Cheap Trick: From the Bars on Broadway to the Budokan
Near Rockford, Illinois
On any weekend night in the early nineteen seventies, if you knew where to look in Rockford, you could find a band playing in bars and small halls with an intensity that did not fit the size of the room. The band was working through an idea about rock and roll: that it could be melodic and brutal at the same time, that hooks and volume were not opposites. They called themselves Cheap Trick.
Rick Nielsen and Tom Petersson had been playing together since the late nineteen sixties in various Rockford bands. With drummer Bun E. Carlos and lead vocalist Robin Zander, Cheap Trick formed in Rockford in nineteen seventy-three. They spent the next several years building a road reputation, playing relentlessly, opening for bands far more famous than they were, slowly accumulating a following through sheer persistence and the quality of their songs.
In nineteen seventy-eight, the band flew to Japan. They were already enormously popular there in a way they were not yet popular at home. At the Nippon Budokan concert hall in Tokyo, they recorded two nights of shows. The resulting album, Cheap Trick at Budokan, was released in Japan that fall. So many American fans imported it that Epic Records released it domestically in February of nineteen seventy-nine. I Want You to Want Me became a Top Ten single. The album sold millions.
The band from the bars of Rockford had broken through on the other side of the world.
Cheap Trick was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in twenty sixteen. In two thousand six they released an album called Rockford, named for the city they had never really left. The following year, the city put the album cover on its vehicle sticker. Rick Nielsen is still closely tied to the city.
