Steven Wilson's Dark, Atmospheric, Melancholic Masterpiece
Music Review: Steven Wilson - Insurgentes

The official backstory on the first ever full-length solo album from Porcupine Tree's ever-prolific Steven Wilson begins a few weeks back when an announcement went out to fans via both e-mail newsletter and on the artist's official website.

Wilson's solo album Insurgentes was to be made available in a limited run of 3000 copies. The album would include ten new original Wilson songs, recorded in 5.1 surround sound, and would be housed in a deluxe 2 CD/ 1 DVDA package also featuring bonus tracks leftover from the original sessions, an 18 minute film, and a book containing what were said to be gorgeous photographs taken by Wilson at various locations around the world.

A trailer film about Insurgentes also quickly made it's way to YouTube, followed in short order by another one. When I missed the original announcement, and found out the original run had quickly sold out, needless to say I was pissed. But there's good news.

Don't ask me how, (and I'll never tell anyway) but a copy of Insurgentes found its way to my desktop earlier this week. I've listened to it pretty much every day since it arrived on Thanksgiving Day, and while part of me is more pissed at myself than ever for missing that original run, the other, more rational part is now anticipating the album's official wider release in Febuary more than Christmas itself.

Insurgentes is every bit as gorgeous sounding as the tantalizing bits of music on that original trailer hinted it would be. Speaking of which, the music used there (seen below) is from the album's opening track, "Harmony Komine." This song kicks off the album with the sort of chiming guitar that wouldn't be at all out of place on a U2 record, before kicking into a wall of sound highlighted by Wilson's own angelic sounding vocal wails. It's just gorgeous sounding stuff.



From there, the lighter shades of that track are mostly left behind for what are the record's more dominant atmospheres of darkness. For all of Wilson's well-documented tendency to spend a lot of time in the recording studio (by my count, this is the fourth Wilson related project released this year, and one of them was a double CD), you do in fact hear elements of all of Wilson's other "projects" on this record.

The treated drum track and light keyboards of "Abandoner" for example recall his work with No-Man (at least until the blast of noise towards the end). The beginning of "Verona Para Las Hadas" (did I mention there's a Mexican sort of theme to this record I've yet to figure out?), almost fools you into thinking Wilson's gone and remade PT's psychedelic masterpiece "The Sky Moves Sideways." At least until it becomes apparent that the soaring guitars of "Sideways" are replaced here by atmospheric keys and vocals that have more of a -- how do I say this? -- more of a "glide" to them.



The dense, layered guitars and droning minor bass notes of "Salvaging" likewise bring to mind Signify era Porcupine Tree, particularly when the synths kick in. Ditto for the bonus track "Puncture Wound." But there's also this dark, thick kind of heaviness to this record that is almost emotionally draining at times -- even during some of the lighter parts.

At times, this manifests itself as sort of a melancholy dreaminess (as on the aforementioned "Verona"). At others, it takes on the darker avant-prog qualities of someone like King Crimson, like on the doomy sounding "No Twilight Within The Courts Of The Sun." That one even sounds like a title Robert Fripp might come with.

Of all the songs here, "Only Child" and "Get All That You Deserve" probably come the closest to something resembling traditional pop structure. The former could easily fit on a latter day PT album like Fear Of A Blank Planet. The latter sounds at first like a slower, heavier version of Blackfield's "Christenings", before it eventually becomes swallowed in the sort of heavy drone you'd more commonly find on one of Wilson's Bass Communion records.

If you love Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree, or just like your music played with lots of minor chords (with equal portions of occasionally lighter, but more often slightly off-kilter counterpoint), you'll probably love Insurgentes as much as I do. The latest word is that K-Scope will release the album's original ten songs (without the bonus tracks) on a double disc set including the 5.1 recordings this coming February.

Jeff Beck Puts On A Guitar Clinic...Again

Music Review: Jeff Beck - Performing This Week... Live at Ronnie Scott's

Jeff Beck is one of the two or three greatest guitarists in the world. Period. End of sentence.

The fact that he has never sold anywhere near the amount of records, or achieved the same sort of notoriety as people like Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page (to cite two examples) is immaterial.

Over the course of his amazing career, Jeff Beck's unique imprint has been heard on landmark records ranging from the Yardbirds' "Shapes of Things" to his work with Rod Stewart in the first Jeff Beck Group.

