Requested by Genevieve Broome.Gen requested this one knowing it was one of my most frequently performed covers, but she didn't know about my ace in the hole: having the basic tracks of Midlife Crisis performing a version of it back in August. Still took a bit of work, but it's always nice to have an excuse to post stuff where I'm playing with other musicians, to say nothing of an actual band.
That this song is so regularly covered by me is a little odd, considering that I didn't really get into Cheap Trick-- yet again one of those bands popular in my younger days whose hits I never heard-- until relatively recently, in 2000, when I picked up a budget box of their first three albums in, of all places, London, alongside a bunch of budget Jam stuff and the requisite rare Magazine CDs &c. By that time I knew them by reputation and was aware of "I Want You to Want Me", but I did't expect to be quite as taken as I was. "Surrender", which I hadn't even known was a single, leapt out at me as a song that I really wanted to learn to perform, which was a rarity in those days: I was barely performing at all and still three years away from starting to posit myself as a rock singer/frontman/occasional solo performer. I was just really fascinated by the bigness of the chord and the strangeness of the verses butting up against the anthemic choruses. I've recently heard someone cite the lyric as "bad", which bowls me over... I think it's flat-out brilliant, and the standby explanation of it being about a kid whose parents are cooler than he is doesn't even begin to scratch the surface.
Some strange things happen during this recording... the band was bum-rushed by a dog at one point, and my extemporaneous ad-libs don't go as far as they normally would, although I'm glad I was captured singing "got my Thunderhill records out". I almost never actually sing "KISS records", partly because I'm not overly fond of KISS but usually to namedrop another bad on the bill or a family concern (Eden's band Wye has taken the place of honor a few times as well).
Personnel:
MIDLIFE CRISIS
Rex Broome ~ lead vocal, guitar
Tom Heckman ~ bass, harmony vocal
Chris Dixon ~ drums
Recorded live in The Barage, Hooker Hollow Road, Keyser, WV, August 2010 by Tom
Mixed and edited by Rex, Minco Records, Silver Lake, CA, October 2010
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