Cheap Trick at Budokan

Cheap Trick at Budokan (or simply At Budokan) is the first live album by American rock band Cheap Trick, and their best-selling recording. It was first released in Japan on October 8, 1978, and later released in the United States on February 1979, through Epic Records. After several years of constant touring but only middling exposure for the band, At Budokan steadily grew off radio play and word-of-mouth to become a high-selling success, kickstarting the band's popularity and becoming acclaimed as one of the greatest live rock albums of all time and a classic of the power pop genre. It was ranked number 426 in the 2003 edition of Rolling Stone magazine's list of "the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2019, the album was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". An album featuring leftover tracks from the band's 1978 Budokan set, plus additional material from their 1979 tour of Japan, was released in 1994 as Budokan II, and a two-disc reconstruction of the complete original Budokan performances, titled At Budokan: The Complete Concert, was released to commemorate its twentieth anniversary in 1998. Overview Cheap Trick found early success in Japan, and capitalized on this popularity by recording Cheap Trick at Budokan at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo on April 28 and 30, 1978, with an audience of 12,000 screaming Japanese fans nearly drowning out the band at times. The album was intended for release only in Japan but with strong airplay of the promotional album From Tokyo to You, an estimated 30,000 import copies were sold in the United States and the album was released domestically in February 1979. The album also introduced two previously unreleased original songs, "Lookout" and "Need Your Love". As stated by producer Jack Douglas, the audio from Live at Budokan is actually not from the Budokan, but from Osaka, which was a smaller show. The recording of the Budokan show was deemed unsuitable for release. An unusual aspect of the album release in the UK was the use of coloured vinyl, then primarily restricted to singles and EP's, and soon replaced as a marketing gimmick by so-called "picture discs".