“Pretty sickening”: How Cheap Trick beat Chicago to recording ‘The Flame’
Do you ever wonder how some songs wind up in the hands of certain artists when they’ve not written them themselves, but are more than capable of putting their songwriting abilities to use? It’s always a bit unusual to hear of a band that have historically penned their own material being given someone else’s work to perform, but despite Cheap Trick and Chicago having accomplished songwriters in their ranks, they were once both put in contention to record a song that ended up becoming a hit for the former.
Both bands operated within the same soft rock sphere, and both had previous success writing songs in this style in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. However, hits had become hard to come by for Cheap Trick and Chicago by the end of the ‘80s. As a result, both began accepting songs from other writers during this period in an effort to potentially score themselves chart success again, or else it might spell the end for both groups.
It wasn’t that they’d become dated; in fact, they’d almost tailored their sound to be suited to the mass market for the era, playing to the AOR and hair metal crowds while still continuing in the same vein as they had achieved their past successes. However, lineup changes resulted in diminishing returns for Cheap Trick, and they were adamant that they would return to the upper echelons of the charts in the US.
Former bassist Tom Petersson had left the band in the late ‘70s, when the band were really beginning to kick into gear, and it wasn’t until he rejoined that they found success once again with their sole US number one hit, ‘The Flame’. However, it wasn’t that Petersson had become a good luck charm for the band as such, as the decision to get the band to record the track wasn’t down to them at all, and had they had their own way, they wouldn’t have even gone near the song themselves.
It was thanks to Don Grierson, the then vice president of their record label, Epic, that ‘The Flame’ landed in their lap in the first place, as he’d been given two songs to hand out to his artists, and when he approached both Cheap Trick and Chicago, he gave Cheap Trick first dibs on which song they’d prefer. They didn’t particularly like either, but ‘The Flame’ seemed to work for them and helped them rise to the top of the charts for the first and only time in their career.
It had been written by Bob Mitchell and Nick Graham, with the initial intent that Elkie Brooks would perform it, but when she refused to sing it, it was passed over for someone else to attempt. ‘The Flame’ wasn’t the only song on Cheap Trick’s 1988 album, Lap of Luxury, the band hadn’t written that, and in retrospect, they’re far from pleased about the fact that their label were pressuring them into recording covers and songs by external writers in an effort to get a sniff at chart success.
Speaking to Songfacts about the fact that the band had been roped into recording power ballads, drummer Bun E Carlos voiced his discontent to the extreme. “They were all pretty sickening,” he explained. “It was a trend – they came and then they went. It was never the end of the world in my book.” While they could’ve ended up with the song ‘Look Away’, that song went on to also be a hit for Chicago, proving that even though the bands may not have liked the choices, Grierson was certainly an expert at picking out the right songs for Epic artists to record.
