A. Yeah. There you go listening to that and I hadn't really thought of it before. It sounds a lot like Peter Townsend to me. We hit the chords equally hard. Was he an influence on you? Oh yeah? I mean it Loves Who was the best live band ever. You know, I played with them, opened for them when when Keith Moon was still wrong and what was that like? It was great? You know, It's like because we'd read a bomb and actually we knew their songs. We opened for him at Majestic Hills in Late Geneva, Wisconsin in nineteen sixty eight, two weeks after we'd opened for Frank Zapp and the mothers and Wow, yeah, you know you were the band when you came out that everybody liked. The heavy metal guys liked you, the new wave guys liked you. What's not to like? Well, what's not? But you just appealed to such a wide group of like everybody could agree on Cheap Trick, even though if they disagreed about everything else. It seems like that. I mean I heard that from a lot of people. I mean, you know, like the Ramons like cheap Trick, you know, And Joey did a number of our songs. He the Southern Girls. He came to see us, and he's like, you know, he's from New York. We're from the Chicago area. We never, you know, really saw them unless we went to see him, and we didn't know him personally. So it's like when we started meeting these guys, it was kind of fun. And the New York Dolls they came to see us play I want to go way back, Okay. Because you grew up in a musical family, yes, I did tell me about that. My father was an opera sayeron and he was also a religious kind of saying. He's saying with Billy Graham He had a radio show in Chicago on w MBI, which is the Moody Bible Institute, where where both my grandfathers graduated from. They were both ministers. So I was around music. And my dad it was a choir director in World War Two. He's a captain and he was served at the Aleutian Islands and in Rosville, New Mexico. But he was always around music. And my dad was choir director at a church in Rockford, but we went to Chicago to the Baptist churches at those times. I here's a white guy with a black woman. It's like and they're singing his great music and everybody's having fun. This is it. Then I go back to the other stuff and was like, put you to sleep. Music for me, It's like, what did I do wrong? God? You know? It's like And when my father also did opera, he did Barbara Saville, which I walked on stage when I was three years old, supposedly, and I walked out on stage when they're doing Barbara Saville and people started to laugh and clap, and I's like, this is what I like this. So I like it when people laugh and clap. And it wasn't a direct route to all this stuff. But so I was around these kind of wacky artists. So I worked in my dad's music store, where I goofed off, mostly so i'd see everybody. You know. Sam Kennison actually rented a PA when he was an evangelist. He and his brother amazing. Was there a moment when sort of pop music came on the scene or rock music. I started out playing drums. Let the b drums, I think it was one of them was Sandy Nelson, and I like Jean Croupa. I liked that stuff in Plus, music on drums is sort of like mathematics, and I was always good at math, you know, like instead of one, two or three four drums one and two E and the three. I could write out music like that. Although I couldn't really read it, I knew how to write it out for me. That really helped me later in songwriting, and then as it progressed, I started playing at bands as a drummer, and the guitar players were always even if we're doing a Rolling Stone song or something. I didn't know how to play guitar, but I knew they were playing the wrong note, so I'd get off the drums and I figure out what the part was, and after too much of that, I just decided to give up the drums and find some other kid that could count to four drums, and I just taught myself how to play guitar. Did you just get a guitar from your dad's shop? I actually got a guitar from my mother was It was a Goya, Swedish brand nylon string guitar. That was my first one. I still have it. It doesn't sound any good, and it's kind of smashed up and broke them, but that's that's how I kind of learned. It was the neck was wider and stuff, so I actually learned how to play a more difficult instrument instead of this easy stuff I got in here. You're the sort of guitar hero to people, but you're not the kind of guy that stays up on stage and plays like ten minutes solos. Oh, I hate that. That's why years ago I used to it's a stack my guitars, one on top of him. I'm a songwriter and an entertainer. I'm not really a virtuoso at all. If my solos are shortened to the point the song is more important than me right, and you have all your solo parts and all your licks worked out before you go on stage. Well, if I know the songs, you know sort of yeah, Like you're not like Angus Young or someone