By JAY ROBERTS

The Cassette Chronicles is a continuing series of mini reviews and reflections on albums from the 1980’s and 1990’s. The aim of this series is to highlight both known and underappreciated albums from rock, pop and metal genres from this time period through the cassette editions of their releases. Some of the albums I have known about and loved for years, while others are new to me and were music I’ve always wanted to hear. There will be some review analysis and my own personal stories about my connection with various albums. These opinions are strictly my own and do not reflect the views of anyone else at Limelight Magazine.

CHEAP TRICK – DREAM POLICE (1979)

It was a random choice that led to me writing about Cheap Trick’s fourth studio album Dream Police this week. I was trying to pick an album and I just walked over to the case hanging on the wall and did a blind draw.

But the interesting thing for me in picking the album is that 2024 is the 45th anniversary of the Dream Police release. I wish I could be so lucky in all my blind picks.

The album was done in the early part of 1979 but with the band still riding high off of the surprise success of the live album At Budokan, it got held until later in the year.

In all, the Dream Police amply demonstrates that Cheap Trick wasn’t just “getting lucky” with their delayed success. I say this because the album is chock full of some incredible songs with great performances all around from singer Robin Zander, guitarist Rick Nielsen, bassist Tom Petersson and drummer Bun E. Carlos.

Having written about Cheap Trick twice already in this series, it should come as no surprise that I consider myself a rather big fan of the band. Maybe I don’t reach the fandom heights of my friend Dave (a CT FANATIC…in a good way). But I know when a new Cheap Trick album is announced, I am very excited to add it to my collection.

That said, I found myself somewhat amused by the fact that I like this album and yet I’m still turned off by a couple of tracks that just grate on my ears (and nerves).

But we’ll get to that later.

The first side of the Dream Police album opens with the title track. It’s a song that finds everything you might know about Cheap Trick (killer music fueled by hard driving guitar work, great melodies that get  you hooked and some really harmonious vocals that are instantly memorable and highly addictive) combining to serve up what has become one of the band’s biggest hit songs. There’s an all-out frenetic pace to the music and, when you take the lyrics at straight up face value, some intensely paranoid sounding lyrics.

The song “Way of the World” follows that up with more energetic rock and roll. The melody here has an undeniable hook that quickly endears the track to the listener.

Now, I have pretty much all of Cheap Trick’s albums and while I do listen to them as I rotate through my music collection, I sometimes forget what songs are on any given album (save the biggest hits, of course). So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself rocking out to the song “The House Is Rockin’ (With Domestic Problems)”. There’s a furious and fiery delivery to the music and a fierceness to Robin Zander’s vocals. What really struck me almost as if I was discovering it for the first time was the ballsy guitar soloing from Rick Nielsen. I caught myself thinking, “This freaking rocks!” at the time I was giving this album another listen before sitting down to write the article.

On Side Two, Bun E. Carlos lays down some crashing thunder with the drumming on the opening track “I’ll Be with You Tonight”. A straight up rocker from start to finish and highly enjoyable. But I loved how I really heard what the drums were doing on the song this time around.

While “Voices” does have a couple brief moments where the music gets a bit of a rising flourish, for the most part, the track employs more of a midtempo pace. Zander’s vocals are a lot softer in their delivery too. It’s a nice brief respite from the more in-your-face rocker tracks but the song kicks butt in its own way.

Cheap Trick then follows that song up with a couple of smoking hot rockers. “Writing on the Wall” is a straight on burner number. Meanwhile, “I Know What I Want” has a killer vibe to it. The vocal delivery is dramatically different and not just because it is bassist Tom Petersson on lead vocals for the track. I loved the way the delivery of the vocals were shaded so that there was an edge to them that I’d forgotten about.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, I’ve had nothing but nice things to say so far. So you may be wondering what it was that I don’t really like about the Dream Police album.

I hesitate to say this because it will probably make me a pariah should I ever get the chance to meet the band and someone in their camp reads this article, but I really don’t care much for “Need Your Love”. Okay, maybe that’s not entirely accurate though. See I do like the song a bit. The guitar playing is superb and the way the music rises to the challenge at the end does at least endear the song to me a bit. But that endless repetition of the song title in the lyrics tends to grate pretty hard on my nerves. The song is more than seven minutes long and it just annoys by the end of the vocal track.

Of course, by way of comparison “Need Your Love” is a strong track compared to “Gonna Raise Hell”. The song is over nine minutes long and it feels interminably longer than that. To describe this one as annoying is being generous. It’s almost like Cheap Trick just forgot to stop playing and the tape just kept recording until it ran out.

Yep, despite my immense love for the band and risking being banned from meeting the band someday, I really just don’t like “Gonna Raise Hell” at all.

But you can’t like everything, right? With that small bit of negative reaction aside, I just love the rest of the Dream Police album a whole lot. Forty-five years on, the album continually gets your blood pumping and shows the band at just one of their high peaks of creativity!

NOTES OF INTEREST: The Dream Police album has been certified platinum at last check. It went as high as #6 on the album chart while the “Dream Police” song went to #26 on the singles chart. The song “Voices” hit #32 as a single.

The album was reissued in 2006 with four bonus tracks . According to the album’s Wikipedia page there are five songs that were listed as “unreleased outtakes”. Two of those songs did end up being recorded and released later on down the line. One was “Next Position Please” that Cheap Trick re-recorded and had it serve as the title cut of their 1983 album. The song “It Must Be Love” was recorded by Rick Derringer in 1979. There also appears to have been a Japanese reissue in 2017.

Toto’s Steve Lukather played guitar on the “Voices” track. Jai Winding played the organ, piano, keyboards and synths on the Dream Police album.