Once again the spirit of Spinal Tap looms large, with that film ending with the band playing a sell-out arena at Kobe in Japan. Here, Cheap Trick are playing a sell-out arena at the Budokan in Tokyo. Their opening track Hello There, with its repeated refrain of “Hello there ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to rock?” is not unlike Tap’s “Tonight we’re gonna rock you” opener, and at the end of this brief intro Cheap Trick’s drummer Bun E Carlos lays down such a frenetic drum fill that you fear he’s going to spontaneously combust like Tap’s unfortunate Mick Shrimpton (quickly replaced by Joe “Mama” Besser).
Luckily, he doesn’t, because he’s a major part in the sound of this album. To begin with, it’s some competent but unthrilling hard rock tracks, but by the time we get to I Need Your Love we get a slow tempo track whose 8-9 minute run time gives enough time for the music to breathe, for the band (especially lead guitar/vocals Robin Zander) to work the 12,000 strong crowd, to break into high energy solos, and to break it down to a steady build, and at this point I was sold on the performance.
The name Cheap Trick is familiar, and they’re still going, so I was waiting for a track I recognised – this was I Want You To Want Me, and it’s indicative of the more power-pop style tracks that close out the album, including “First track off our new album, released last week”, Surrender (not to be confused with Rainbow's "I Surrender"). This is the kind of music that Big Star probably would have gone on to make had they not imploded – a big, audience-pleasing, stadium-filling mix of pop tunes played in a rock style.
The band have a little closer track Goodbye to mirror Hello There, followed by an encore of Clock Strikes Ten, a kind of hard rock version of the Von Trapp family wishing you Auf Wiedersehen.
The production values on this are great – the songs stand or fall on Zander and Carlos (the other band members providing a solid backing but not doing anything shiny, which they don’t need to), and they’re picked out against the screaming fans cleanly enough to be distinct, not so clean as to lose that live rock feel. Of all of the live albums so far, I don’t think any have sounded so big as this one. Peter Frampton was a great performance, but there wasn’t that collected thunder of band and fans at top volume.
Such was the popularity of Cheap Trick in Japan that it fed back to their American audience and re-ignited their career. Considering this was one of those albums that was only available on bootleg for a time probably only added to its cachet (even if it was the “kamikaze yellow vinyl” version that doesn't sit well with today's sensibilities).
Stick with this one, it’s a grower. And Bun E Carlos is still alive, unlike any prior Spinal Tap drummers.
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