The Doctor (1987)
1.It's Up To You
2.Rearview Mirror Romance
3.The Doctor
4.Are You Lonely Tonight
5.Name of the Game
6.Kiss Me Red
7.Take Me to the Top
8.Good Girls Go To Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere)
9.Man-u-lip-u-lator
10.It's Only Love
There are career missteps, and then there is The Doctor.
Released in 1986, this album remains the nadir of Cheap Trick’s studio output—a sonic cul-de-sac so overstuffed and undercooked that
even the band’s most ardent defenders tend to offer only silence in its defense. If Standing on the Edge was a misguided
attempt to align with ‘80s production trends, The Doctor was the full immersion: gated drums, cartoonish synths, and a barrage of
sonic novelties that suggest not a rock band but a malfunctioning jukebox.
Tony Platt, who had previously engineered Standing on the Edge, was given the production reins this time. One suspects he took the phrase throw everything at the wall
as a creative mandate rather than a warning. The resulting mix is dizzying—bells, whistles, and digital debris layered so thickly that melodies, hooks, and even common sense are smothered beneath the rubble.
The opening track, It’s Up to You, sets the tone. An assault of keyboards and robotic vocals, it sounds less like Cheap Trick and more like a sentient Casio keyboard trying to write an anthem. And yet, remarkably,
it may be the album’s high point. From there, things spiral downward with unnerving speed. Rearview Mirror Romance and Man-U-Lip-U-Lator
arrive with all the subtlety of a pratfall, their titles as wince-inducing as the music itself.
Attempts at pop success prove equally fruitless. Kiss Me Red, courtesy of outside writers, achieves a kind of accidental parody—a chirpy,
synth-laden confection that sounds like a sitcom theme rejected by the Facts of Life. Take Me to the Top reaches for balladry but misses by several emotional miles.
And then there is It’s Only Love, a song so egregiously poor it was somehow selected for a debut video, presumably by someone with a deep, personal grudge against the band.
Defenders of the group (and there are many) point to record label interference, weak material from external sources, and a band cornered by the demands of survival. Fair enough. But no amount of contextual
understanding can make this record sound better. The Doctor isn’t just a misfire—it’s a document of a band lost in the machinery of mid-‘80s rock, their instincts buried beneath a pile of bad decisions and digital gloss.
That Cheap Trick survived The Doctor is a minor miracle. That they went on to reclaim some of their former glory is a testament to their resilience. But in 1986, the prognosis was grim. The band may not have flatlined, but they were certainly in critical condition.
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