Snare Tactics: Hello There

A not-at-all consistent-but-hopefully-ongoing exploration of songs I love

“Hello There” (Cheap Trick, Track 1 from In Color, 1977)

When I was nine years old in the late summer of 1995, one of the janitors from church started taking myself and my older brother to Oakland Athletics baseball games. One of my parents would drop us off in the church parking lot, where Kyle would meet us, herd us into his red Honda Civic, and after a quick stop at 7-Eleven, we’d be off to the races, making the one-hour drive from San Jose to the Coliseum in time for batting practice.

Kyle, who was a far-seeming twenty-seven years old at the time, introduced us to many a music groups on the way up to Oakland. We began each drive by listening to Ozzy Ozbourne’s “Crazy Train,” and occasionally listening to the rest of Blizzard of Ozz. We dove deep—very deep—into Van Halen (the Roth era was of particular focus). We also listened to more niche acts like Stray Cats (Brian Setzer pre- “Jump, Jive and Wail”) and The Paladins.

He also introduced us to Cheap Trick.

“Hello There” is the first track of Cheap Trick’s second album, In Color. The band has more well-known songs—“Surrender,” “Dream Police,” “I Want You to Want Me,” among them—but something about how imagination is sparked whenever I hear this song makes it one of my favorites.

“Hello There” is a lightning bolt of a song. It’s a tight 100 seconds that calls to mind punk and crunch and humor and fun. I’ve long-thought the song itself would make for an excellent opening to a movie—like something Emerald Fennel or early-90’s Scorcese would incorporate at the top of their film, the main credits filling the screen in blocky, ostentatious lettering, as brash and as brazen as possible.

When “Hello There’s” opening guitar riff shreds through the speakers, I imagine the sultry pair of lips from the VHS cover of The Rocky Horror Picture Show zooming to the front of the screen, scaling up in some sort of lovingly old-fashioned way, and then singing out this song as if it was the beginning of a rock opera, a la The Who’s Tommy or Rush’s 2112.

I was going to say “Hello There” is a “take-no-prisoners” tune, but somehow, I feel like Cheap Trick would take all prisoners. They would take all the orphans and widows, all the tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free. After all, the lyrics of the song itself are composed of nothing but polite greetings and earnest solicitations:

Hello there, ladies and gentlemen
Hello there, ladies and gents, are you ready to rock?
Are you ready or not?

Hello there, ladies and gentlemen
Hello there, ladies and gents, are you ready to rock?
Are you ready to rock?

Would you like to do a number with me?
Would you like to do a number with me?
Would you like to?
Would you like to?
Would you like to do a number with me?

Cheap Trick’s drummer, who went by the name Bun E. Carlos, looks a bit like the lead actor from Breaking Bad, which is to say he actually looks like the guy who created Breaking Bad, a guy who, on a good day, would apologize for turning in a library book two days past its due date, and who, on a bad day, would steal all the office equipment supplies and sell them out of the trunk of his car while also making some noxious kind of moonshine whose secret ingredient is the ink from the industrial-sized tri-color printing cartridge.

All of that ramble is preamble, however, for my ode to Carlos’ snare drum.

The snare drum’s not here to mess around: bright and sharp not a whole lot of reverb. It’s got a sort of a treble ‘clap’ nature to it, but it also retains enough of a foundational ‘thwack’ to it to still have an impact. While the opening guitar riff “Hello There” grabs your ear, it’s Carlos’ snare, coming in fast on the heels of the riff, that calls your body and mind to attention.

On a personal note, what I as a drummer also love about the song are how the hi-hat is wide open, its slobbering mouth careening and teetering as Carlos bashes the snot out of it. I also adore how the flams are clearly audible and discernible. During the quarter-note tom flams that lead into the bridge, I can clearly see Carlos going left to right across the toms, “2-3-4,” painting his drums like a banner of love.

“Hello There” simultaneously possesses a sonic sneer and smile. It’s a confrontation and welcome, all at once. And maybe that’s what makes it deeply punk (Coming from a guy who doesn’t have a stereotypically punk bone in his body). What I mean to say is, the song seems sincere in its declaration as well as its invitation, and in our current age of all-consuming algorithms and rapidly shrinking musical palettes, the loving both-ness of “Hello There” seems to be in short supply.

I wanted to write about “Hello There” because music captivated me at a young age, and thirty-odd years later, it still does. I wanted to write about something I love in order to put love into the world, and I wanted to explore why music does what it does to me:

Why does my interiority grow larger when I listen to music? Why do drums seem to fill the caverns of my soul? Why does my soul suddenly seem to have caverns and cathedrals in the first place? How did they get there? Did someone build them on purpose? And why and how are they so lovingly satiated by the percussive affections of drums?

Certain theological ideas have baked into them the idea that a moment in time is a portal to something outside of time itself—is that accurate? What kind of phenomenon is that? Is that a nameable thing? If it is, I don’t want to find out the name for it. I’d rather spend my life stumbling and reconnoitering around the outskirts of the term itself, happening upon a different region each time and describing it as I encounter it, each engagement different than the last.

All that to say, “Hello There” is a kind of portal for me—it is liminal space, 100 everlasting seconds, a gateway to a placeless place and timeless time, always starting and never-ending. The story has always just begun. The show has always just started.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock, asking, “Would you like to do a number with me?”