In the summer of 1978, Cheap Trick found success with the song “Surrender.” The opening track from the Illinois-based band’s Heaven Tonight album was their first song to break the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 62 on Sept. 2, 1978. It was followed by a popular live version that appeared on the iconic Cheap Trick at Budokan album the following month.
“Surrender” has been ranked as one of the greatest songs of all time by Rolling Stone. The outlet noted, “Trick provided the ultimate Seventies teen anthem in ‘Surrender,’ with a verse about a kid who catches his mom and dad getting stoned and making out to his Kiss records. Guitarist-songwriter Rick Nielsen’s secret? ‘I [had] to go back and put myself in the head of a 14-year-old.’”
Written by Nielsen, “Surrender” detailed a teen’s relationship with his “rock 'n' rolling" parents who got “weird” when the kids weren’t around. The song was inspired in part by Nielsen’s opera-singing mom and dad.
“I took stuff from my life and embellished it,” Nielsen told Uproxx in 2021. “Growing up, every kid I knew, their parents were weird. Whether they were hippies or straight or religious nuts or whatever, every parent is weird. 'Hey, you want to come over to my house?' 'No, your parents are weird. Do you want to come to my place?' No, no, your parents are weird!' You've got to know how to stretch the truth with your parents. You've got to listen to them, but you don't always have to heed it. That's 'Surrender': Don't give yourself away. Don't turn into one of them."
In an interview with Blender magazine, Nielsen said the lyrics came to him easily. “The first thing I got was the opening of the chorus: 'Mommy's all right, daddy's all right.' It just rolled off at one sitting,” he said in the interview, per Songfacts. “Those opening lines, 'Mother told me, yes, she told me I 'd meet girls like you,' that’s advice to the lovelorn, and obviously inspired by the old Shirelles hit 'Mama said that there'd be days like this.' It's a good way to start a song, if you can make it go with a chord progression."
He also noted that it was the “ultimate slap in the face” for parents to be rolling around listening to their kids’ Kiss records at that time. “Kiss was like the ultimate…’Oh my God, you can’t be listening to this,’” Nielsen said on Chris Makes a Podcast. “Ozzy Osbourne...Alice Cooper, It could have been any of those guys…but Kiss really fit the bill.”
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The live version of the song changed the game for the band
As the opening track on Heaven Tonight, "Surrender” got attention when it was first released in 1978, but it didn’t become a teen “anthem” until the live version followed. In a 2020 interview with Guitar Player, Nielsen recalled, “It was a turntable hit, but radio wasn’t really playing it. But when we performed it live, everybody thought it was this big chart hit. So when it finally came out on Budokan, it was like, 'There you go! That’s how we sound!'"
“The live version of 'Surrender' changed things for us,” the Cheap Trick legend added. “Now we weren't just an opening band. We were played on the radio all the time. It was tremendously exciting. …I still love to play the song live. People laugh, they cheer, they sing along. I never get tired of that.”
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