Album: Cheap Trick.
Year: 1976
I’m not a particularly big fan of Steve Albini. While he’s produced several records that I’ve loved, and came across as thoughtful – and walking it like he’s always talked it – in Sonic Highways, purists of any stripe have always been anathema to me. The world is compromise (and carnage.)
That said, there is one thing on which I would for sure agree with Mr. Albini: the awesomeness of Cheap Trick’s “He’s a Whore,” which Big Black covered relatively straight (and relatively awesomely) in the mid-1980s.
And why not? The absolute and utter highlight of Cheap Trick’s otherwise uneven (to me) first album, “He’s a Whore” features the most bone-crushing riff that Rick Nielsen will ever write, an impassioned performance from Robin Zander, and of course Bun E. Carlos driving through the whole thing like a trucker on the way to meet his truckstop whore.
Cheap Trick were decidedly not punk rock. They were too pop. The were too polished and stardom-oriented (the great album cover jokes with the pretty Robin Zander & Tom Peterssen on the front and Rick Nielsen & Bun E. Carlos relegated to the back doubled as marketing) to even remotely be considered as anything but as an adjunct to punk, but they weren’t a typical hard rock band, either.
Maybe that was because – like the punks – Cheap Trick were influenced by The Who. Neilsen’s solo in “He’s a Whore” was a microcosm of that approach: short, nasty, focused and more like a Pete Townshend series of almost-random chords than a Jimmy Page (or Mick Jones, heh) curlicue of notes. But – unlike the punks (OK, not The Clash) – they shared producers (and a major label) with Aerosmith & Ted Nugent.
But while you could slot Aerosmith & Ted Nugent in with the other big American hard rock acts of the eras, like Kiss and Blue Oyster Cult, Cheap Trick existed in a nether world that really was theirs alone.
Video for “He’s a Whore”
Video for Big Black’s “He’s A Whore”