"In Color"
©1977 CBS / Epic Records
Produced by Tom Werman

Hello There (1:41)
Big Eyes (3:09)
Downed (4:11)
I Want You To Want Me (3:11)
You're All Talk (3:35)
Oh Caroline (2:59)
Clock Strikes Ten (2:59)
Southern Girls (3:44)
Come On, Come On (2:39)
So Good To See You (3:36)

From January 1977 to January 1978, Cheap Trick played 179 concerts. They opened for acts ranging from Kiss and Queen to the Kinks and Kansas, their music diverse enough to appeal to each of those bands' audiences without quite fitting snugly with any of them.

This aversion to niche-rocking was Cheap Trick's great strength and also their weakness, the double-edged sword that Rick Nielsen, Tom Petersson, Robin Zander and Bun E. Carlos have swung with a mixture of pride and exasperation throughout their career. The band's debut album, Cheap Trick, released in early 1977, didn't help clarify matters. It was greeted enthusiastically by critics, more cautiously by the public, and virtually ignored by commercial radio programmers. In retrospect, it sounds like one of the essential albums of the mid-'70s, but back then it was deemed too hard for popsters, too twisted even for head-bangers, and too diverse for all but the most open-minded listeners. What's more, the noisy mix-which the band preferred, by the way- may have obscured of of the quartets other strengths: Nielsen's gift for melody.

In Color, released in August 1977, was an attempt to redress the balance. Its ten songs - all Nielsen originals, two in collaboration with Petersson were packed into 30 no-frills minutes, the emphasis on concise songcraft and jangling choruses. The clean, crisp mix achieved by producer Tom Werman-which separates the individual instruments so that each can be heard clearly, with Zander's vocals prominently front and center-Is the opposite of the noisy wall of sound erected on Cheap Trick. The songs, too, are a departure from the darkly sarcastic Molotov cocktails of the debut. This time, the primary songwriting theme is what happens when boy meets girl in the back seat of a convertible.

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