Bun E, Carlos is veiled in a wreath of cigarette smoke. "You can find just about anything you want right in Rockford," he says.
He's taking about rare records, which he collects----everything from Johnny Burnette to Eno. He has over 1000 items stored at his parents' house in Rockford, Illinois. Wherever he travels, he carries an assortment of bootleg cassettes, out-of-print albums and traders' catalogs; his first stop in Tokyo was a record store. Rock and roll isn't' just a job for Bun E.---it's his favorite pastime.
"And it sure beats being a roofer," he laughs, warming to the conversation. A roofer?
"Yeah, helping my dad," he replies. Carlos' father, Mr. Carlson Sr., is the prosperous proprietor of a roofing company in Rockford. (Rolling Stone contacted Mr. Carlson's roofing company to confirm the true identity of Bun E. Carlos. A Larry Carlson told us that he had heard of a Brad Carlson, but when asked if Brad is Cheap Trick's drummer, he said slyly, "Oh NO, Bun grew up in Panama, and his father was instrumental in the building of the Panama Canal.") "My parents were really strict, real religious---no drinking, no smoking, church on Sundays. But there was lots of music in the house, because my mom and dad both played all sorts of instruments. And we all belonged to church choir."
Carlos smiles a little sheepishly; he IS shy---it's no pose. When I sidled into the empty seat next to him on the plane from Tokyo to Osaka, the first thing he did was apologize for the copy of Gallery on his lap ("It belongs to the roadies"). Up close, he has a baby-faced innocence that doesn't show up in his press photos. Nice Midwestern family, Sunday school, chaperoned dates---how in the world did Carlos get started in rock and roll?
"I was thirteen," he explains, lighting up another cigarette. "And I was in a band called the Pagans. We had a local hit in Rockford, a Beatles cover. My mom was real upset. 'People will grab you and do terrible things to you,' she said. So my sister would drive us all to gigs in the next town."
Carlos attended college for a while, then spent three months in Italy, hoping to avoid the draft. When he came back to Rockford, he went to work for his farther for a while, then hooked up with Rick Nielsen and Tom Petersson, who were about to move to Philadelphia and start a band. Carlos followed them, and the three (plus Robert "Stewkey" Antoni of Todd Rundgren's Nazz) played local clubs under the name Sick Man Of Europe. After a year and a half of getting nowhere, Carlos, Petersson and Nielsen returned to Rockford.
"Everybody back home said to me, "You're playing with RICK NIELSEN? He's such a jerk!" Last year I sent out all my I-told-you-sos." He grins and starts telling stories about the early days, when Cheap Trick was scrounging around the club circuit.
"We had some great times. Sometimes Ken [Adamany] would hire us to play back-up for acts that were coming to his club. We played behind [Chuck] Berry, Bo Diddley---sometimes we just barely knew all the chord changes." Carlos smiles at the memory; the rock and roll of the Fifties has been a major influence on his drumming style. His featured spot in Cheap Trick's set comes during a cover of Fats Domino's "Ain't That A Shame."
"And there were the crazy nights Cheap Trick would play clubs. The late sets got pretty rowdy. There was the 'Carnival Game.' I'd start up a little shuffle and Rick would take the mike: 'Ladies and gentlemen...welcome to the Cheap Trick Carnival. Tonight, we're asking for volunteers---do I have a young lady in the audience? Well step right up, and you'll win a prize if I fail to guess your weight within five pounds. Just step right up. Now in order to guess your weight, you'll have to sit...on...my...face...!'"
It looks like a toad tongue, or maybe a section of rat intestine. "Mmmmmm...tasty. Try it," Rick Nielsen offers, holding a slimy, unidentified tidbit on the end of his chopsticks and waving it in front of my face.
"Uuuuuuuuuuhhhhhh," I cringe in disgust. Rick knows a vulnerable audience when he sees one, and continues. "Hey, this reminds me of a television show we saw in Japan last year. There was a guy performing in this amateur talent hour and he had this live eel. And he started to tear it with his teeth and eat it raw!" He licks his lips. By now, I'm doubled over, laughing hysterically. "And all the veins and blood were dripping out of his mouth, stuck in his teeth..."