But his most noteworthy recordings remain the jazz-rock fusion albums Blow By Blow and Wired. Working with great musicians like keyboardist Jan Hammer on these albums, Beck completely reshaped and redefined the instrumental rock genre by applying the "less is more" economics of rock guitar to the more improvisational tone of fusion jazz.

Where guys like John McLaughlin, Al DiMeola, or even Carlos Santana could be all over the place on the six string, Beck was always much more about dramatic effect. What Jeff Beck could say in one short staccato blast on the Stratocaster often said more than all of the thousand notes per second scaling of a DiMeola or Santana ever could. Not surprisingly, Beck's legacy lives on today in guys like Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson.

Jeff Beck's new live album, performing this week...live at Ronnie Scott's, captures the best of the "guitar mechanic's" multiple night stand at London's Ronnie Scott's nightclub. Beck himself cherry picked what he considered the best performances from the concerts for this CD, which is also scheduled for a DVD release by Eagle Rock.

As always, Beck surrounds himself with a group of great musicians here, but none stand out more than female bassist extraordinaire Tal Wilkenfeld, whose funky bass popping provides a perfect counterpart to Beck's own frenetic playing.

But man, does Jeff Beck put on a guitar clinic here.

Opening with "Beck's Bolero," -- the track he famously recorded for the album Truth backed by various members of Led Zeppelin and the Who -- Beck stretches the possibilities he first explored there, even further here. Few guitarists on earth can make a guitar simultaneously sing and cry the way that Jeff Beck does. And on this track, Beck lets the listener know immediately that they will be getting everything he has in his considerable arsenal.

I've personally had the pleasure of seeing Jeff Beck perform in concert multiple times -- many of which have been from seats down in front -- and the guy simply never ceases to amaze me. Seriously, I could get lost for days watching this guy's fingering technique.

What he does on the whammy bar here on songs like a particularly "whammified" version of Wired's "Led Boots," can only be described as setting the fretboard on fire. One minute Beck is bending the notes in a thousand different directions, the next he is attacking the strings in thirty to sixty second bursts that say more in that time than a ten minute Yngwie Malmsteen solo ever could.

By the same token, Beck also has a unique gift for making his guitar "sing" in more ways than the best vocalist you could imagine ever could. Nowhere is that more apparent than on this album's takes on Stevie Wonder's "Cause We've Ended As Lovers" and especially the Beatles' "A Day In The Life," where Beck's crying guitar turns the song on it's ear, making it into a plaintive sort of cry.

Beck's guitar sings these songs without the need for lyrics, interpreting them every bit as effectively as a great singer ever could.

On performing this week...live at Ronnie Scott's, Jeff Beck provides ample proof, as if any were further needed, of just why he remains of the world's two or three premier guitarists.

Springsteen's Working On A Dream Due January 27

I don't have to tell anybody who reads this space regularly that I kinda like this Bruce Springsteen guy. I do, okay?

Guilty as charged.

So here's the deal. Bruce has got a new album coming out.

The release of Springsteen’s 24th album, to be titled Working On A Dream continues the prolific – and unusual -- period of activity for the notoriously methodical artist that began on 2002’s album, The Rising.

Once known for taking years between album releases, Springsteen has averaged a new album almost every year ever since reuniting with the E Street Band for The Rising -- the first time he had recorded with them on an album since 1984’s blockbuster Born In The USA.

The title track for Working On A Dream, an uptempo pop tune reminiscent of songs like “Hungry Heart” and “Girls In Their Summer Clothes,” was previewed on NBC’s NFL Sunday telecast in a ninety second clip.

Working On A Dream features twelve new songs penned by Springsteen, as well as two bonus tracks, “A Night With The Jersey Devil” (which was released as a free download on Halloween) and the title track from the Mickey Rourke film The Wrestler.

So the first taste from this new album kicks some pretty major ass in my own, admittedly biased opinion. I particularly like the bells at the end of the song.

To check it out for yourself, go here



Here's the complete tracklist. Think Dream.



