Cheap Trick – The Flame

Cheap Trick’s Guitarist Hated Their Only No. 1 So Much He Ground the Demo Cassette Under His Boot Heel — Then It Saved the Band’s Career

The first time Rick Nielsen heard “The Flame,” he yanked the cassette out of the boom box and ground it under his boot heel on the floor of a Los Angeles studio. Cheap Trick’s guitarist and chief songwriter wanted nothing to do with a power ballad handed to the band by outside writers — it was everything he thought Cheap Trick wasn’t. He had to be talked into recording it. A few months later, “The Flame” became the only No. 1 hit of Cheap Trick’s entire career, the song that dragged them out of a decade-long commercial freefall and put them back on the radio. “Guess that shows how much I know,” Nielsen admitted afterward.

Keep watching: Cheap Trick – I Want You to Want Me

The story behind that resentment starts with desperation. After the triumph of 1979’s Cheap Trick at Budokan, the Rockford, Illinois band had spent most of the 1980s in a slump, with single after single failing to reach the Top 40. By the time sessions began for their tenth album, Lap of Luxury, original bassist Tom Petersson had rejoined, but Epic Records had lost faith in the band’s commercial instincts and insisted they record material from outside songwriters — a humbling demand for a group whose identity was built on writing its own quirky, punchy power pop. “It was tough working with other writers,” Nielsen later said. “But it was a lesson for us.”

“The Flame” wasn’t even written for them. British songwriters Bob Mitchell and Nick Graham — the latter a former member of the rock band Atomic Rooster — had written it in late 1987 for English singer Elkie Brooks, who turned it down. Their demo made its way to Don Grierson, an Epic executive who’d recently helped revive the careers of Heart and Aerosmith. Grierson brought Cheap Trick two ballads and let them pick: “The Flame,” or a Diane Warren song called “Look Away.” The band didn’t love either, but chose “The Flame” — and “Look Away” went to Chicago, where it also went to No. 1, meaning Grierson had handed two future chart-toppers to two different bands in a single meeting.

Recorded One Reluctant Member at a Time

Producer Richie Zito had to coax the song out of a band that didn’t want to play it. “The band didn’t want to do it, so we had some pretty good arguments over it,” he recalled. “We recorded it one guy at a time because the band wasn’t happy about it.” Zito started with Robin Zander and a keyboard player alone, betting that if the song was going to work, it would be on the strength of Zander’s voice. It was the right call. Zander’s soaring, anguished vocal — selling lines like “You were the first, you’ll be the last” with total conviction — turned a song the band saw as formulaic melodrama into something genuinely affecting. Released as the lead single from Lap of Luxury in 1988, “The Flame” climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July, holding for two weeks, and also topped the charts in Canada and Australia while reaching No. 3 on the US Mainstream Rock chart. It pushed the album to platinum, the band’s best showing since their heyday, and the follow-up — a cover of Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel” — reached No. 4, giving Cheap Trick the one-two comeback punch they needed.

The Outlier That Became the Hit

There’s a deep irony in “The Flame” being Cheap Trick’s signature chart achievement. This was the band whose biggest cultural footprint had been “I Want You to Want Me,” the irresistibly bratty live version from Budokan that defined their power-pop appeal, and “Surrender,” the kind of smart, sideways rock anthem Nielsen wrote in his sleep. “The Flame” was none of that — a lush, earnest ballad with no irony, no wink, the one hit in their catalog not written or co-written by Nielsen. Fans who’d followed the band for a decade spotted it instantly as an outlier, since Cheap Trick generally avoided exactly this kind of straight-faced sentiment. And yet Zander’s performance made it theirs; he later had a guitar modified with a seventh string to better mimic the recorded sound when playing it live. Over time, even Nielsen came around — in 2021 he called it a “terrific song,” clarifying that his frustration had been about it being forced on a band that had already recorded a dozen of their own tracks, not about the song itself. More than three decades on, “The Flame” endures as a staple of ’80s-ballad radio and a permanent fixture of Cheap Trick’s live show — proof that sometimes the song you fight hardest against is the one that saves you.