Gross. But also very funny. Nielsen has a gift for this sort of tasteless, adolescent humor, and it's reflected in his lyrics. Cheap Trick, the first LP, contains a song called "The Ballad Of TV Violence." The song was originally titled "The Ballad Of Richard Speck," and was acted out onstage with Nielsen in the role of mass murderer. Violence, suicide and teenage sex are also favorite Nielsen themes, but they're all treated with sarcastic delight.
"Yeah, I have to go back and put myself in the head of a fourteen-year-old for some of the songs," he admits in a rare moment of seriousness. (Although Nielsen won't tell his age, he is approximately thirty-three, according to informed sources). "But for others, I jump ahead and write from the perspective of a fifty-year-old. I have one called 'Oh Claire.' It's a romantic song about a couple who marry and grow old together..."
"Sounds like The Beatles' 'When I'm 64.'"
"Yeah, but in the end, the guy dies of a heart attack."
"Well, yes, I admit that Rick's lyrics are a bit strange. I'm not one to venture what goes on inside Rick's mind. He's got his father's sense of humor."
Mrs. Ralph Nielsen, a pleasant, motherly sounding woman, pauses for a minute. She's calling from Nielsen's Music Store in Rockford, an establishment that Mr. Nielsen, a former opera singer, has owned for twenty-three years. Rick is their only son.
"What was Rick like in high school? Oh, for goodness' sake. We always had them in our garage. I can remember the noise. It rattled the glasses in the kitchen when I was trying to do the dishes. The band was called the Phaetons. Rick was still in high school, but I have a felling that he was not in high school as much as he told us he was. I used to sit in that kitchen and think, 'Oh dear, will I ever live through this!' Now I run the gift section of the music store---we sell Cheap Trick T-shirts, posters, that sort of thing. And I have five rock concerts under my belt," she adds proudly.
"Did Rick show any signs of musical talent when he was growing up?" I ask.
"Well," she says quickly, "of course his dad had all sorts of instruments around the house. Rick played drums and flute. Let me think...Oh yes! Here's a funny story. When Rick was six years old, we took him to Dallas to hear his father sing. And the accompanist hit a wrong note. After the show, backstage, Rick blurted out, ' You made a mistake!' In front of everybody! Everyone was quite embarrassed."
"Why didn't you just come out and say you were four guys from Rockford, Illinois? Why did you adopt this air of mystery?"
"Did we do that?" asks Rick innocently. We're riding on the Shinkansen, the fastest train in the world. Outside the window, trees and houses whoosh by at 120 mph. "Well, actually, what are you gonna say? All right, here are four superstars, and one night onstage after Bo Diddley drank root beer and ate beans, I played guitar while he farted across the room."
"No, but you did put, 'Bun E., born in Venezuela...Rick and Tom met in Europe..."
"Well, what I said was the truth. You can't make up everything. I WAS born in Chicago, and as a matter of fact, Tom and I tried to start the band in---hey! That bio was written by a writer, you know. We didn't have our names at the bottom of the thing." Nielsen sounds irritated, a little defensive.
"In your interviews, you didn't exactly try to set things straight."
"Well yeah..."
"And in 'Surrender,' you sing, 'Surrender, surrender, but don't give yourself away....'"
"Well, yes, but...."
He turns my tape recorder off. In the ensuing conversation, Nielsen explains that he wants his home life kept separate from his rock and roll character.
"Look," he says when the tape is running again. "I'm a really normal guy. You know our song, the one that goes, 'It wasn't easy, it was hard as hell...Never worked so hard, had so much pain.' That's really what Cheap Trick is all about: work hard, keep trying. Everybody in the band has that stick-to-it-iveness."
For the first time during the tour, Nielsen is serious, absolutely straight. a rock and roll Horatio Alger: work hard, stick to it, get a gold record. But for his outlandish attire, he could be a traveling salesman from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The guy who spends Monday through Friday wearing out shoe leather to push his product, then turns into the life of the party on Saturday night. And sneaks a whoopee cushion under his hostess' sofa.
"Excuse me. I'm sorry. You Cheap Trick staff? You give this to Ro-been prease?"