1. Outlaw Pete
2. My Lucky Day
3. Working On a Dream
4. Queen of the Supermarket
5. What Love Can Do
6. This Life
7. Good Eye
8. Tomorrow Never Knows
9. Life Itself
10. Kingdom of Days
11. Surprise, Surprise
12. The Last Carnival

Bonus tracks:
The Wrestler
A Night with the Jersey Devil

The Definitive John Lennon Bio Has Arrived

Book Review: John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman

Not before or since has there ever been a musical group -- rock and roll or otherwise -- that the world's media has followed with the same determination that it once did with the Beatles. And while all of the fab four provided journalists, both legitimate and otherwise, with more than enough ammunition to feed their reporting, none of them gave them more salacious material than John Lennon.

Just this week, more than forty years after the fact, Lennon continued to make news as the Catholic Church apparently offered the former Beatle an absolution of sorts for the sin of publicly proclaiming, way back in 1966, that the Beatles were "bigger than Jesus Christ."

In an article for the official Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano published this week, the church has apparently forgiven Lennon, while praising the Beatles music on the 40th anniversary of the release of their White Album. The article called the offending remark the product of "showing off, bragging by a young English working-class musician who had grown up in the age of Elvis Presley and rock and roll and had enjoyed unexpected success".

In his new 800-plus page biography, John Lennon: The Life, the author of what many call the definitive Beatles biography, Shout! The Beatles In Their Generation, retells the story of the "Jesus remark," along with many others. In the book, Lennon's life is retraced from his roots in a broken working class family in England, to his worldwide fame in the Beatles, to his eventual borderline sainthood status as a martyr and an icon of the peace movement.

Many of these stories have been told numerous times before of course, and there really aren't any new earth-shattering revelations. In addition to the firestorm that came in the wake of the Jesus incident -- which was a key factor why the 1966 American tour which followed was the Beatles' last -- Philip Norman recounts most of the well-tread chapters of Lennon's story.

Most of this stuff will be familiar to Beatles fans. There are the bed-in's and nude album covers with Yoko, the love/hate relationship with his fellow Beatles (especially Paul McCartney), and of course the rumors of sexual fantasies and dalliances with everyone from his mother Julia, to his manager Brian Epstein.

Norman treats all of these subjects with the objectivity of a seasoned journalist. Unlike so many others who have tried, Norman neither deifies or demonizes his famous subject, but rather tries to present a balanced picture showing all sides of the very complex personality of John Lennon.

What emerges is a dichotomy of the man himself. Norman pulls no punches when detailing Lennon's penchant at times for sarcasm, cruelty, and drunken, loutish behavior. At the same time, Lennon is also presented as a thoughtful man, who was equally capable of childlike innocence and wonder as he observed the dizzying events going on all around him.

To tell this story, Norman was also granted near unprecedented access to what is left of the Beatles original inner-circle. The author began this project with the blessing of Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono (who later withdrew it, claiming the author's narrative painted Lennon in a cruel light). In addition to Ono, Norman's research also includes extensive interviews with Paul McCartney, George Martin, and for the first time ever, Lennon's son Sean. The Sean Lennon interview makes for a particularly poignant chapter at the end of the book.

With John Lennon: The Life, Philip Norman has attempted to write nothing less than the final, definitive word on the life and times of one of the twentieth century's most iconic figures. As such, this book is an unqualified success in doing precisely that.

An Urgent Plea To Steven Wilson: Don't Make Me Steal Your Album



Steven Wilson, for the uninitiated, is best known as the creative brain-trust behind the British progressive rock group, Porcupine Tree. I can already hear a lot of you scratching your heads and asking "who?" right about now, and in America at least, you'd hardly be alone there.

Porcupine Tree doesn't sell that many records on this side of the pond, and they enjoy what could be best described as a cult following. That said, Steven Wilson and his cohorts in PT have made some pretty amazing music over the past decade and a half or so.

They have also made a buttload of it.

So much so, that after discovering and falling instantly in love with this band roughly a year or so ago, I ended up spending a small fortune going about the process of obtaining their complete recorded catalog. Let me tell you, these guys have made a ton of records, too - especially for a band that by and large remains undiscovered on this side of the world, at least in terms of finding a mass audience anyway.

The records also all sound quite different from one another.

