Cheap Trick’s Last Top 40 Hit Wasn’t Enough To Satisfy Their Label

These days, you can be a long-running, extremely popular mainstream rock band without ever coming close to the pop charts with a single. That certainly wasn’t the case in the 70s and 80s, when record companies pressured their acts for hits.

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Cheap Trick acquiesced to those demands in the late 80s and enjoyed the biggest commercial success of their career. But they also found out how fickle label support could be when their last Top 40 hit wasn’t enough to make everyone happy.

Trick’s Treats

Rock fans who check out the track listing of any type of Cheap Trick greatest hits compilation will likely recognize most of the songs. These guys didn’t try to sneak anything by their audience. They came right at them with gleaming melodies, fetching musical hooks, and resonant lyrics. And they became a beloved band because of that approach.

Yet when you look at their history on the pop charts, especially in the first decade or so of their career, there’s not a ton of success there. Spurred on by the success of their live album Cheap Trick At Budokan and the Top 10 smash from that album, “I Want You To Want Me”, they managed four straight Top 40 hits in ’79 and ’80.

But beyond that, their singles either missed the charts entirely or scraped up against the Top 40 without making it. Epic Records, their label since the very beginning of their careers, wasn’t satisfied with critical plaudits. They wanted bigger sales, which required smash hit singles. And they demanded a change in approach.

Outside Writers Reluctantly Welcomed

The compromise that the band made with Epic is that they would work with outside writers for their 1988 album, Lap Of Luxury. Keep in mind that the band already had an ace in-house songwriter in guitarist Rick Nielsen. But it was either they accept this compromise or run the risk of losing their record deal.

Legend has it that when Rick Nielsen heard the tape of two songs Epic proposed as potential lead singles from Lap Of Luxury, he threw it across the room in disgust. That tape contained two future No. 1 singles, “The Flame” and “Look Away”. Cheap Trick recorded the first, and Chicago took the second.

The success of “The Flame”, in conjunction with a Top 10 cover of the Elvis Presley staple “Don’t Be Cruel”, helped Cheap Trick to their first platinum album in a decade. And it also gave the band enough clout to suggest that they get more artistic control on the follow-up.

“Falling” Slowly

On the 1990 album Busted, the writing credits were far more Cheap Trick-centric. And the first single, “Can’t Stop Falling Into Love”, came from Cheap Trick members Nielsen, Robin Zander, and Tom Petersson.

A power ballad somewhat in the vein of “The Flame”, “Can’t Stop Falling Into Love” showed that Cheap Trick understood what the market wanted from them at the time. The song performed well, landing at No. 12 on the pop charts. That was the fourth-biggest hit in the band’s career.

But, as it turned out, it didn’t satisfy the Epic overlords. Since the sales of Busted dropped off significantly compared to Lap Of Luxury, the label dropped the band. Cheap Trick recovered from that and has done a lot of amazing work since. But they never again hit the top 40 after “Can’t Stop Falling Into Love”.

Photo by David Redfern/Redferns