Sunday Pages: "Surrender"

A song by Cheap Trick

Dear Reader,

The first time I remember hearing “Surrender” was in December of 2000. My wife’s band had booked a gig at the Christmas party of the small company where her bass player’s wife worked, and the Cheap Trick banger was one of the requested covers they performed.

As it happened, the party took place on the night Al Gore gave his concession speech. In fact, I’m pretty sure the band was playing the song while Gore gave the speech, which at the time seemed sadly appropriate: the VP surrendering to “Surrender.”

How had I managed not to know such an awesome song? “Surrender” is the opening track to Cheap Trick’s third studio album, Heaven Tonight—released in April of 1978, when I was five and a half years old. I was too young to have heard it on the radio when it came out, and Cheap Trick wasn’t quite canonical enough to displace Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd on K-Rock and WNEW when I started listening to New York classic rock radio. So I just missed it.

This is unfortunate. My high school band would have killed “Surrender,” which both rocks hard and is right in my vocal range. (It has become my go-to karaoke song, and I scream-sing it very, very loud.) On the other hand, at the time, I would not have appreciated the lyrics. Back in 1991, I would not have understood that “Surrender” is—against all logic—a sneakily profound meditation on parenthood.

When I wrote my novel Fathermucker, which concerns a day in the life of a stay-at-home dad, I used two epigraphs. The first was a quip by John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester, who died a century before the American Revolution: “Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories.”

The second was the chorus of that Cheap Trick song:

Mommy’s alright,
Daddy’s alright,
They just seem a little weird.

Surrender, surrender,
But don’t give yourself away.

“Surrender”—music and lyrics by guitarist Rick Nielsen, the band’s Court Jester—is about how we will never completely understand our parents, just as our children will never completely understand us. The generations are unknowable to each other. And that’s okay! We’re not supposed to understand!

In the song’s construction, the narrator, a boy of perhaps 14, is telling his new girlfriend about what happened when he told his parents about her. (We know this because he addresses her in the second line: “. . . I’d meet girls like you.”) First, the mother tells her son that said new girlfriend is trash—pretty straightforward stuff.

But in the second verse, when Dad chimes in, things get weird (which, in my experience as a teenager, was usually what happened when Dad chimed in):

Father says, “Your mother’s right.
She’s really up on things.
Before we married, Mommy served
In the WACs in the Philippines.”

This revelation is news to the son, who is gobsmacked by this bit of information about his mother:

Now I had heard the WACs recruited
Old maids for the war,
But Mommy isn’t one of those;
I’ve known her all these years!

This makes a bit more sense when we use the original lyrics, which were famously changed to make the song less pejorative and more radio-friendly:

Now I had heard the WACs recruited
Old maids, dykes, and whores,
But Mommy isn’t one of those;
I’ve known her all these years!

In the heat of that argument, the kid learns that there is more to his mother than he knew. How can this woman, who he’s known all his life, who gave birth to him, have been in the Women’s Army Corps? It doesn’t compute!

Burdened by his new knowledge, he falls asleep. A few hours later, he wakes up and stumbles into the living room, where he finds his parents drunk and/or high, listening to his music, and having themselves a gay ol’ time:

Then I woke up. Mom and Dad
Are rolling on the couch:
Rolling numbers, rock and rolling
Got my KISS records out!

Once again, this is a side of his parents he’s never seen before, and he doesn’t understand what’s happening. His young mind is completely blown. These two fuddy-duddies fought in the war; now they’re wasted, listening to “Rock and Roll All Nite?” It is at this point, I propose, that his mother, seeing the terrified look on his face, assures him that “Mommy’s alright, Daddy’s alright.”

(Rick Nielsen, incidentally, was born in 1948—the same year as both of my parents. He is almost exactly the same age as my mother.)

What takes the song to the next level, to me, is the titular line:

Surrender, surrender,
But don’t give yourself away.

The inherent conflict of parenthood, it seems to me, is perfectly encapsulated in those seven words. As parents, we have to give so much of ourselves: love, time, money, attention, emotional energy, blood, sweat, tears. We have to sacrifice our own egos for the benefit of our kids. The (not at all cheap) trick is to be able to give the requisite amount of ourselves without losing who we are in the process. As parents, we have to surrender to the all-encompassing-ness of this sacred duty—but we can’t give ourselves (or, rather, our selves) away completely, either. We cannot relinquish our individual identity, or we will never find true fulfillment.

It is extremely difficult to strike the right balance. This was true for parents in the early 60s, when Rick Nielsen and my mother and father were teenagers; it was true in the late 80s/early 90s, when my brother and I were; and it’s especially true now—with the pandemic and the quarantine and social media and climate change and the opioid crisis and the country on the brink of fascist overthrow—when my kids are.

Finding that balance demands we let loose once in a while. Whether it’s “rolling numbers” to KISS or singing “Surrender” in our car with the volume cranked up to the max, we have to find our moments of joy—and trust that, come what may (and despite ample evidence to the contrary), we’re all alright.

We’re all alright.

We’re all alright.

We’re all alright.

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POSTSCRIPT

Thanks so much for the kind words on last week’s piece about my wife’s music career and the release of her first new album in almost two decades. We very much appreciate it! If you missed it, you can listen to Heylo’s When This is Over here, and also here: