Cheap Trick‘s 1978 live album At Budokan was a triumphant success that marked their critical and commercial breakthrough. It also, apparently, wasn’t totally honest.
“So Budokan’s not Budokan,” producer Jack Douglas confessed during a recent appearance on the Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan podcast. “It’s Osaka.”
Recorded during Cheap Trick’s spring of ’78 trek through Japan, At Budokan was allegedly culled from the group’s performances at Nippon Budokan in Tokyo. It was Douglas and mixing engineer Jay Messina who were tasked with assembling the live album. When the men received the raw audio, they were shocked by what they heard.
‘Budokan Sounded Terrible’
“They sent me the tapes, and Jay and I, we listened to everything. Budokan sounded terrible,” Douglas admitted. “It was just so poorly recorded. I don’t know, like the mics were off, they were pointed the wrong direction, there was a little bit of drums, very little, not much, no bass drum.”
READ MORE: How Cheap Trick Finally Broke Through With ‘At Budokan’
Thankfully, one of the other performances recorded on the tour was in better shape. “We went to Osaka, it was better. It was the best performance,” he noted.
The producer went to work making sure the audio included on the live album sounded as strong as possible. His dedication helped At Budokan become a landmark release for Cheap Trick, selling more than 3 million copies and garnering the band mainstream success. But Douglas’ connection to the project didn’t end there. Decades later, Rick Nielsen contacted him as Cheap Trick was prepping their 30th anniversary CD and DVD reissue.
Cheap Trick Revisit Budokan
“Rick calls me up,” Douglas recalled. “He goes, ‘We have the film from Budokan. We’re going to do a 5.1 [mix]. I want you guys to mix a 5.1 version of it. And I said, ‘You have the film from Budokan?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, just use like kind of the same mix maybe as…’ I said, ‘But that mix is Osaka, remember?’”
Sure enough, Nielsen had forgotten where the album’s audio really came from.
READ MORE: Top 10 Cheap Trick Songs
“So now Jay and I go to work on this thing, and thank God for Pro Tools, there was a cut and paste job,” Douglas noted. “You would not believe because when there was a close-up on Rick or his hands or Robin singing, that was Budokan. When I was a wide shot, it was Osaka. And it was just… It was a labor of love. I loved doing it.”
See ‘Cheap Trick at Budokan’ in Our List of the Top 100 Live Albums
These are more than just concert souvenirs or stage documents from that awesome show you saw last summer.
Gallery Credit: UCR Staff
