Cheap Trick: Next Position Please
1983
Epic Records
Format I Own it on: Vinyl
Track Listing: 1. I Can't Take It 2. Borderline 3. I Don't Love Here Anymore 4. Next Position Please 5. Younger Girls 6. Dancing the Night Away 7. 3-D 8. You Say Jump 9. Y.O.Y.O.Y. 10. Won't Take No for an Answer 11. Heaven's Falling 12. Invaders of the Heart
Remember the other day when I was ranking my favorite Cheap Trick albums? Well, their first three records get the top three spots, but I honestly think "Next Position Please" easily takes the number 4 slot...
The band teams up with Todd Rundgren and recorded a pure power-pop album...Their previous hard rock tendencies are turned waaayyy down, but it's not their later, wussier "Lap of Luxury" style either...
Damn, looking at that "Lap of Luxury" cover makes me wish I lived in an alternate reality where Cheap Trick never put out "The Doctor" or "Lap of Luxury" and all those shittier albums...In my alterante reality they just kept putting out high-quality pop albums like "Next Position Please"...
But yea, the band sounds really natural and comfortable with this sound...Album opener "I Can't Take It" has a bit of big-radio bombast, but starting with the second track, the light pop-rock "Borderline," they sound so relaxed...Its insidiously catchy chorus kind of sneaks up on you.
Really, everything on Side One is stellar...When I first picked up the album and saw the song title "Younger Girls" I was like, "uh-oh," but man, what a chorus! Against all odds, you can't help but raise your fist to the sky and sing at the top of your lungs, "Younger girls, oh, how I love those younger girls!"
And then Chris Hansen shows up...
The title track is also one of the band's best moments...Somehow I had never heard it until I picked up this album a few years ago, and it immediately jumped to the top of my Cheap Trick playlist...Playful, funny, irreverent, well-arranged and poppy...This has it all...the lyrics are a hoot, freely quoting "Bohemian Rhapsody"...So underrated...
The only song that does nothing for me is the cover of "Dancing the Night Away." It seems like this song should have been a perfect fit for the band, but somehow they miss the mark...They skip the extended jangly guitar intro (which was the coolest part of the Motor's original) and traded the hard-pop sound of the original for a colder, new-wave novelty feel...Weird, but not surprising since this was forced on them by their record company...
The album does seem a bit front-loaded, although there's definitely some good songs on Side Two, like "Heaven's Falling," a dead-ringer for late-period Utopia, which is fine by me...The album closes with "Invaders of the Heart" which rules! It sounds like a fast, rocking version of Tom Petty's "Free Falling." Whenever I'm belting out this song in the shower, I can't help but sing,:
"Invaders of the heart
Are messin' with my mind,
They love Jesus,
and America, too!"
But that's my curse...
The CD and cassette version of this album features two additional tracks not on the vinyl version I own...
To be honest I've never even heard "You Talk Too Much" or "Don't Make Our Love a Crime." Let me spotify 'em real quick and I'll let you know what I think..
(Time Passes...)
I like "Don't Make Our Love a Crime," the verses rock a little more than the other songs on the album, but that confident chorus fits right in...They bumped this for "Dancing the Night Away"? "You Talk to Me" rocks for sure, but it does seem a bit like a minor entry...I would have gladly traded "Y.O.Y.O.Y. " for this, though...
Alright, let's check out a video of Cheap Trick playing "Borderline" on the Alan Thicke Show...
Huh? Alan Thicke had a TV show? Besides "Growing Pains"?
Let's check it out...Enjoy...
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