who just gets up there and plays and plays. Well. He plays a lot of the stuff that you know that these worked out, and a lot of stuff that's on the record so that you know, I'll change it if if it's that bad. But it's like usually what I do is like I'll play something that's realistic according to me, and it's like I don't know how to explain. It's like on this new records, like I don't sound like I'm in this old guy. I sound like sometimes I would do a solo that's more like the MC five or Neil Young. He plays one note that's good enough. Yeah, he plays it well. Yeah. When you started playing electric guitar and you were in bands, who are the guitarists who influenced you to get that very particular sound? Well, my favorite and I went to see him. I was, I think the first show of I'm Not Sure what You're sixty four The Yardbirds Jeff Beck right from the start, and I thought he was great. Then I think he's great. Now he's still my kind of my hero. And I sold him a guitar in nineteen sixty eight, the second less Paul you ever owned. Really Yeah, I went and saw him in Chicago at the Connecticut Playground. What was it about his playing you like so much? You know, back then it was like the guitar players that you kind of knew about was Scotty Moore, Jenny Atkins, but they had he played with round wound strings, and he was like, it just didn't sound right, Jeff Beck, sound like, how is you get that sound? It's like I was back then. It were like there was no guitar magazine kind of things. I read in a Hit Parader and it was like, how did Jeff Beck get that? He says, well, I just you know, punched out the speaker, you know, made it kind of raspy and whatever. Of course, so the first thing I did was go punch holes in my speakers and that and that wasn't it. It's it's him. You need Jeff Beck to punch a hole in your speaker, not anybody can do. Yeah, you gotta have the right punch. Yeah. We'll be right back with more from Rick Nielsen. After a quick break, we're back with more of Bruce Headlam's conversation with Rick Nielsen. You were playing in bands. The other guys in Cheap Trick, we're playing in bands. How did you finally all get together? So? I met Tom in high school and a new bunny. Bunny was in an imposing band. He was in the Pagans and I was in the Grim Reapers, and I was like, okay, So I thought they were whimpy, and he thought I was a Ballahoonian? What does that mean? They carry knives like a hood. I was a troublemaker. He had a single out, Good Day Sunshine of the Beatles, Good Day of Sunshine. You imagine that's like, that's even whimpier than the than when I'm sixty four. So then when did you meet Robin? Robin? Uh? Bunny knew him and because Robin hit you know, he's like five years younger, so I never to him. But we had heard that there's a singer. Was it's called bb Kems or something. He was in a duo. He was doing BG's songs and Neil Young and Beatles. We heard that this guy was really good. So we're up there with with my manager at the time. It's like, because we're looking for a serm. No, he picked the other guy. But Robin I, you know, I could tell you he had he'd been in quirer and stuff growing up, and so he was a real singer legit. Later he actually took some singing lessons from my father. Who's that right? Yeah? Now, you guys when you were playing just because where you were near Chicago, you go to Wisconsin, you went, you went. You must have spent a lot of time in vans. Oh yeah, who did it? Like crazy? Yeah? I read somewhere that you preferred playing suburban places because the crowds were bigger, Like if you went into Chicago. Some of the clubs just weren't They weren't big, and they weren't big enough. And it's like, uh, for the most part, they liked their horn bands and it's like they go ahead and play original stuff. Was not easy, you know, because you get the jobs. You know, what what rolling Stone Strong, what do you do from the top forty We'd always say, well, you know, we got a whole bunch of stuff, and we never did. So we did get fired a couple of places because we didn't do what they wanted did playing like bigger holes out in the suburbs. That that affect your sound. That helped shape how you came out. You know, being a three piece, you gotta do what you do. I mean when like that chord, I played to that a chord if you let it ring out, there's certain ways to play. It's like I didn't go chick chick chick like some some guitar parts and stuff and played like that. It's like I've played to fill the sound out. And so we'd go to those places. And we always had our built our own PA. So we go to these places like so we we knew we wanted. We used to use a TC thirty three forty as the slap echo on the voice to sound like John Lennon. Oh that's interesting. Yeah, it's a real to real. We had to you know, it was running all the time. But it was like if I go back and listen to some of the tapes