When a founding band member retires after 35 years, it's often the beginning of the end for the group. In Cheap Trick's case, the opposite happened.
Performing Saturday night at the Bomb Factory, the power-pop pioneers from Rockford, Illinois, sounded bolder than ever with new drummer Daxx Nielsen, the 35-year-old son of Trick's guitarist and resident hambone Rick Nielsen.
Nothing against founding drummer Bun E. Carlos, a fine musician who retired from the road in 2010. But while he was behind the kit, Cheap Trick often worked on cruise control, playing the same 80-minute greatest-hits show night after night.
Saturday, the band challenged itself - and its audience, too - with an hour-and-45-minute show brimming with lesser known gems, including the R-rated strut "Daddy Should Have Stayed In High School," and "Lookup," a rave-up from its career-launching 1978 album At Budokan.
"That one was recorded before 99.5 percent of you were born," Rick Nielsen said, exaggerating as he surveyed a crowd mixed with 20- and 30-somethings and fogeys like himself. At age 68, Nielsen doesn't leap as high as he used to. But he was still a fireball of comic energy as he uncorked Jeff Beck-worthy solos on an endless parade of guitars, from his trademark 5-neck monster to "Uncle Dick," a twin-neck Hamer that looks like a cartoon version of Nielsen.
Nielsen's son Daxx didn't try to emulate Bun E. Carlos - instead, he locked into a hard rock groove with founding bassist Tom Petersson and pretty much stayed there. The key to the show was singer Robin Zander, looking like he stepped out of Scarface in his white suit and feathered fedora and sounding like Roy Orbison's nephew as he nailed one falsetto note after the next.
Zander did hit a few sour notes, and so did the rest of the band. "Did that sound out of tune? Or is it just my brain?" Nielsen said after an off-kilter "Southern Girls."
Then again, it wouldn't be Cheap Trick without a certain rawness. Look past the bubblegum melody of "I Want You to Want Me" and the power ballad bombast of "The Flame" and it's always been a heavy metal punk band on a Beatles bender. On Saturday, Trick dove deep into its Liverpool influences with a discordant trip through "Magical Mystery Tour," and "Heaven Tonight," its doom-metal homage to Abbey Road's "I Want You (She's So Heavy)."
The group tackled most of its classics, like "California Man," "Dream Police" and a rough-hewn "Surrender" with backing vocals from Nate Fowler of the opening band American Fuse. But they also went down so many side streets (the unrecorded "Bang Zoom Crazy Hello," the Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for the Man") they never got around to playing some of their best-loved songs: No "Stop This Game." No "If You Want My Love." No "Voices" or "She's Tight" or "Auf Wiedersehen."
But let's not quibble. Great rock bands like Cheap Trick aren't jukeboxes; they're mix-masters, changing things up ever so slightly to keep fans eagerly awaiting coming back year after year.
Thor Christensen is a Dallas writer and critic.
