Get Down With Your Funky Self - "Clock Strikes 10"

Tweet

Once again, it’s time to get down, as in, let’s all get together and have a good time. These are songs with “Get down” in the lyrics. We’ve been hitting a lot of dance songs, obviously, but today’s offering is a frantic power pop rocker, courtesy of Cheap Trick - “Clock Strikes 10.” “Gonna get down, gonna get on down” sings Robin Zander on “Clock Strikes 10,” which is from Cheap Trick’s second album, 1977’s In Color. The song, to paraphrase critic Robert Lawson, brings back fun, mid-60’s pop tunes. Despite its fast pace, the tune does sort of conjure up images of sock hop fun, as in “Hey kids, this is Burt Smiley, and our Cavalcade of Music is coming to your town!” While it’s not the final track on In Color, the band often uses it to close their live shows. It was released as a single, in Japan, where it hit #1, and, with the Japanese success of the follow-up singles, “I Want You to Want Me” and “Surrender” paved the way for their live Cheap Trick at Budokan album (their most commercially successful album to date,) which finally broke the band in the U.S. (it took a live album recorded in Japan to get us to take notice.) This is second-generation power pop at its finest. Link is to the studio album version (the live version from At Budokan seems to be the definitive version, but I went with the original:)