The Cheap Trick book, This Band Has No Past

It’s been a long time since my last post, but I’m ready to get things rolling again.

Last spring I wrote about Brian Kramp’s run-in with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a short-sighted entity who temporarily shut down his music podcast, Rock and/or Roll. The silver lining in this fiasco was that it freed up Kramp’s time to complete This Band Has No Past: How Cheap Trick Became Cheap Trick, available now at Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and other bookstores. I am not a die-hard Cheap Trick fan by any means, though I do think that Dream Police and In Color are nearly perfect power pop albums. Beyond that I’m a modest fan at best. Nonetheless, I found Kramp’s 300-plus-page read to be a delightful trip to the world of live music in the Upper Midwest during the 70s, and a meticulous record of how this band earned their success. If the book can capture the interest of a casual fan, I think that hard-core Cheap Trick followers will be ecstatic.

Kramp conducted more than eighty interviews for the book, including particularly insightful contributions from original drummer Bun E. Carlos and band manager Ken Adamany. The other original band members – Tom Petersson, Rick Nielsen and Robin Zander – didn’t participate, but their words are well-documented from past interviews, and I didn’t find their lack of direct input to be a drawback. If anything, it may have helped to keep the book focused and allow for more contributions from other players in the band’s history.

This Band Has No Past, a title taken from the mock-biography included in the band’s debut album, meticulously covers the origins of Cheap Trick from its modest roots in Rockford, Illinois, with forerunning bands such as The Grim Reapers, Bo Weevils and Fuse, to the recording of the wildly successful Cheap Trick at Budokan, the album that finally garnered the sales that eluded the band through their first three releases. You might be asking, “How the heck can a 300-page book only cover the band’s first few albums?” Kramp does this in a multitude of ways, all of which I found appealing.

First, he put the band’s evolution in context with contemporaneous events like the Vietnam War and the releases of Jaws and Star Wars, plus events that played tangential roles in band members’ lives, such as the details of the Richard Speck murders (which would inspire the song, "The Ballad of TV Violence") and the story of the plane crash that took the lives of Otis Redding and six others in 1967. As it happened, future band manager Ken Adamany owned the Madison, Wisconsin club where Redding was to appear that night, and Rick Nielsen’s band, The Grim Reapers, opened for what turned out to be somber occasion.

Second, Kramp’s devotion to details that other author’s may have deemed unimportant give the story its scope and vibrancy, such as the story of Chris Crowe, a graphic artist who created the band’s logo, the inclusion of setlists from various shows, and an in-depth analysis of which of the debut album’s sides was supposed to be played first (it’s not as obvious as one would think). Kramp scoured seemingly every publication that included even a passing mention to the band – the Racine Journal Times, the Rockford Register Republic, Estherville Daily News, etc. Seriously, I admire the efforts it must have taken for Kramp to amass so much information and portray it in an entertaining fashion. Hell, he included two pages worth of adjectives that various publications used to describe Cheap Trick, and another two pages of adjectives used to describe at Rick Nielsen. Kind of crazy, but really rewarding!

Which brings me to the third point: just as Kramp appears to have worked tirelessly to write This Band Has No Past, the book highlights just how hard-working the members of Cheap Trick and a multitude of other bands were at the time, playing show after show after show at tiny venues throughout the Upper Midwest, from bowling alleys to high school dances to clubs to festivals. The book serves as a time capsule of the gritty but vibrant live music scene during the 70s, a scene that modern day musicians can only long for. While most of the venues were foreign to me, I have to imagine that anyone from the area who came of age during the 70s is going to be thrilled with this trip down memory lane.

Most illuminating for me was the realization that Jack Douglas, the producer of Cheap Trick’s debut album, hand-picked the songs for that 1977 release, overlooking tracks that would later prove to be very important to the band’s success, most notably “I Want You To Want Me” and “Surrender.” And it’s mind-boggling to me that “Hello There” wasn’t chosen to open the first album; it would have rivaled other great debuts such as “Welcome to the Working Week,” “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Chuck E.’s in Love” and “Runnin’ with the Devil.” A fan of alternative history might ponder what would have transpired if these songs had been released earlier. Perhaps success would have come sooner, but perhaps Budokan wouldn’t have become phenomenon it became

Somehow it all worked out. And thanks to Kramp, much of it has been documented in an enjoyable read, and the book itself is an attractive, sturdy publication with color photos and appealing typesetting, making it well worth the price.