Rick Nielsen

“The Ramones were American, and I knew about them, and I thought they were interesting. But they were like a pop band to me.”

“The song 'Hello There' was written because we never got a soundcheck. 'Hello There' was our soundcheck.”

“We toured with Deep Purple a number of times.”

“I could have moved anywhere I wanted to. But for family reasons, I stayed in the Midwest.”

“I'm a normal person. I don't see where people come off saying I'm crazy.”

“We always record with the whole band. That's key to capturing the feel, especially trying to get a good basic track.”

“There's no rush to ever put out a new Cheap Trick record. We put it out when we feel like it.”

“I love to be the loudest thing in the room.”

“My parents were opera singers. I didn't want to play opera because I wasn't good enough. I didn't want to play their music; I wanted to play the music that I wanted to play, and I'm so lucky that today I get to play that music, even though I don't like every song I write.”

“If you can make it in Rockford, you can make it anywhere.”

“I feel like such an idiot... you know, that our band didn't break up just so we can re-form and become more and more popular.”

“It's an honor that people give a crap about us. We're in a rock band; we're not supposed to be treated with any respect.”

“Whenever we tell the truth, nobody believes us. We lie, and people take it as etched-in-stone fact.”

“You've got to work hard and have luck. Luck only enters in if you do work hard.”

“In 1977, I had Paul Rivera hotrod six Fender Deluxes for me. At that time, a lot of studio guys in L.A. were using those - not so much live guys but studio guys. They had terrific tone and great technique, and I was like, 'Well, I like having terrific tone even though I don't have any technique.'”

“I was the Richard Gere non-lookalike in Illinois.”

“We're Cheap Trick, and the majority of people know about three songs, and the real huge fans know about eight. There are 292 songs people have never heard.”

“Our band is rock n' roll. We were never just a studio band trying to make everything perfect. It was never supposed to be perfect. It was supposed to be cool.”

“To me, a day off is sitting at a piano or with a guitar and writing.”

“We played New Year's Eve in Los Angeles, maybe 1978, opening for Kansas or somebody. Driving to the hotel after the gig, we came on KLOS. It was like, 'All right! We're in L.A., we just played a big gig, and we're on the radio!' That was the start of something big.”