In the beginning, Cheap Trick was lovable because they tried to pull off the toughest trick in the book: making rock that was both bonehead hard and intelligently witty. Rick Nielsen aspired to nothing less than the kind of working-class-hero reputation he'd found in role models like Pete Townshend and John Lennon. In the band's finest moments—Heaven Tonight, In Color and, especially, the awesome in-concert version of "Surrender" that's the centerpiece of Cheap Trick at Budokan — you can hear his absolute joy at discovering that such an approach worked. The live "Surrender" isn't rock & roll at the edge, but way past it. Cheap Trick sings and plays this nonsense story
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(which isn't really nonsense) with the same fervor that the Beatles brought to the live "Twist and Shout" on
The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. And for a lot of the same reasons, which boil down to one: triumph.
For better or worse, "Surrender" also had the effect of raising the stakes: Cheap Trick must now deliver on the promise of their first three studio albums. While there's no question about Nielsen & Company's stature among American hard-rock bands—these guys are among the brightest ever — there are some doubts about what they can do with their potential. Dream Police is an unsatisfactory record mostly because it ducks such issues in favor of reworking familiar territory. (Perhaps if Cheap Trick at Budokan had been released in Japan only, as originally intended, this wouldn't be the case. Yet the group has had as much time to deal with the consequences of accidental success as its listeners have.)
Rick Nielsen has never been shy about letting his sources show, but maybe he's gone too far here. You can actually work Dream Police like a puzzle, ascribing a specific antecedent to almost every vocal and instrumental idea. The title track, for example, simply revisits "Surrender" with Ray Davies-style singing. "The House Is Rockin' (with Domestic Problems)" is derived from the dense, chordal rock of the late-Sixties Beatles ("I Want You," "Helter Skelter"), with the added fillip of a guitar tag from "Thank You Girl." "Gonna Raise Hell," another variation on "Helter Skelter," features a string chart and some Abbey Road-inspired layered voices. "Need Your Love" is a better version of the Who meets Free than Bad Company has ever managed—but that's about all it is.
It's not that these songs are bad. (Only "Voices," a ballad from a band that has absolutely no facility for ballads, is disastrous.) Indeed, several of them—particularly "Dream Police," "Way of the World" and "I'll Be with You Tonight"—are nearly as good as the earlier ones in which Cheap Trick used similar stylistic devices.
Still, Dream Police isn't as exciting as Heaven Tonight or In Color. The reason has something to do with the LP's production style. Previously, producer Tom Werman and
Cheap Trick's last great album comes up a bit short in the "songs good enough to hear just before you die" category but it does have the title cut, the creepy-ish "Voices" and "Need Your Love" which at times sounds like Rick Nielsen was listening to a lot of Sabbath. Sabbath? Yes. Weird. The Tom Petersson-sung "I Know What I Want" is the other undeniable classic on here.