The first PT song which really grabbed me was "Sentimental," from the band's 2007 album Fear Of A Blank Planet. The song uses haunting piano minor chords overlaid with gorgeous sounding acoustic and electric guitars as a backdrop for Wilson's lyrics about youth and alienation (the song, like much of the album, appears to have been inspired by the school shootings at Columbine). An acoustic version of this song, with just Wilson on guitar, can be viewed below:



Elsewhere on the FOABP album you'll find songs like the opus "Anesthetize," which over the course of its eighteen-plus minutes goes from similarly lighter shades to the sort of metallic bludgeon played in weird time signatures you'd normally associate with someone like Tool.

Meanwhile, on a wide assortment of E.P.'s, singles, and full length albums (at least two of which are multiple disc sets), PT's sound runs pretty much the entire table of progressive rock styles - from metal and ambient electronica to atmospheric Floydian space rock (check out the amazing double album The Sky Moves Sideways for the best stuff there). It's a lot to digest, especially for the recently converted neophyte.

The thing is, Porcupine Tree's releases only scratch the surface of Steven Wilson's recorded output. The guy is so prolific in the recording studio you have to wander when he finds time to sleep. In addition to Porcupine Tree, Wilson fronts at least four other "groups," or recurring projects.



Again, each individual project is so stylistically different from the next it's hard to recognize each of them as coming from the same incredibly talented musician.

Blackfield is a quieter, more acoustic based pop group where Wilson is joined by Israeli singer/songwriter Aviv Geffen. With No-Man, Wilson explores sounds ranging from avant-jazz to electronica. Wilson's Bass Communion albums, at least the ones I've heard, are mostly electronically generated ambient soundscapes that move from beautiful washes of synthesized sound to cacophonous noise on a dime.

Just this past week, one of my cohorts here at Blogcritics introduced me to yet another of Wilson's "projects," with a series of recordings labeled as being by "I.E.M." (which stands for Incredible Expanding Mindfuck). The group name is about as descriptive of the music as any I could conjure, as I.E.M.'s largely instrumental music consists of psychedelic improvisational pieces with titles like the ten minute "An Escalator To Christmas." Other I.E.M. tracks run as long as 35 minutes.

So Steven Wilson is a busy guy. He's also a great songwriter, an incredibly talented multi-instrumentalist, and quite possibly the most prolific rock musician alive. What this means, if you are anywhere near the fan that I've become in the past year, is that you've got to keep checking in at his various websites to keep up. Blink, and you could easily miss an album or even two - which is exactly what happened to me this past week.

As it turns out, I hadn't visited SWHQ, which is Wilson's homepage, in about a month. I stopped by there a few days ago. What I learned when I did is that Wilson has a new solo album out. From the information I got at the website, and the tantalizing bits I heard on a trailer for the album, which is called Insurgentes, is that it sounds like it could be one of Steven Wilson's most interesting releases yet.



There's just one problem. The damn thing is already sold out. Insurgentes has left the building. Gone.

Wilson apparently offered a limited run of 3,000 copies for a "deluxe edition" of the release. This run features the album, a picture book, a bonus CD with leftover tracks from the Insurgentes sessions -- hell, there's even an eighteen minute Insurgentes film!

All in all, this deluxe version of Insurgentes appears to be a one of a kind deal. It costs about eighty bucks (or rather, it did while it was available), most of which is due to the shipping costs, as the package it's housed in apparently weighs about ten pounds. There will be a commercial release of Insurgentes early next year.

Much as I want to hear this CD right now, I could wait for that - except, that the commercial release will not be the same. I won't be able to hear the extra tracks. I wont be able to see the film, and I'm particularly excited about the part where Wilson takes a gun and starts shooting a bunch of MP3 players (I knew there was something I loved about this guy!).



This is my urgent plea as a fan to Mr. Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, No-Man, Bass Commnunion, Incredible Expanding Mindfuck, and now apparently the first of what I imagine will be countless solo albums.

Please, Steven. Please consider a second run on the deluxe version of Insurgentes.

I don't want to steal it by going to one of those torrent or peer-to-peer sites. I really don't. I want to pay for it - or better yet, get a review copy from you if you are so inclined to send one. But if you don't make another run available, you will leave me with no other choice. You'll have no one to blame but yourself if this happens Steven. You see, I am a desperate man; I simply must have this music.

Please don't make me steal your new solo album.

I'll be checking your website and my e-mail for your answer. Thanks Steven.

