Though it was not a big chart hit, this teen anthem is one of Cheap Trick's best-known songs. The singer thinks of his parents as a bit overprotective and kind of weird, but he gains a new respect for them at the end of the song when he wakes up and they are rolling around on the couch listening to his KISS records. Cheap Trick guitarist-songwriter Rick Nielsen recalls in Rolling Stone's Top 500 songs magazine that when he wrote it, he had to "go back and put myself in the head of a 14-year-old."
This song is featured in a number of films. In Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1983) the ticket hustler Mike Damone sings "Surrender" to help try to persuade a girl to buy tickets to a Cheap Trick concert. Band members Rick Nielsen and Robin Zander appear in the film Daddy Day Care (2003), which also features this song.
In 2017, it was used in the closing credits of the film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and included on the soundtrack; director James Gunn used the Cheap Trick song "If You Want My Love" in his 2011 independent film Super.
This appears on Cheap Trick's live album At Budokan. Robin Zander's speech, which opens the live version is sampled on the Beastie Boy's 1992 single "Jimmy James."
In a Blender magazine interview, Cheap Trick 's drummer Bun E. Carlos recalls, "We had that track back in 1975. We used to rehearse in the basement of Rick [Nielsen]'s dad's music shop on Seventh Avenue in Rockford, Illinois. As soon as I heard it, I thought it was a really interesting lyric."
Rick Nielsen said: "I used to hear my friends saying they thought their parents were strange. 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. 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."
This song contains one of the more famous key changes in rock. According to Rick Nielsen, the song begins in B flat, goes to B for two verses, then changes key to C around 2:15 as Robin Zander sings, "Whatever happened to all this season's losers of the year..."
-
The live version of this song from the Budokan concert was used on the
Detroit Rock City soundtrack. The movie was about some kids going to a KISS concert.
>>
Suggestion credit:
Katie - Goulburn, Australia
The lyrics about the mother being in the WAC's is a reference to the Women's Army Corps, which was active during World War II. And if you're wondering why those lyrics, "Now I had heard the WACs recruited old maids for the war," don't make much sense, it's because they weren't written that way. The original lyrics were deemed too racy: "Now I had heard the WACs were either old maids, dykes or whores."
The high-pitched sound in the mix was made using an arpeggiator on the keyboard. When the band recorded their next album,
Dream Police, they used a real string section since they had a bigger budget. This is best heard on the
title track.
Some of the TV series that have used this song include:
Scrubs ("My Old Man" - 2002)
Cold Case ("Blank Generation" - 2005)
Supernatural ("No Exit" - 2006)
South Park ("Guitar Queer-o" - 2007)
One Tree Hill ("Don't You Forget About Me" - 2010)
New Girl ("Tomatoes" - 2012)
Californication ("Daughter" - 2014)
Life in Pieces ("Cheap Promotion Flying Birthday" - 2016)
Cheap Trick's version of "In The Street," originally recorded by Big Star, was used as the theme song of That '70s Show. In this version, they incorporate the "We're all alright" chant from "Surrender."
In concert, this is the song where Rick Nielsen would break out his famous 5-necked guitar. Nielsen owns hundreds of guitars, many with outrageous designs built by the Hamer Guitar company.
Tom Werman, one of the top rock producers of the '70s and '80s, produced this track - he worked on the first three Cheap Trick albums.
According to Werman, they were "a producer's gift in the studio" because they were so efficient.