Picture this: it’s 1993, and you’re an executive with Epic Records. Your label recently lost Cheap Trick—a band that hit paydirt for you twice in a career spanning 15 years—when they up and signed with Warner Brothers. Do you accept the loss stoically, or do you bleed the archives dry in a cash grab as a giant middle finger to the lost golden goose?
C’mon… this is the music industry we’re talking about. If there’s money to be made on an album filled with nothing but throat clearing and farting in the studio, they’re gonna put it out. So, back to the archives someone went, where they discovered the tapes from the famous concerts in Japan that launched Cheap Trick into superstardom—and decided to release all the songs that didn’t make it onto Cheap Trick At Budokan, as well as a couple tracks from a follow-up tour in 1979.
The resulting disc, Budokan II, tries to put the lightning back in the bottle 15 years after the hype of the original album. Had this been released a lot sooner, the idea might have worked… but this disc, while enjoyable in its own right, contains none of the big hits, and is left to try and keep one interested in the lesser material from those magical shows.
That’s not meant to be a knock on Cheap Trick. Rick Nielsen and crew do hold their own musically on this one; tracks like “Southern Girls,” “California Man” and “Downed” do offer the serious fans another insight to that time period (even if I still can’t understand why Japanese fans were so maniacal with their response to Cheap Trick).
The problem with Budokan II as an album—performances notwithstanding—is that, due to the choice of sequencing on the first album, Cheap Trick essentially blew their load with the initial 10 tracks… leaving this collection of 12 songs trying to maintain performance after the bullets had left the gun. It’s an admittedly admirable attempt that, in the end, doesn’t quite succeed.
Still, there is a charm to Budokan II that anyone who has followed Cheap Trick will seize upon. In the end, it’s still probably worth experiencing, as long as one doesn’t get their hopes up for a “Surrender”-like moment.
Epic would eventually see the error of their ways, pulling this from circulation and merging the two albums together as a complete concert, even down to the original performance order of the songs. Would they work in that setting? That’s something for a different review, kids, and it’s getting late already.
