Cheap Trick, which plays the last of four shows at Metro Sunday night, was emerging as a major band when it played four shows in June of 1979 at the International Amphitheatre. Here is an excerpt of then-rock music critic Lynn Van Matre’s review.
For Cheap Trick, a rock quartet from Rockford . . . it has been a case of the old cliche, “laughing all the way to the bank.” After five years together and four albums, the band’s most recent release, a live album made during a tour of Japan (where they are apparently as big as Godzilla), is currently hovering around the million-sold mark, while a single, “I Want You to Want Me,” is familiar to most Top 40 radio listeners.
Given that some of their songs border on parody, their large scale success in Japan is somewhat puzzling, though it’s obvious that it’s the band’s overall sound and carefully contrived appearance that’s the selling point. … It adds up to a lightweight one-note performance entertaining enough in its amiable silliness and reverb- heavy rock and roll, but puzzling in the degree of devotion it inspires in fans.
Cheap Trick … is like a line-drawn cartoon, superficial but capable of amusing. Their sound, which varies between rock and pop, with Zander handling most of the lead vocals, makes extensive use of electronic echo and delay techniques to achieve its crashing fullness that manages to be effective in large venues, though the music itself is competent rather than extraordinary.
And aside from Nielsen-whose goofy act really isn’t all that imaginative, its inventiveness extending no further than pouring a glass of cola on his headnone of the band are showmen in any sense of the word. Still, they’re no less than-but no more than-harmless fun.