Disco de Cheap Trick: “Cheap Trick”

This is a great, Great, GREAT CD!!! The music can stack up against ANY album. It is the "Abbey Road" of Cheap Trick. It starts with the powerful "ELO Kiddies" and the alarm clock ringing at the beginning of the song lets you know that this is a band you should wake up and pay attention to. It then changes gears with Tom's bass into the sickly twisted "Daddy Should Have Stayed in High School." It then transitions smoothly with the sound of kids playing (shades of the Beatles) into "Taxman, Mr. Thief," where they directly tip their hats off to the Beatles by using the name Mr. Heath. "Cry Cry" changes up the pace with a slip-sliding slow chunker, then "Oh Candy" spotlights the band's ability to create hard hitting up beat rock songs. Another change up into the slamming steamroller "Hot Love." This song rips is like a sports car at full throttle. Robin's beautiful voice is show cased in the haunting ballad "Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace." Another smooth transition with Bun E's sharp drum beat: "He's a Whore" kicks in, with Rick soloing like a deranged punk rocker. The soothing "Mandocello," named after the instrument it is played on (double strings tuned like a cello), can make you float away on a cloud of dreams. The last song from the original album, "Ballad or TV Violence," ends the original recording with a portrait of a mental murderer. When Cheap Trick played this song live, Rick used to open up his sweater to reveal a picture of the real life killer the song is about, crazy! This is a CD of a recording of when albums were albums, not just a collection of hit tunes. The songs move and support each other. This CD is made to be listened to in one sitting. Like Abbey Road by the Beatles, there is a cast of characters in the songs, some songs stand in isolation while others link into the next track, and a variety of instruments, tones, and textures keeps the selections fresh. The bonus material is good and interesting (like the early style of "I Want You To Want Me" they used to play live), but it is the high quality remix of the original recording that makes this CD a "must have" for any music lover. This is truly a masterpiece of music; the best Cheap Trick album ever (and that is saying a lot when you think about the fine albums that followed). This album had no flaws, and the only way to improve it was to remaster the tracks to let the brilliance of Cheap Trick shine through.

Conventional critical wisdom suggests that Cheap Trick's first 3 1/2 records (that's "Cheap Trick", "In Color", "Heaven Tonight", and half of "Dream Police") were the good ones. I would add that I think each album was slightly less successful than its predecessor, which puts their debut album at the top of the heap. This album is raw, catchy, and utterly unprecedented. Two pretty boy rock stars, one cartoon character, and one fat throwback from the 50's. It's too delicious to ignore! Highlights from the original album include "Taxman, Mr Thief" and "Elo Kiddies", but this reissue adds previously unreleased material (much of which is top notch). "Lovin' Money" and "Lookout" are brilliant!

I was introduced to Cheap Trick through Kiss in 1976. At the time, they were just the opening band for my make-up clad heroes (okay...I was just 10 years old), but Cheap Trick have truly stood up to the test of time better than almost any other rock band of the 70's (especially Kiss...ha!). This CD is a beauty. If you could only own 30 rock CDs, this would need to be one of them.

All these reviews you see about this album have it dead on. When I first bought it in 1979 I was taken aback, having heard nothing like it before - this was a sound that was completely fresh, raw and somehow alive, a far cry from the overprocessed studio albums that were in vogue at the time. It would take over a decade for a similar kind of music to give this album's a name: it seriously is the first 'alternative' album.

There isn't a throw-away track on the entire album. From start to finish, it's brilliant.

I didn't understand then why Cheap Trick didn't enjoy the radio play they deserved, and I still don't understand it.

Like most teenagers in 1979, I bought Live a Budokan and liked it alot, but it was when I went back and bought their first album, that I really fell in love with Cheap Trick.

From the first track to the last, this album is very nearly perfect, and captures the wild, infectious energy that Cheap Trick lets loose every night in their stage shows, better than any other album they've ever made has been able to. This album can be at any given moment: hard, frenetic, insane, wild, edgy, chaotic, sexy, and outrageous. It will leave you begging for more the second the last track is over.

The only improvement I've ever heard to any of the tracks on this album, can be found on The Essential Cheap Trick in the form of a live version of the track Mandocello. Although the version of it found on this album is very nice, it's the only song on the album that sounds slightly dated by the era it was recorded in. The live version however, will leave you spellbound, and is definately worth checking out.

Although this album contains a half a dozen or more songs that sound like they should be standard FM Classic rock fare, I don't remember hardly ever hearing any of these songs played on the radio over the last 20+ years, except maybe by a cool DJ here and there, and that fact is sad indeed. However, I often wondered what might have happened commercially with this album if it had been released, say 15 years later, during the Grunge era? If it had, Cheap Trick might be as much a houshold name today as Nirvanna.

Cheap Trick's self-titled debut album is exceptional and is by far the rawest of their catalog. Tom Petersson's 12-string bass is way up in the mix and only adds to the album's rough edge. As for the songs, all of them are very good, even if most of them are only known by their hardcore fans. "Oh, Candy" and "Mandocello" are strong ballads that never get sappy while mid-tempo tracks like "Cry, Cry", "The Ballad of TV Violence", "Daddy Should Have Stayed in High School", and the cover of "Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace" are performed with passion and swagger. "Hot Love" and "He's a Whore" are as heavy as Cheap Trick got, bearing no resemblance to the pop/rock of later years. The remaining tracks, "Elo Kiddies" and "Taxman, Mr. Thief" are also very good, featuring Rick Nielsen's majestic sounding riffs. The bonus tracks are also very good, particularly early versions of "I Want You to Want Me" and "You're All Talk." All told, an excellent debut, second only to In Color as their best album, only because that disc has a lot more classic tracks.