Picture this: it\u2019s 1993, and you\u2019re an executive with Epic Records. Your label recently lost Cheap Trick\u2014a band that hit paydirt for you twice in a career spanning 15 years\u2014when 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?<\/p>\n
C\u2019mon… this is the music industry<\/i> we\u2019re talking about. If there\u2019s money to be made on an album filled with nothing but throat clearing and farting in the studio, they\u2019re 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\u2014and decided to release all the songs that didn\u2019t make it onto Cheap Trick At Budokan<\/i>, as well as a couple tracks from a follow-up tour in 1979.<\/p>\n
The resulting disc, Budokan II<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not meant to be a knock on Cheap Trick. Rick Nielsen and crew do hold their own musically on this one; tracks like \u201cSouthern Girls,\u201d \u201cCalifornia Man\u201d and \u201cDowned\u201d do offer the serious fans another insight to that time period (even if I still can\u2019t understand why Japanese fans were so maniacal with their response to Cheap Trick).<\/p>\n
The problem with Budokan II<\/i> as an album\u2014performances notwithstanding\u2014is 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\u2019s an admittedly admirable attempt that, in the end, doesn\u2019t quite succeed.<\/p>\n
Still, there is a charm to Budokan II<\/i> that anyone who has followed Cheap Trick will seize upon. In the end, it\u2019s still probably worth experiencing, as long as one doesn\u2019t get their hopes up for a \u201cSurrender\u201d-like moment.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s something for a different review, kids, and it\u2019s getting late already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35262,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5736],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-47148","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-cheap-trick","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/47148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/47148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=47148"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=47148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}