Cheap Trick

The legendary 1970s chart toppers Cheap Trick revisit their most successful studio album, "Dream Police," more than 30 years after its original release. The hard-rockin' but delectably poppy quartet will perform songs from the platinum record, with orchestral help from the Bombastic Symphonic Philharmonic with Rhythmic Noise Mind Choir in 4D. Greek Theatre, 2700 N. Vermont Ave., Los Feliz. 7:30 p.m. Fri. $35-$75. (323) 665-5857. http://www.greektheatrela.com.

How best to celebrate the 35th anniversary of a beloved live album? By re-creating it onstage, of course. That's the approach being taken by Cheap Trick, which announced Thursday that it plans to play "Cheap Trick at Budokan," the power-pop veterans' 1978 concert classic, at two shows this month. On April 28, the band will play the John Varvatos boutique in New York, at the former address of the defunct punk club CBGB. Cheap Trick will then head west for a gig at L.A.'s El Rey Theatre on April 30. TIMELINE: Coachella and Stagecoach Both concerts are to re-create the show Cheap Trick played on April 28, 1978, at Tokyo's Budokan.

Cheap Trick is a much better band than its riches-to-rags tale would suggest: On New Year's Eve eight years ago, the quartet headlined the Long Beach Arena; a few blocks away on Sunday, Cheap Trick played Fender's--a room about one-tenth that size. The diminished popularity isn't a complete mystery. After late-'70s power-pop gems like the "Heaven Tonight" and "Live at Budokan" LPs, the band began releasing hit-and-miss records.

AUSTIN, Texas -- By many accounts the South by Southwest music festival is about discovering new talent: the fresh-faced indie-pop outfit, for instance, or the precocious laptop wizard just stepping beyond the walls of his bedroom. Dave Grohl doesn't share that view. On Thursday night, hours after delivering SXSW's keynote speech at the Austin Convention Center, Grohl and a handful of his famous friends took over Stubb's for what he described as the final performance by the Sound City Players.

How best to celebrate the 35th anniversary of a beloved live album? By re-creating it onstage, of course. That's the approach being taken by Cheap Trick, which announced Thursday that it plans to play "Cheap Trick at Budokan," the power-pop veterans' 1978 concert classic, at two shows this month. On April 28, the band will play the John Varvatos boutique in New York, at the former address of the defunct punk club CBGB. Cheap Trick will then head west for a gig at L.A.'s El Rey Theatre on April 30. TIMELINE: Coachella and Stagecoach Both concerts are to re-create the show Cheap Trick played on April 28, 1978, at Tokyo's Budokan.

For the most part, concert albums only hammer home the notion that you had to be there to fully appreciate the show. Cheap Trick's 1978 classic, "At Budokan," remains a glowing exception. As catchy and compelling as the Rockford, Ill., quartet's studio work was, the raw energy coursing through the Budokan recordings made for transcendent music; an electrifying collision between sublime pop and smoldering, gritty rock.

Like the Cars, Cheap Trick got off to an exceptionally promising start in the '70s, only to run out of creative gas, leaving it somewhat stalled along the side of the road when it comes to putting together the honor roll of great rock bands. The Midwestern group had witty, highly melodic songs with dressed-up arrangements that seemed to borrow equally from the power pop side of the Beatles and, remarkably, the harder, guitar-driven intensity of the Who.

Cast members from the Fox comedy series "That '70s Show," along with the band Cheap Trick, which recorded the show's new theme song, will appear today at 6:30 p.m. at the Wherehouse music store, 7127 Sunset Blvd. The event celebrates the program's new season and the release of the show's soundtrack album.

When the word comeback came up, Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen cracked up. The people at the only other occupied table in the small dining room of a West Hollywood hotel peered quizzically at the lanky, laughing man in the kooky cap and the kind of well-worn, ragtag outfit that most stars wouldn't dare wear in public. But Nielsen isn't the sort that frets about wardrobe.

Cheap Trick's popularity has ebbed and flowed over the years, but the band's playful lyrics and odd melodic twists have won the devotion of a fervent core of loyal fans. Those fans were so intent Friday night at the Universal Amphitheatre in celebrating the band's latest round of good fortune (the current "Lap of Luxury" album has gone gold) that the crowd stayed on its feet the entire concert.

