All The Feel Good You Ever Need Is Captured On Both Sides Of The First Cheap Trick Album

I heart being from the Midwest because to me, "being from the Midwest" means that you are capable of riding in the back of pickup truck, on a hot summer day, on a country road, cheap American beer in hand, and that's all you need. As if the universe collapsed back into a singularity of just you in the truck at that moment and completeness was completed: bliss, nirvana, pick a term. I left the Midwest for California because as a kid in a band in the late 80s, all the cool stuff happened in California: the weather better (truth), the women hotter (partial truth 😆), the music better (umm...) and if only you could get yourself in a van and drive to LA, all your dreams would manifest and life would be lived happily ever after. Well, shoot, I never even made it to California, I flirted with San Francisco, enough so to call on a few apartments, but then I asked a potential employer if I needed a car. The answer? "Kid, this is California, everyone has a car." As an alternative and like everyone else in the Midwest, I moved to Washington State, the poor person's California (and safer too, no hair bands and no women that David Lee Roth would have sung songs about) and this is home. But I will forever miss the Midwest and the polarization of folks (current Zeitgeist) pains me beyond belief because I lived in both worlds and seeking disagreement between the two seems so forced and artificial to humankind. Don't believe me? Pick two random people and put them in the same room with a six pack of beer between them and watch what happens. Face to face, people almost aways try to find what's common and harmonize with each other. 

OK, enough of that ^, don't have enough time today to solve the world's problems, but, yeah, Cheap Trick and their first album, there are no hits but in aggregate it's bliss, it's Midwestern joy at its best, it's a bottle of feel good that you can pour at any moment, and maybe in the 40 minutes it takes to listen to the whole thing, you can forget about polarization and think more about the back of that pickup truck.