Okay, maybe I'm not the brightest guy in the world. The book is called American Standard: Cheap Trick From the Bars to Budokan and Beyond. But a title that references a band's most famous gig and album doesn't necessarily mean anything, especially when the back jacket copy and foreword don't clearly lay-out the author's agenda. So, as I read the first seventy pages of American Standard, I kept thinking, "Gee, Ross Warner is sure sprinting through Cheap Trick's career." He barely spares a word about the guys' pre-band years, barely a sentence on their formation, and—upon flipping forward to get a sense of what I was reading—barely a paragraph on their only #1 hit. That last bit was fine by me though. "The Flame" is a piece of shit.
Only after I was seventy pages into Warner's book did the agenda finally come clear. Ahhh...American Standard isn't some general Cheap Trick bio; it's a bio that uses Cheap Trick at Budokan as the key turning point of the band's career. So once we get to those fateful gigs in late April 1978, Warner finally eases up on the gas to get into how Cheap Trick ended up playing The Beatles' old stomping ground, how a live album they never wanted released was released only in the country in which it was recorded and then became Cheap Trick's signature album only after an import-crazy New Jersey record shop imported a bunch of copies. We then learn how At Budokan kind of messed up Cheap Trick's momentum, creativity, and enthusiasm, how it might have even expedited Tom Petersson's exit from the band. We learn how having a smash hit can be a curse for a band if it's the wrong smash hit. Therein lies the story, and it's one worth telling, especially since the last Cheap Trick book that crossed my desk, Brian Kramp's This Band Has No Past, stops just before the release of Budokan. Even though these two books were written by different authors with very different approaches, they still feel like companion pieces, and not just because Warner picks up where Kramp left off, but because This Band Has No Past supplies something that American Standard lacks: a clear sense of who the guys in Cheap Trick, so often sold as dreamy or goofy caricatures, are. So, while I'd be comfortable recommending American Standard alone to the merely Cheap Trick curious, the kind of fan who wouldn't dare leave home without a long blonde wig or badge-festooned cardigan must read Kramp's book first. But they should definitely proceed on to Warner's next, even if only to enjoy the two pages devoted to journalists' hilarious descriptions of Bun E. Carlos.
[Disclosure: American Standard: Cheap Trick From the Bars to Budokan and Beyond was published by Backbeat Books, which is also the publisher of my books The Who FAQ and 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Minute.]
