Maybe I’m just old, but – strike that – I am old and this next sentence is just going to cement that fact. I get as giddy when I hear a Cheap Trick song come on the radio as I do when I hear The Sweet or The Raspberries, which isn’t as often as I would like these days. Cheap Trick’s songs take me back to when I was young, dumb and fulla, well, you know the rest…
Saturday’s Rock-N-Roar concert outside the Terrace Theatre was a jaunt down memory lane when freedom meant getting high, impressing girls and my only ambition was somehow, someway getting my bad self out to California.
In sound Cheap Trick hasn’t aged a day although their outward appearance would certainly belie that fact. Rick Nielsen playing the scamp as always crackled on lead guitar. Robin Zander’s vocals were clear and strong and Tom Petersson’s sturdy bass held it all together. Nielsen’s son Daxx did an admirable job filling in for m.i.a. drummer Bun E. Carlos.
I didn’t stay for the entire set, leaving as soon as Zander announced that they had some new songs, but the old favorites I heard were enough to bring me back to those schoolboy days when rock-n-roll was the soundtrack by which I lived my life.
