Minimalism met rock in 1972 when Pete Townshend wrote “Baba O’Riley.” The song’s cyclic, arpeggiating riff was inspired by the work of avant-garde composer Terry Riley and became the driving rhythmic force behind “Baba O’Riley,” the anthem that is itself the launch pad for Who’s Next, the band’s landmark 1972 album.
Although it’s often described as a synthesizer line, Townshend created the riff on a Lowrey Berkshire Deluxe TBO-1 home organ by using its “Marimba Repeat” setting, which gives it the sort of synthetic, percolating rhythmic pulse associated with early electronic synthesizer music.
As hooks go, it’s a great one, grabbing listeners’ ears, pulling them in and holding them hostage for the track’s full five-minute length.
Producer Tom Werman was among the listeners captivated by Townshend’s synth-like line. As it turns out, he liked it so much that he took it for his own when recording a pair of hits for Cheap Trick later in the decade.
The idea first struck him while recording “Surrender,” from the group’s 1978 album, Heaven Tonight. Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen wrote the tune as a "rock nursery rhyme" about his own youthful perception of his parents' "weirdness.”
“I wrote it at home late one night,” he told Guitar Player. “I was playing an unplugged electric guitar, and I had a rhythm thing going on. Then I started singing to myself: ‘Mother told me, yes, she told me, I’d meet girls like you.’ It kind of sounded like a nursery rhyme to me, only it was a rock nursery rhyme for somebody in high school wearing a leather jacket.
“I wrote down lyrics as I went. It was all kind of stream of consciousness, but a lot of it was true. ‘Mommy’s all right, daddy’s all right, they’re just a little bit weird.’ Whose parents aren’t weird? My parents were weird.” (This from a guy who plays a five-necked guitar?)
While hearing Nielsen pound out the song’s opening chords on his electric guitar, Werman had an idea. Maybe it was the song’s theme of teenage alienation that brought the music of Pete Townshend to mind. After all, the producer said, “Pete Townshend was always my main musical inspiration.”
Whatever it was, Werman got it in his head to use Townshend’s “Baba O’Riley” riff behind Nielsen’s power chords. “I just plain stole it,” he admitted.
“I took the keyboard riff from ‘Baba O’ Riley’ by the Who and I put it in ‘Surrender,’ because it sounded good and it supported Rick’s signature riffs,” Werman tells Guitar Player. “That was my main contribution to it.”
The song made the perfect opener for Heaven Tonight, an album of power-pop tunes made with radio-friendly production that positioned Cheap Trick as a group ready for arenas.
“I just loved what we did with ‘Surrender,’” Werman says. “We were all excited about the track. It wasn’t a huge hit, but it got a lot of airplay.
“Normally the song that opens up side one of an album is your choice for the strongest song on the record, and the first song on side one of Heaven Tonight was ‘Surrender.’ But there could have been a lot of those, because there are so many good songs on the album.”
Released as a single in June 1978, “Surrender” got Cheap Trick in the Hot 100 — at number 62 — and helped push Heaven Tonight to number 48. In Japan, the album notched in at number 11. Executives at the Japan headquarters of their label, Epic, took note and decided to release Cheap Trick at Budokan, a live document of the group’s recent spring concerts at the Tokyo arena.
That, in turn, gave “Surrender” a boost months later when At Budokan was released in the U.S., in February 1979. The album had a slow-burn success, thanks to the radio hits “I Want You to Want Me” and the group’s cover of the Fats Domino hit “Ain’t That a Shame.”
By then, Werman and Cheap Trick were ready to release Dream Police, the group’s fourth studio album. The record had been completed for months but was left on the shelf while At Budokan rode the charts, setting the stage for what would be the group’s most commercially successful studio album.
Dream Police was the perfect statement of Cheap Trick’s musical intentions, featuring longer songs with more ambitious production, including orchestrations. And for the album’s title track, Werman once again took inspiration from the Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”
“That synthesizer riff turned up again in the song ‘Dream Police,’” he says. “It was almost the same thing, and was done in half-time.”
It also featured actual string players rather than a synthesizer.
“Rick did a real string chart for ‘Dream Police,’” Werman confirms. “I think that’s the only time we used real strings on any song, except I used double cello on ‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ to double the bass.
“That album was a big deal. Initially, Heaven Tonight sold about seven or eight hundred thousand, which was a big improvement over its predecessor, In Color, which had sold about three hundred thousand copies. Then Dream Police sold a little over a million, so we were on the way up.”
