Cheap Trick at Budokan (1978)

Cheap Trick at Budokan (or simply At Budokan) is the first live album by American rock band Cheap Trick, and their best-selling recording. Although the band and the album's liner notes claimed it was recorded at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo, in fact it was recorded in Osaka. The album was first released in Japan on October 8, 1978, and later released in the United States in February 1979, through Epic Records. After several years of constant touring but only middling exposure for the band, At Budokan steadily grew off radio play and word-of-mouth to become a high-selling success, kickstarting the band's popularity and becoming acclaimed as one of the greatest live rock albums of all time and a classic of the power pop genre.

It was ranked number 426 in the 2003 edition of Rolling Stone magazine's list of "the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2019, the album was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". An album featuring leftover tracks from the band's 1978 Budokan set, plus additional material from their 1979 tour of Japan, was released in 1994 as Budokan II, and a two-disc reconstruction of the complete original Budokan performances, titled At Budokan: The Complete Concert, was released to commemorate its twentieth anniversary in 1998.

Overview

Cheap Trick found early success in Japan, and capitalized on this popularity by recording Cheap Trick at Budokan at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo on April 28 and 30, 1978, with an audience of 12,000 screaming Japanese fans nearly drowning out the band at times. The idea for a live album originated with Japanese record executives. Epic Records, then a subsidiary of CBS Records, released Cheap Trick’s albums through its Japanese branch, CBS/Sony. Drummer Bun E. Carlos explained, "In Japan, CBS/Sony was splitting into two companies. They decided that every time a band on Epic or Columbia came over, they'd record their show and put out a series of Live at Budokan albums. Bob Dylan and Cheap Trick were the first albums they released." The album was intended for release only in Japan but with strong airplay of the promotional album From Tokyo to You, an estimated 30,000 import copies were sold in the United States and the album was released domestically in February 1979. The album also introduced two previously unreleased original songs, "Lookout" and "Need Your Love".

According to producer Jack Douglas, the audio from Live at Budokan is actually not from the Budokan, but from Osaka, which was a smaller show. The recording of the Budokan show was deemed unsuitable for release.

An unusual aspect of the album release in the UK was the use of coloured vinyl, then primarily restricted to singles and EP's, and soon replaced as a marketing gimmick by so-called "picture discs". A prominently displayed sticker on the sleeve of Live at Budokan announced that it had been released on "kamikaze yellow vinyl", and, unlike most coloured discs, which were usually as opaque as the conventional black vinyl records, the disc in the album is translucent.

When Cheap Trick at Budokan was first released on compact disc in the US, the first pressing contained a slightly different, possibly unpolished mix of the concert.

Reception

In the U.S., the album peaked at number four on the Billboard 200 and became the group's best selling album with over three million copies sold. It also ranked number 13 on Billboard's Top Pop Albums of 1979 year-end chart. The single "I Want You to Want Me" reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The second single, a cover of Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame" also charted, reaching number 35. Cheap Trick at Budokan was certified triple Platinum in 1986 by the RIAA.

In Canada, it went to number one, hitting the top of the RPM 100 Albums chart on August 11 of the same year. By November 1979, it had achieved quintuple platinum status (500,000 units) in that country.