“Rick Springfield, you have a song that people recognize after three frigging notes. Congratulations, Rick frigging Springfield,” Dave Grohl said on Thursday to his colleague in a new band celebrating the former Van Nuys recording studio Sound City. Springfield, for his part, looked tickled to be onstage at a sold-out Hollywood Palladium hearing praise from the Foo Fighters frontman seconds into his own 1981 hit “Jessie's Girl.” Grohl's friendly jibe - a mix of jealousy and bonhomie in the dark arts of rock hitmaking - showed the point of his entire Sound City Players project.

MUSIC Steve Lukather Best known as the guitarist for Toto, Lukather also is one of the world's top session men, having played on more than 1,500 records by artists such as Paul McCartney, Miles Davis, Cheap Trick, Alice Cooper and Aretha Franklin. Hear him in discussion about his lengthy career followed by a performance of some of his signature guitar licks. The Grammy Museum, 800 W. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles. 8 p.m. $15. (213) 765-6800. http://www.grammymuseum.org. Gold Panda The U.K. producer deftly blends crackly vinyl samples with ambient synths and a consistent ear for screwball melody.

The legendary 1970s chart toppers Cheap Trick revisit their most successful studio album, "Dream Police," more than 30 years after its original release. The hard-rockin' but delectably poppy quartet will perform songs from the platinum record, with orchestral help from the Bombastic Symphonic Philharmonic with Rhythmic Noise Mind Choir in 4D. Greek Theatre, 2700 N. Vermont Ave., Los Feliz. 7:30 p.m. Fri. $35-$75. (323) 665-5857. http://www.greektheatrela.com.

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I was supposed to go out and hear some music. I didn't know if it would be some clanging revelation, a sound I'd never heard before, or a blast from the past given new oomph by some young punks so in love with the big, crazy history of American music that they have to rip it open and devour it. I'm at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, the biggest, wildest annual gathering of melodic music-makers this nation knows, where old and new collide in an...

"We got something," Taylor Hanson of Tinted Windows sang Tuesday night at the Troubadour, "Yeah, we got something." There's no denying that: A new supergroup featuring veterans of Smashing Pumpkins, Cheap Trick, Fountains of Wayne and Hanson, Tinted Windows has a self-titled debut full of near-perfect power-pop songs, as well as a frontman who couldn't look better in his soccer-mom shag and tight white trousers. Yet more than anything else, Tinted Windows' first Los Angeles show emphasized what the band doesn't have -- namely, any collective sense of rock-star charisma.

Back in 1977, you only had to look at this album's cover art to realize that Cheap Trick was a band cut from a different cloth. On the front were the group's two pretty boys----singer Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson----sitting astride imposing motorcycles. Straddling puny motor-scooters on the back were drummer Bun E. Carlos and guitarist Rick Nielsen, who looked more like discombobulated mathematician/nerds than rowdy rock 'n' rollers.

Much to their delight, the members of Cheap Trick have found that lightning can, indeed, strike twice. Nearly a decade after their initial flash-in-the-pan success, the veteran Midwestern rockers have finally realized their long-harbored hopes for a comeback. Their latest album, "Lap of Luxury," is their highest-charting LP since 1979's "Dream Police." Their recent single, "The Flame," is their first No. 1 hit, ever. And, on their current U.S.

The Beatles have stood for so many things -- the creative flowering of the baby boom, the apex of classic rock, the voice of an international youth movement, the proof that pop music can be art, yadda yadda yadda -- that it can be hard to remember that John, Paul, George and Ringo were also a rock band. Like a chamber group or an early-music ensemble, a rock band has a particular structure and way of interacting.

ON TUESDAY, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney returned to Michigan, his native state, to announce that he is running for president. He delivered this earth-shattering news at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, posed between a model of the old Nash Rambler and the new Ford hybrid. The picture was meant to convey a message of "innovation and transformation," the motto of the Romney campaign. The venue had a local message too.