Cheap Trick named their current tour the All Washed Up Tour, because of course they did. This is a band that has spent fifty-plus years treating rock and roll with equal parts deadly seriousness and gleeful irreverence, and if you do not understand that the joke is the point, you have not been paying attention. They bring this tour to Seneca Niagara Resort & Casino on April 4, and Western New York should take notice.
The Case for Cheap Trick
Here is what the casual fan knows: “Surrender.” “I Want You to Want Me.” “Dream Police.” “The Flame.” A string of hits that dominated rock radio from the late seventies into the eighties, anchored by Robin Zander’s impossibly versatile voice and Rick Nielsen’s showmanship. Fair enough. Those songs are bulletproof — power pop perfection that has not aged a day.
Here is what the serious rock fan knows: Cheap Trick is one of the most important American rock bands of the twentieth century. Full stop. Before the term “power pop” had fully entered the lexicon, Nielsen and company were welding Beatles-grade melodic sophistication to a delivery system with the force of a freight train. The first four Cheap Trick albums — the self-titled debut through “Dream Police” — represent one of the great runs in rock history, and “At Budokan” remains the gold standard for live rock albums nearly fifty years after its release.
The Live Animal
Records are one thing. The stage is another, and this is where Cheap Trick separates from the pack. Nielsen alone is worth the price of admission — prowling the stage with whatever absurd custom guitar he has pulled from his legendary collection, tossing picks into the crowd with machine-gun frequency, grinning like a man who cannot believe he gets to do this for a living. The man is a showman of the highest order, and his guitar work — crunchy, inventive, deceptively sophisticated — drives the band with an energy that has not diminished one degree in five decades.
Zander’s voice is the other half of the equation. One of rock’s most underrated vocalists, he moves from a whisper to a scream with the kind of control that most singers lose by their second decade. At a Cheap Trick show, the vocal performance alone would justify the ticket. Paired with Petersson’s thunderous twelve-string bass — a sound so thick and rich it functions as its own gravitational field — and you have a three-piece sonic attack that hits harder than bands with twice the personnel.
Seneca Niagara: Up Close and Loud
The casino setting works in the audience’s favor here. Cheap Trick in an intimate room is Cheap Trick at maximum impact. There is no upper deck to reach, no distant lawn to project across. Every riff, every Nielsen stage antic, every moment where Zander leans into a chorus and the whole room locks in — it all lands at close range, which is exactly where this band does its most devastating work.
The All Washed Up Tour name is vintage Cheap Trick humor, and anyone who has seen them in the last decade knows the truth it mocks. Rock and Roll Hall of Famers since 2016, these guys play with the hunger and intensity of a band still trying to prove themselves. They do not need to. The catalog speaks for itself, the live show is ferocious, and fifty years in, Cheap Trick remains one of the greatest rock and roll bands America has ever produced.
Washed up. Right.