Cheap Trick: New LP + “Sgt. Pepper’s” Disc

"It's kind of like a trilogy." - Rick Nielsen, speaking to BLURT.

By Fred Mills

It's not just a cheap trick: the mighty Cheap Trick is laying plans to be the hippest thing happening this summer, with a new studio album set to drop June 23, a song on in the new Transformers film, a summer tour with Def Leppard and (urk!) Poison - well, one-third of that bill is hip, but that bill will certainly PAY the bills - and, possibly, a concert disc from their 2007 Hollywood Bowl performance where they covered the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's.

Regarding the new album, The Latest will be sold as a CD, LP and - get this - 8-track, exclusively at Amazon.com for the first month. The band is already taking pre-orders; details at CheapTrick.com. It's the followup to 2006's Rockford.

Speaking to BLURT several months ago prior to naming the album, guitarist Rick Nielsen disclosed that the record was already finished, joking, "It's called The One After This Next One. No, I don't have a title for it yet." Clearly he was on the right track, however, as "The Latest" seems to be a reasonable evolution from "The One After This Next One."

Nielsen paused to laugh, then added, "It's kind of like a trilogy: 3 songs, 3 songs, 3 songs. Then 1 song. So it's not a real triology - it's our bad math version of a trilogy."

In a report filed today by Billboard.com, drummer Bun E. Carlos observed, "We wanted to make a record that sounded like 2009, get something that sounds like us this year." Nielsen weighed in as well, saying, "I think it seems like we kinda grew up but didn't too old, 'cause musically there's a lot of different aspects to it. When you hear something like ('Sick Man of Europe'), you think, 'This can't be the same guys.' It sounds too energized for what people expect from somebody who's been around as long as we have...But musically I think it sounds like we grew up a bit."

 Meanwhile, news about the Hollywood Bowl recording was initially posted at Billboard.com then subsequently removed for reasons not clear - possibly because the group hadn't prepared an official announcement yet. Here's the original Billboard text as it appeared prior to being deleted:

The group is also planning to release some sort of document from its 2007 Hollywood Bowl performance of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" but is not ready to announce it yet. That performance, a 40th-birthday tribute to the classic album, featured such guest vocalists as Aimee Mann on "Fixing a Hole" and Joan Osborne on "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."