The Who Are Good...Just Not Perfect...On Live At Kilburn 1977

Music DVD Review: The Who At Kilburn 1977

The Who At Kilburn 1977 is, for a variety of reasons, a must-see, must-have DVD for Who fans.

It captures the Who at a time when they were arguably the greatest live rock and roll band in the world -- and certainly at a time when they were at their commercial peak. It also shows exactly how and why they earned that well deserved reputation.

That said, this is not the ultimate document of the live Who experience. So color me picky.

For that, you'd have to rewind back a few years to 1970, and the amazing performances captured on both the live Isle of Wight 1970 DVD, and especially The Who Live At Leeds, which is simply one of, if not the best live rock and roll albums ever made. That much goes without saying.

With that in mind, The Who At Kilburn 1977 is still damn great stuff.

The concert, parts of which eventually made way to the documentary film The Kids Are Alright, is shown here in its entirety for the first time on an official release, and also represents one of the final Who shows with drummer Keith Moon just before his untimely death. For that reason alone, The Who At Kilburn 1977 is an essential release for Who Fans.

Like everything else here, the video and 5.1 audio restoration are first rate, particularly when the time period is taken into account. What separates the actual performance from something as jaw-droppingly amazing as the recently remastered Isle Of Wight DVD is the simple fact that by the 1977 time-frame of this show, the Who had become such a polished act in comparison.

What makes the performances from the 1969-70 period captured on Isle of Wight and especially Live At Leeds such a revelation is their sheer, raw and unbridled energy -- even when the Who are trying out the more sophisticated songs from Tommy for the first time. Even though everything ultimately fits together -- from John Entwhistle's intricate bass runs to Moon's over-the-top drumming -- there is still that sense that the train could derail at any moment.

Not so on The Who At Kilburn 1977.

By this time, thanks to the commercial success of albums like Whos Next, The Who had become a well oiled machine in concert. As such, songs like "Won't Get Fooled Again" as performed in concert are letter perfect, close to the record versions. Meanwhile, songs like "My Generation," which formerly served as launchpads for extended improvisational craziness, are likewise played very close to the vest here.

Keith Moon alone maintains that element of unhinged dangerousness here that once made the Who the greatest live rock and roll band in the world. And they are still heads and shoulders above everyone else here. But you can also start to see that where once there was the sort of chaos that would influence a generation of punk rock bands like the Clash, the polish was starting to settle in.

Interestingly, the bonus disc on Kilburn features previously unseen footage from roughly the same 1969 period as Leeds and Isle Of Wight, featuring some of the earliest performances of the Tommy material. Both the sound and video here vary wildly from decent to barely above that of a bad bootleg. Still, the performances here are good and often great. From an fan's archival standpoint, they are also essential.

The Who At Kilburn 1977 isn't perfect, but comes close enough to make this DVD a must for Who fans. It comes out in stores on November 18.

Remembering Randy Ryan, Reunions, Death, And Memory Penny Lane

I was in Los Angeles earlier this week at a sales convention for my day job when I got the news about Randy Ryan.

Randy was a guy I worked with at my first job out of high school at a record store in West Seattle called Penny Lane (not to be confused with the L.A. based record store pictured here).

Randy and I had an odd relationship, mostly because Randy was a really odd sort of guy, but I always basically liked him.

He basically had really bad hygiene habits, kept a horribly messy apartment (despite having meticulously clean habits when it came to our record store), and really enjoyed doing all he could to get me in trouble with our boss (Willie), because we were both gunning for the managers job at the record store back then. He also could be very cold, arrogant, and anti-social towards certain people.

Despite all of this, I still always really liked Randy.

It was particularly fun getting together with him a few years back, after we had not seen each other in something like twenty years. After hearing the news this week, I'm particularly glad I was able to do that now.

In between sales meetings in L.A., I got the news that Randy died earlier this week. According to an e-mail from another friend, David Rynning, that I don't see nearly as often as I should, Randy had a sudden heart attack in downtown Seattle. Oddly enough, he was on his way to the doctor when it happened according to the e-mail.

So like I said, Randy was an odd guy, and on the surface we didn't have a whole lot in common. He was gay, I'm straight. He could be withdrawn, where I've always been kind of an open book. And of course there was that god-awful apartment of his where you could write your name on his toilet seat, and you sometimes had to make your way around all of the McNaughton's bottles and cigarette ashes strewn about the place.