we did. We were playing in clubs and we sounded good. Yeah, and we had good amps. In nineteen sixty eight, when I bought my melotron at Orange Music, I bought it used. I also bought the very first Orange amp, which I still had today. I just liked it. You know. It's like, you know, we happened to be smart enough or lucky enough to surround myself with good equipment. Yeah, so when did you get signed to do the first Cheap Trick album? Seventy six? Jack Douglas came to see us, and we got turned down by a bunch of people saying tapes out or whatever. And Jack Douglas had heard our stuff and liked it but wanted to see us. So he came to Walkershaw, Wisconsin because it's his in laws lived there the Sunset Bowling Alley that had bands on the weekend or where and we'd played there a number of times and Jack came that night and it plays a packed and everybody's drunk and it's like and then we came up and played and he immediately liked us. I don't know who. You talked to, Tom Worman or somebody at the record company and says, you gotta sign these guys. I said, I'll do him, you know, And here's Jack done Aerosmith record. So I mean it's like his name meant a bunch. So we actually went in not long after that and I went to New York and went to the record plant and I did twenty some songs in eight days or something like that. By that point, had you guys kind of figured out your look? I think it was Jeff Tweedy. You had a great line about like how you guys perfected the two good looking guys two weird looking guys thing for a band. I never wanted to be anybody else. I don't know. I wanted to be me. But I was always a class clown and I was always the the wise guy, and so I didn't look like a rock star. You know, like there's a lot of bands back then they you know, they were their mother's makeup and used their mother's hair spray, and it's like that wasn't me. It was like, so I kind of perfect it because like, yeah, I had fun being the goof off, you know guy I played the guitar solos or whatever it's like, and you people look at me, He's like, that's that guy. You know, he doesn't look like he has a nickel in his pocket. And your first album, I don't think sold, but your second album had did. Have I Want You to Want Me? I think it did. Yeah, that was in color, and we did that. That came out on seventy and seventy seven, also between the first album coming out and that and Uh, that came out and that was the Rolling Stone issue that where Elvis had died. He's on the cover and our reviews on the inside, and we got I think we got pretty good reviews, and that one sold a little bit more but that. But in Japan we had a number one song, Clock Strikes ten, which never got any airplane in the airplace. And so it must have been strange though, because you were a struggling band here. You put out some albums, you hadn't had a lot of success, but then you went to Japan. You did the live album, but you were like the Beatles in Japan. That sort of seemed like, didn't it. It was frightening, but it was like they were the coolest people I'd ever met, you know, or never met. You know, It's like these guys like us. There was so much screaming at the concerts. I know, it was fantastic. And then was it strange to come back to the States where you're, oh, yeah, we're big in Japan. You weren't so big here yet. Yeah, I was like, man, you got a taste of that. Now that's cool. You know. It's like we can play these arenas and do do okay, you know, because we're slaying them over there. And I was like, yeah, you know, but they liked us. I remember we were a good we're a good band. I remember we're not great or whatever. But but you want you're a very distinctive band because you've written most of the songs. Can you tell me what is is there some secret sauce to a cheap trick song? What is it that makes your songs distinctive that people like about them. I think we're diverse, which I think is probably you know, it's like somebody might like this one and then it's like, oh but there's other stuff. You can listen. It's not like one song and then they're they're ninety five ninety percent more, but they're just not as good as that one. And you know, different people like different stuff. I mean, clocks are extend. It's like that's a hit. It's like here if you'd play and nobody knew it. And one of those things that we had done on our early records, it's like I wrote hello there as a for a sound check. Hello, they're late. You know. It starts out drums boom boom, boom. Okay, now that's in. Okay, now the basoom boom, here's the guitar. Day. It was a sound check for doing these big shows we're doing, because if you think about what intros, what's the first song we should play in our set with Queen or or who ended, whoever, you gotta get their attention. Let's let's play this one. That's real moody and in the middle part, you know, it's like, don't overthink