The Rockologist: Got My Cheap Trick Records Out!

I have to be honest and say that when I heard Sony/Legacy was doing yet another commemorative repackaging of Cheap Trick's legendary 1978 live At Budokan album, I was a bit skeptical.

How much more mileage can you get from a single concert, I thought to myself? The original single disc album only featured about half of the concert, and they already had unearthed all of the previously unreleased songs from the concert on 1998's At Budokan: The Complete Concert repackage.

I mean, what could possibly be left?

As it turns out, what they found was nothing less than the Holy Grail itself. For the upcoming 30th anniversary boxed set Budokan! (it comes out on November 11), they've actually restored the video from the concert for a DVD, complete with a 5.1 Dolby remix.

This astounding footage, which was originally shown just once on Japanese television (Cheap Trick were huge in Japan at the time), puts the seemingly well tread Budokan concert in an entirely new light. Here you can not only hear, but see Cheap Trick at their artistic and commercial peak performing the very show that basically made this band's career.

It looks and sounds great, and is an amazing find by the folks at Sony/Legacy.

For the uninitiated, Cheap Trick is a band that should've been absolutely huge. I'm talking Beatles huge here. And for about five minutes at the end of the seventies, they actually were — especially in Japan. For most of the usual reasons these sort of phenomenons never last in rock and roll, this one didn't either (however unlike most of them, Cheap Trick are still together all these decades later).

But for a brief time, Cheap Trick were not only one of the biggest bands in the world, they were also arguably the best.

At a time in the late seventies when the rock music audience had become ridiculously polarized — you had your metalheads and arena rock types, your punk rockers, and then you had those who had abandoned rock altogether for disco — Cheap Trick was just about the only band everyone could agree on.

And why not? They had the perfect gimmick for starters. With two pretty boy glam rock types in vocalist Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson, and two nerds in guitarist Rick Nielsen and cigarette smoking drummer Bun E. Carlos, the marketing possibilities — beginning with the album covers — were limitless.

But beyond the look, Cheap Trick had the sound. To begin with, Rick Nielsen's songs were a wet dream come true for power pop fans brought up on the Beatles, Big Star, and the Raspberries. The songs had the same sort of bright, smart, irresistible pop hooks as those bands that had obviously inspired them. Nielsen was (and is) also a guitarist cut from the Pete Townshend school of big power rhythm chords and economical but effective solos.

Article Author: Glen Boyd

You'll find Blogcritics assistant music editor Glen Boyd sharing his Thoughtmares on his personal blogs The World Wide Glen, and The Rockologist. In a previous life, Glen was a music professional and journalist whose work has appeared in The Rocket, SPIN, Pulse!, and The Source. …

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