He’s a real vocalist, he’s not a shouter or a copycat singer. “All the other singers we had were capable, but they weren’t the interpreters that Robin was. “Robin is the singer I’ve always looked for to sing my songs,” Nielsen recalled. It was then that Nielsen extended an invitation to Zander to join Cheap Trick. His current group eventually got off the ground fronted by former singer Randy “Xeno” Hogan, who left the band shortly after its formation. And while The Phaetons morphed into The Grim Reapers (where Nielsen first met future bass-playing bandmate Tom Petersson), the guitarist’s trip to Cheap Trick included a brief stint replacing Todd Rundgren in Nazz and in the short-lived band Sick Man of Europe. Those compositional chops have roots in both the British Invasion sensibilities of groups like the Fab Four, Stones, Yardbirds, Who and The Move and the rich trove of blues legends plying their trade in Nielsen’s childhood Chicago backyard. “There are all these guitar whizzes around - I’m not one of them.” “I was self-taught and I still think of myself more as a songwriter than a guitar player,” he said. “I didn’t know how to play, but I knew a right note from a wrong note,” he quipped.Īnd while Nielsen’s love of the instrument has led to his amassing an impressive guitar collection that includes a five-neck axe, he’s modest about his guitar playing ability. Tired of having to get up from behind his kit to teach his group’s guitarists the proper chords for the Stones and Beatles covers his group was performing, he eventually switched to guitar.

By the time he was 13, the younger Nielsen was a drummer in The Phaetons, his first school band. to Rockford, where they opened a music store. For Nielsen, his musical path started out being the son of opera singers who moved the family from the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst, Ill. It seemed an apropos song.”ĭependably consistent might be the best way to describe Cheap Trick. We decided to do (‘Gimme Some Truth’) so John Lennon could get all the credit and all the criticism. “These are songs that we’d written over a period of time, including during the last four years of the last administration - it’s about how to be optimistic in a pessimistic world. “We’re not a political band, but we talk about politics amongst ourselves,” he explained.

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