it. So that's how those songs came above. We'll be right back with more from Rick Nielsen. After a quick break. We're back with the rest of Bruce Helen's conversation with Rick Nielsen. You've had a long relationship with the Beatles. Now I'm not quite sure. I know. George Martin produced your album in nineteen eighty and that's also when you were working with John Lennon, which came first. We worked with George in aer Studios, Monsterrot and that was as the beginning of nineteen eighty and then we went to England to finish it and then it was in August of eighty August twelfth. That went and worked with John Lennon. So tell me what was it like to work with George Martin or George of great He was like the smartest musician, producer overall arrangement whatever. I mean, he was the he liked us stute. I mean that was that was We were kind of shocked at that. You know, we got it. We got them to come to Madison. He and Jeff Emeric come to Madison the middle of winter for pre production. You can imagine, George Martin, you want to go to magazine Wisconsin three foot of snow and where your goloshes now? And he came to see us. He liked the band enough and the songs enough and us enough that he said yes, and so hey, we're gonna go to Montserrat in the British West Indies, my new studio Air Studios. Okay, you know it's like you know. So he packed up and went down there and did the tracks there and finished it. Then we flew to New York and took the concord over to London and we took the go to over and then we took it back. When we were done, we went to stay in London and finished the record there. But I'm fascinated just because there's so many stories about George Martin with the Beatles. What was he like in the studio. It was great. It was like very professional and to experiment on stuff. We did. Stop this game was one of them, and he uh, the intro, so I did that, but we did it with the orchestra dot dot that that that, but the very beginning of the songs like well, I can't stop the music. I seven we did recorded an e notte and then he went to the second track on a piano and recorded that, and we left the attack off on each one, so we didn't he didn't hit the die. You hit that and then the next one, and we did like I don't know how many twelve or twelve tracks of that, you know, delaying the next one by a beat and then the next one and so it's just a continuous loop. And it was like and I think he said, well, that's what they use at the end of one of the Beatle tracks. So so we were privy to that, you know, working with the best guy on Earth and some of those tricks. And later when we did all the Sergeant Pepper shows, which I went to Georgia's house out in the country and he cooked lunch for for us, and uh I got his blessing and the and the charts for Sergeant Pepper to do that. Oh, he gave you the original charts. Yeah, you guys did a big performance of Sergeant Pepper. Yeah we didn't ninety shows and uh so I got his blessing for that, and you know, we just got along. Well, it's like and here I am. You know, I always think of myself. I'm Rick from Rockford. You know. It's like, you know, it's like, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anyways. I said, if you can make it Rockford, you can make it any ways. So then when he then when he passed away, I got an email from from him and his family or whatever. It's like, we'd like invite to his memorial service. So I went flew to England and went to this thing, and uh I go, I said, family sider in the back of my invitation. And so I sat there. I'm like, right up front behind me, it's Elvis Costello, here's Genes Inspector, there's Pink Floyd, all these you knows all these famous people and they're way way behind me in this place. And uh. And as we file out to leave and go and talk to Yoko, Sean and Julian because they were right ahead of me, and we talked for about a second, and then all of a sudden, somebody comes up to me. Hello, Rick, I said, hello, Paulo. You know paul the guitar he plays I got for him too, not not that far, but yeah, yeah, that's the left handed lest Polity plays. So I had one. I was like, what am I doing with this thing? It's like it's a piece of art, but I have no I can't play it. So I said McCartney should have it, you know. And then I said that in a guitar magazine and a few months later and he ended up getting it. Wow. Yeah. But later that year, after you recorded the album with George Martin, you worked on Double Fantasy with John What was that like? Oh, it's terrific. You know, It's like I treated it like a guy to guy. I did you know? Musician a musician? You know, he's one of my favorites. You know, what can you say? Well, I see I was asked by Jack to do it to rock up this stuff that John was doing. If you listen to the original Double Fantasy, it's like it sounds like a lounge man. I mean, it's too produced. So Earl Slick