Cheap Trick – Surrender (from Budokan!)
Description
Cheap Trick at Budokan (or simply At Budokan) is the first live album by American rock band Cheap Trick, and their best-selling recording. It was first released in Japan on October 8, 1978, and later released in the United States on 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.
Impact and legacy
In its official press release upon the album’s entry into the National Recording Registry, the Library of Congress stated that, along with its success in the Japanese market, Cheap Trick at Budokan “proved to be the making of the band in their home country, as well as a loud and welcomed alternative to disco and soft rock and a decisive comeback for rock and roll.” Allmusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine has also stated that with this album, “Cheap Trick unwittingly paved the way for much of the hard rock of the next decade, as well as a surprising amount of alternative rock of the 1990s.” In Pitchfork, Stuart Berman wrote on the album’s success and influence, respectively, that “At Budokan, is not just one of rock’s greatest live albums, but also one of its most triumphant underdog tales, an exemplar of pre-internet viral phenomena,” and that “for the Foo Fighters, Weezer, Smashing Pumpkins, Ted Leo, the Raconteurs—basically any band that’s ever tried to weld a Beatlesque melody to a power chord—all roads lead back to Budokan.” Further invoking comparison to the Beatles, Nwaka Onwusa, director of curatorial affairs at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, spoke with 1A on the parallels between Beatlemania in the United States and Cheap Trick’s reception in Japan:
Sure we have the story about the Beatles…how Beatlemania hit the United States, but to have Cheap Trick then go overseas and do that same very thing…in Tokyo. The girls, the screaming, throwing flowers at the plane. That’s total ‘Trickmania,’ for sure…it’s actually a beautiful story that [doesn’t] get a lot of shine or recognition because it didn’t happen here, but we have an American band…that created such tidal waves that then boomeranged back here in the United States.
The album was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