But we had some good times in that apartment back in the seventies. We sometimes had to endure his depressing poetry, listen to his dull music (his taste sometimes ran towards boring singer-songwriters like Stephen Bishop) and watch his weird impressionistic dances to get there. There was also the matter of his mood shifts, which sometimes came in waves over the course of a night of pretty hard drinking...but we had some good times there.

We stayed up all night many times drinking, listening to prog-rock groups like Genesis and the Strawbs (we even called these get-togethers our "Strawb-outs"), and getting into deep conversations about things like religion and spirituality. I guess you could call this time my sort of "philosophical seeker" period.

The past few years I've had a pretty steady series of encounters with old friends and aquaintances from my distant past.

Some of these have been quite rewarding, such as when I was able to renew my friendship with old DJ pal Nasty Nes about a year ago. Others have proved ultimately frustrating, such as when my old drummer Huey and I started jamming together again last year for a few months, only to have him mysteriously drop the whole thing and disapear again just as my own creative fires were just starting to get sparked again.

I've also got a few more of these impending reunions that are sure to crop up in the next few months. Kim Murrell, my old high school buddy who now lives in Chicago called me again just a few nights ago when Obama got elected. And I should be seeing Pat Levy, a buddy from junior high in Hawaii who I haven't seen in more than thirty years, early next year when he comes to Seattle to be the donor for his brother's cancer.

Just tonight, I went up to the West Seattle junction to grab a quick beer and I bumped into another guy I haven't seen in years who proceeded to tell me the true story of how another mutual friend of ours, Leon, had died. Most of my friends believe Leon died as a semi-destitute heroin addict. But tonight "Greg" insisted that he had just come into a big financial inheritance a few days before they found him dead, and even suggested foul play may have been involved.

The thing is, the way Greg told the story I think I may even believe him.

Anyway, many of these reunions have been great experiences, but many others either didn't quite fulfill their initial promise, or just turned out to be bad ideas.

But the common link with all of them has been their bittersweet quality. Whatever the case, they seem to be occuring with increased frequency these days, and I'm sure there will be many more to come. The bottom line is I guess this is what happens when you get old.

I'm sorry I never got to say goodbye to Randy one last time.

But at least I was able to see him that one last time a few years back, and whatever weirdness ever existed between us was finally sorted out that night. Now I can go on with just the good memories of our days at the record store and our nights sorting out the meaning of life over too many beers and bongloads largely intact.

Rest in peace Randy. Tonight, I'll be listening to the Strawbs Hero And Heroine album in your memory.

The Rockologist: Got My Cheap Trick Records Out!

I have to be honest and say that when I heard Sony/Legacy was doing yet another commemorative repackaging of Cheap Trick's legendary 1978 live At Budokan album, I was a bit skeptical.

How much more mileage can you get from a single concert, I thought to myself? The original single disc album only featured about half of the concert, and they already had unearthed all of the previously unreleased songs from the concert on 1998's At Budokan: The Complete Concert repackage.

I mean, what could possibly be left?

As it turns out, what they found was nothing less than the Holy Grail itself. For the upcoming 30th anniversary boxed set Budokan! (it comes out on November 11), they've actually restored the video from the concert for a DVD, complete with a 5.1 Dolby remix.

This astounding footage, which was originally shown just once on Japanese television (Cheap Trick were huge in Japan at the time), puts the seemingly well tread Budokan concert in an entirely new light. Here you can not only hear, but see Cheap Trick at their artistic and commercial peak performing the very show that basically made this band's career.



It looks and sounds great, and is an amazing find by the folks at Sony/Legacy.

For the uninitiated, Cheap Trick is a band that should've been absolutely huge. I'm talking Beatles huge here. And for about five minutes at the end of the seventies, they actually were -- especially in Japan. For most of the usual reasons these sort of phenomenons never last in rock and roll, this one didn't either (however unlike most of them, Cheap Trick are still together all these decades later).

But for a brief time, Cheap Trick were not only one of the biggest bands in the world, they were also arguably the best.

At a time in the late seventies when the rock music audience had become ridiculously polarized -- you had your metalheads and arena rock types, your punk rockers, and then you had those who had abandoned rock altogether for disco -- Cheap Trick was just about the only band everyone could agree on.