learned my my riffs and did them. But you know, it's like it's not you know, I like to do this. You know, it's like the way it is on the record is you know, it's like my version was heavier. And then I came up with this. I came up with the riff. So when I was doing it, here's Buddy and Jack in the in the booth. When I was playing the guitar. After we had done the initial track, John says, God, I wish I would have had Rick on Cold Turkey, Clapton choked up or Clapton froze. You could only play the one riff. Wow, that's a high compliment. So how how were they to work with? How were John? And they were great? They were great. You know, it's like they were they were terrific in the musician it's like it's just cool. And he was a great rhythm player too, and I'm a good rhythm player. And it's like together it just kind of worked out and it's like we enjoyed each other's company, and I'd hope to take him out guitar shopping after after the sessions, not that day, but you know, I gave him one of my guitars because I said, we're going to Japan the next day and after the session, and I'll get it back later. I got it back three years after he was murdered. Yeah, that's very sad. Yeah, So into the eighties with with Cheap Trick, and I still can't quite believe this, but you guys had this run of great hits and great albums, but then your record label decided that you had to like bring in professional writers. Yeah, that beat up my ego pretty emotion. It was like, you know, we weren't gonna we weren't somebody else, and we don't try to make us into somebody else. And we didn't have a label or a producer or a management that stuck up for us, you know, you know, we we we've always done other people's material, like we did the first album, did Terry Reid song, and we did Roy Woods songs. You know, Beatles, you did Beatles stuff too, you know, but that was our own picking. You know. It's like and here we got. Now we're doing something that's not written by us as like, it just didn't make sense to me. It still doesn't, but there you go. Did you have to co write with them or these were I told wrote some songs. I mean, I'm not opposed to that, but this was already sign seal delivered. Yeah, before we had the Flame. When that came out, we did they We did a record with Todd Rundgren next position, pleasing on that. They had us doing a Motors song dance No no I, no way, Bob, Bob jesus. So are you the kind of guy that just walks around with here iPhone and if you've get an idea, you just record it. So you've got these little snatches of ideas, got tons of tons of bad ideas. But I've always kind of done that. I mean I've written stuff down. It's like my one is like in the middle of the night, wake up, you write something. Oh man, this is something here. Then you wake up is chocolate milk? You know, what are the uh? You know, it's like how did that turn in? Why was that important enough to write it down? So there's there's usually something there. So I mean I've got tons of that kind of stuff from my wife says the F word finish, you know, finish it. We're writing songs, it's like, uh, like a producer would come say something to me like, well, what's the third verse? Like I said, what do you like the first one? Before I spend the time to write the third one? You know it? You know, that goes into the arranging all stuff like in Surrender starts off at B flat and then the first verse and second verse there would be third verses and c modulates up. That's an arrangement, you know. It's not really so much to the song. You love doing those kind of modulations and songs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's cool. Yeah, it's better than us going na na na hey hey yeah a lot of those songs are a good song turn into junk and you have too much nana hey. All right, what's been great talking to you? Well? Cool, great, great album. I hope everybody listens. It's just a lot of fun. Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Rick Nielsen for running through some of the highlights of his career with us to Hear in Another World and our favorite cheap Trick tracks Head to Broken Record Podcast got where we also have a playlist of some of our favorite power pop songs. You should have subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcasts. We can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced helpfully Rose Jason Gambrel, Martinozzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez with engineering help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is Miola bet. If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider becoming a Pushnick. Pushnick is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine amus look for Pushnick exclusively on Apple Podcasts subscriptions. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. Are the music by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Mitchell