Probabilistic Jukebox: "Stiff Competition" by Cheap Trick

Early color photograph titled "Children in the Tenement District" by Jack Delano, 1940

For me, Cheap Trick is all about the contrast of "ugly" and "pretty" (the two aspects that arguably make up the respective halves of power-pop). Cheap Trick's second album, In Color, had a picture of the band's two "pretty" members (Robin Zander and Tom Petersson) on the front, hiding the band's - uh - less photogenic dudes (Rick Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos) on the album's back cover. This was a good reflection of the band pretty-ing up their sound for their second record. The third record, Heaven Tonight, still features Zander and Petersson on the front cover, which has always bugged me - this is the album where the band found a balance of "power" and "pop", and I think Zander should be sharing the front cover with Rick Nielsen (the guy who wrote most of Cheap Trick's songs, incidentally).

These were my thoughts on Heaven Tonight when "Stiff Competition" popped up on the ol' jukebox. It's my third favorite song on the record, maybe - the open homage to Who's Next may not be totally original, but it was probably a gutsier move in 1978 than it looks like now. That Townsend-style riff is the backbone of the whole song, although there's no real verse/chorus divide here - instead, there's an acoustic bridge-like section after each verse. It's cool that the acoustic arpeggios in this section also have a distinctly Who-like sound, like bits of "Behind Blue Eyes" spliced into "Won't Get Fooled Again". The only aspect of the song that doesn't work for me is the lyric, particularly the line, "I screw you, you screw me, they screw us". It's not as edgy and cool-sounding as they probably thought it was at the time.

"Stiff Competition" by Cheap Trick