What do you do when you’ve been a rock star for nearly 50 years? Some bands kick back, sell their songs for cheesy ads and put their feet up. Others, like Rick Nielsen of veteran American power pop band Cheap Trick, know nothing else but to stay on the road.

“I could have quit a long time ago,” Nielsen says in a recent phone chat from his home in Illinois. “I still get the itch. I sit down at the piano or the guitar. I’m not skilled like those guys who can play circles around me, but they can’t do what I can do. I’m too dumb to quit.”

Cheap Trick first became a sensation when a 1978 live album became a hit around the world. But it all went by in a blur, Nielsen says. “We never had time for stop and smell the roses stuff. We were in London and someone said the record was number one in the United States. We looked around, but there was no one to tell it to. We were always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The band comes from Rockford, Illinois, a college town 100km north-west of Chicago. Nielsen played in various bands but always dreamed of working with a certain local singer with a clear and distinctive set of pipes and an impressive range.

“I have perfect pitch, but I can’t sing,” says Nielsen. “Robin Zander was the singer I always wanted but I couldn’t get him. How many guys can you find who are that good, that you can help shape?” Eventually, Zander joined.

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It’s hard to explain how weird Cheap Trick looked at the time. Lead singer Zander was a blond pretty boy. Bassist Tom Petersson was a brunette pretty boy. But Nielsen himself, not so much. He has the build of a munchkin and the face of an imp. And the drummer, who went by the name Bun E. Carlos, portly, with thinning hair and glasses, sporting a moustache and invariably a cigarette, looked like a surly desk clerk at a shabby motel.

Cheap Trick leaned into the weirdness. They became the band with the two hot guys and the two dorks. On stage, while Zander preens, Nielsen sports a beanie cap, mugs incessantly, and displays his flamboyant guitar chops on an array of wildly patterned guitars – and sometimes wildly constructed ones as well. (One of these, covered in the band’s trademark checkerboard pattern, had five necks.)

It turned out Nielsen had a secret. It was the era of power pop, energetic but happy and tuneful pop-rock songs basically derived from Paul McCartney works like Hello, Goodbye and Day Tripper. Nielsen was a master of the form and his songs ultimately made Cheap Trick the genre’s most successful exponent.