And why not? They had the perfect gimmick for starters. With two pretty boy glam rock types in vocalist Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson, and two nerds in guitarist Rick Nielsen and cigarette smoking drummer Bun E. Carlos, the marketing possibilities -- beginning with the album covers -- were limitless.

But beyond the look, Cheap Trick had the sound. To begin with, Rick Nielsen's songs were a wet dream come true for power pop fans brought up on the Beatles, Big Star, and the Raspberries. The songs had the same sort of bright, smart, irresistible pop hooks as those bands that had obviously inspired them. Nielsen was (and is) also a guitarist cut from the Pete Townshend school of big power rhythm chords and economical but effective solos.

As a result, Cheap Trick was that rare breed of band who were embraced by both the critics who loved people like Elvis Costello (but wouldn't give AC/DC the time of day), as well as the seventies rock dawgs who pledged their allegiance to Ted Nugent and Kiss.

Like I said, Cheap Trick were the band everybody agreed on at a time when rock fans were otherwise more divided than the cliques you remember from high school.

At first, I'll admit that I dismissed them though. Their first album did nothing for me (I warmed up to it later), and at the time I knew them mainly as the band who seemed to be doing little more than pursuing a career as the permanent opening band for Kiss. Gene Simmons even had taken to wearing a shirt where the words "small dick" duplicated the Cheap Trick logo.

I initially wanted nothing to do with them.

What changed my mind however, at least in part, was a journalist named Ira Robbins, who wrote for a magazine called Trouser Press.

Robbins was a guy whose opinions I really respected, and he was always running power pop and new wave artists like Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, and Dwight Twilley up the flagpole. He also was a very early champion of Cheap Trick, who he compared to the Beatles and the Raspberries in reviews where I first read the words "power pop" used to describe a band.

So when Cheap Trick's second album In Color was released, I decided I'd better start paying attention, and it turned out that he was absolutely right. With songs like "Downed," "Clock Strikes Ten," and "Come On, Come On," I became hooked.



By the time of Cheap Trick's third album Heaven Tonight, I crossed the line from casual to hardcore fan. With songs like "High Roller," "Surrender," and their cover of the Move's "California Man," Cheap Trick had for me become a band who could do no wrong.

Even though I've never been a Kiss fan, that line from Cheap Trick's song "Surrender" about "mom and dad rolling numbers, rock and rolling, got my Kiss records out" is for my money one of the best rock lyrics ever. It made perfect sense to me.

Not long after that, I got the chance to interview Rick Nielsen, and it remains an encounter forever etched in my memory. Cheap Trick were sandwiched between AC/DC and Ted Nugent on a triple bill show in Seattle, and I interviewed Nielsen prior to an in-store album signing the band were doing at the old Peaches record store. Later that day, when I showed up at the in-store with some friends, Nielsen announced me to the room as the guy who uses too many big words. I don't think I've ever been so simultaneously flattered and embarrassed since.

The guys were equally friendly at an after show party I went to following the concert. Robin Zander seemed to take a particular shine to Roxanne, the girl I worked with at my day job at the record store. My memories of that day remain a permanent part of my consciousness growing up.

When the At Budokan album first came out, I paid $20. for the Japanese import. Even though it was released in America about a year later, I never regretted the decision. By this time, the band were nearly as big in America as they were in Japan.

But it wouldn't last.

The band's fourth studio album, Dream Police -- delayed by the unexpected smash success of Budokan -- continued the creative roll of the first three records. But by the time of the followup album, All Shook Up, you could see that the well was beginning to run dry.

Cheap Trick have showed flashes of that original brilliance from time to time in the years since, but have never quite completely recaptured it. To their credit, they did stay together though, becoming a primary influence for latter day bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Mudhoney. They continue to tour and record to this day.

The four disc Budokan! box features the complete concert, but most importantly it also has this great show captured on DVD for the first time.



Here you can see Cheap Trick performing at their peak, having a great time in the borderline Beatlemania atmosphere of Budokan, and responding with an amazingly high energy show that ended up making the band's career. There is also footage from a 30th anniversary show at Budokan earlier this year, where the band sounds as good as ever, despite showing the wrinkles of age.

Cheap Trick's Budokan! boxed set will be in stores Tuesday November 11.