Heaven Tonight is Cheap Trick's third studio album, released in 1978. The album was remastered and released with bonus tracks on Sony's Epic/Legacy imprint in 1998. The album cover features lead singer Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson.
Heaven Tonight is considered Cheap Trick's best album by many fans and critics. While their debut album Cheap Trick showed the band's darker, rawer side and In Color explored a lighter, more pop-oriented persona, Heaven Tonight combined both elements to produce a hook-filled pop-rock album with an attitude. Popular songs from this album include the anthemic "Surrender", "Auf Wiedersehen", the title track, and a cover of The Move's "California Man".
Heaven Tonight is also known as the first album ever recorded with a 12-string electric bass.
This was the second Cheap Trick album to feature Robin Zander and Tom Petersson on the front cover and Bun E. Carlos and Rick Nielsen on the back. While the front cover has Zander and Petersson standing in front of a nondescript background, the back cover portion (part of a continuous, wrap-around shot on the original LP) reveals that they are standing inside a public restroom where Nielsen is brushing his teeth and Carlos is fixing his tie in the mirror. Nielsen has a cassette copy of the band's previous album, In Color sticking out of his back pocket. At the suggestion of the record company, the album was originally to be called American Standard; the cover photography was intended to play upon the secondary association with the well-known manufacturer of plumbing fixtures. The band were less pleased with the idea and opted for the release title, but the cover design remained.
Heaven Tonight is a 1990 Australian film.
An ageing rock star (John Waters) tries to make a comeback and is jealous about the success of his son (Guy Pearce).
Writer-producer Frank Howson later claimed that "every incident" in the film was true: "either I have lived it, or I know somebody who has. There is no fabrication, except in the names, which have been changed to protect the guilty."
The film was not a commercial success and only ran for two weeks in cinemas in Sydney and Melbourne.
The film provided comedic material for the 2006-2007 Austereo radio comedy show Get This. Host Tony Martin referred to the film on a number of occasions, making jibes at the name of Guy Pearce's character's band which was 'Video Rodney', the frequent references to the film's villain whose name was the ill-chosen 'Tim Robbins' and the dated 1980s syth-rock music.
"Dream Police" is a song written by Rick Nielsen and originally released in 1979 by the American rock band Cheap Trick. It is the first track on the group's album of the same name. The single peaked at #26 on the Billboard Hot 100. Nielsen has stated that the song "is an attempt to take a heavy thought - a quick bit of REM snatched right before waking up - and put into a pop format." Cheap Trick biographers Mike Hayes and Ken Sharp describe the song as "a magnificent tour-de-force, characterized by an addictively infectious chorus and jarring bursts of dissonance.
Tom Maginnis of AllMusic described the song as "a tongue in cheek Orwellian nightmare" and that it represents "late '70's power pop at it’s (sic) zenith." Maginnis also noted that "Dream Police" follows up on its B-side, "Heaven Tonight" (which had been released on a previous album), in that both songs represent dreams.Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone described the song as a "trash thriller like John Carpenter's Halloween, and also noted that it is "nearly as good as the earlier ones in which Cheap Trick used similar stylistic devices."
I feel the horses
Coming galloping
I will never grow old
I'll go to heaven tonight