Giggles. Red Faces. Dozens of preteen and teenage girls have staked out the lobby of the Osaka Grand Hotel, which has been decorated for the occasion with a large billboard that reads: WELCOME CHEAP TRICK TO OSAKA. So much for security. The girls tend to cluster in groups of three: two gigglers to one confident first-year English student. They are polite, discreet and persistent. They're behind me in the gift shop. They're at my elbow by the magazine stand. They're waiting outside the ladies' lounge. There is no escape; always three girls, five or six feet behind me, waiting to zero in on the "Cheap Trick lady." By the time I sidle over the lunch counter in the hotel coffee shop, I'm loaded down with three handmade dolls, four sacks of chocolate candy, five tins of sourballs and a half-dozen letters, all for Rick-ka, Tom-ma and Ro-been.
I order lunch, open my notebook and try to look busy so they'll leave me alone. They don't. They've learned to persevere; it's not easy to be a rock and roll fan in Japan. Concert tickets are expensive, around fifteen U.S. dollars, and the demand for seats is so great that tickets are routinely sold through a mail lottery system. That's only half the battle. Last year, a fan was killed during a Ritchie Blackmore concert in Sapporo---literally crushed in the press of an excited crowd. Fifty others were injured. Since then, Japanese authorities have cracked down on rock and roll. Last night at Cheap Trick's Budokan concert, security guards---one for every twenty fans---patrolled the aisles, insuring that no one got out of hand or out of his or her seat. You're not allowed to dance or even stand up; concerts have become a test of an adolescent's capacity for frustration. What happens to all that throttled energy? Last night I caught a twenty-five foot paper streamer a girl threw at the stage; its entire length, back and front, was covered with the following message, painstakingly handwritten over and over again, hundreds of times: "Robin, I love you and want to devote my life to you." How many self-abnegating hours had it taken to complete?
"Ah, but the kids are the ones who control the situation," an older Japanese man assured me. "All parents want their children to study hard to get into the best universities. So they spoil the children. Kid say: 'Give me money for Cheap Trick ticket, or I don't study for exams.' Parent is helpless."
Not exactly. When the Bay City Rollers came to Japan in 1977, the entrances to concert halls were barricaded---by school teachers. They stopped students and confiscated their tickets, and at least one was suspended from school for having attended a concert. It sounds like a modern-day "American Hot Wax," and in a way, it is. Japan's booming economy provides young people with money to spend; Western influences are eroding traditional family roles. Rock and roll has become the battleground for a struggle between generations, much as it was in America twenty years ago. And Cheap Trick is a leading beneficiary.
Without even realizing it, Rick Nielsen created an image that was perfect for the Japanese rock and roll audience. His lyrical nose-thumbings ("Mom and Dad are rolling on the couch...Got my KISS records out") are funny in English because they're parody. But in translation, the tongue-in-cheek effect is lost; to Japanese, it must seem as if Nielsen is being naughty in a way they'd like to be, but wouldn't dare.
Zander and Petersson, on the other hand, are perfect sex objects for a nation of painfully shy teenage girls. As Music Life's Rue Togo told me, "Japanese girls don't like macho. Robin and Tom are friendly. Japanese girls are not so grown up about sex...it's just imagination, you know?"
Imagination---perhaps. Keiko and Etsuko have been at every restaurant, radio station, concert hall and on every train and plane we've traveled on so far this tour. On the way back upstairs to my hotel room, we bump into each other, and they greet me like an old friend. They are slightly older than most Cheap Trick fans---Keiko is sixteen, Etsuko eighteen---and their dress betrays them to be several stages beyond their school-uniform-and anklet-sock set. I'm overcome with curiosity: are they groupies? Students? How can they afford to follow us everywhere, and how do they find out where we are?
Etsuko is cagey about answering questions. After a few minutes of halting, confused conversation, I gather that their parents have given them each $1000 to follow Cheap Trick to the far corners of Japan., Etsuko's father, it develops, is a top executive with National Panasonic. There's irony for you. While he helps his company steal a share of the American electronics market, Cheap Trick is stealing his daughter.
"But how do you know exactly where we're going to be in every city? The travel plans are secret---how do you find us?" I ask them. Keiko turns to Etsuko, whispers a few words in Japanese and shakes her head. "Come on," I wheedle, "you can tell me." Another conference, then Keiko smiles knowingly. "Intuition."
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