A treasure trove of Bun E. Carlos approved-Cheap Trick bootlegs are being posted on a new YouTube channel appropriately titled Bun E’s Basement Bootlegs. Originally only available on cassette through mail order, this is the first time these audio recordings have been made officially available in digital form. Colin Gawel and Jeremy Porter share their thoughts on this show from Osaka, Japan during the Woke Up With a Monster Tour. More reviews to come.
First Impressions On Hearing the Record
Jeremy: I got an advance cassette of the record a few weeks before it came out. I think I still have it somewhere. My girlfriend/future wife worked at a great record store and I was lucky to get stuff like that all the time. I can't remember if it was just a few songs or maybe just partial versions of a few songs that awkwardly faded out, but I didn't love it. Busted was stale almost out of the gate four years prior, a letdown after the inconsistent but hit-yielding Lap of Luxury before it. I was excited and ready for something great after that, but maybe hopes and expectations were too high. I liked "My Gang" a lot, and still feel it's the strongest track on the record, but that was about it. I felt like they were trying too hard to reinvent themselves in the grunge-era with the ‘90s look and the new logo (the ONLY album WITHOUT the classic logo). Not like they were playing grunge, they weren't, it just felt like they were grabbing at something. I still loved the band, I saw them all the time, but I wasn't thrilled with the album.
Colin: This record came out at a very interesting time in my life and my band Watershed. We had just been signed to Epic Records and were recording at the Power Station in NYC for our debut release Twister. As hyper-obsessive Cheap Trick fans since middle school, they were the reason we started our band, we bought the CD the day it came out.
I remember very clearly bringing it into the control room of Studio C and asking if they could play CD’s? We were just starting our record, or maybe it was demos, but with all that fancy gear, I honestly didn’t know if they could play a CD. They could and they did. “My Gang” came blasting out of the sweet Jim Steinman-approved speakers and Herb, Joe, Biggie and I just kinda sighed. By the time it got to track #4, “Never Run Out of Love,” we asked them to take it off.
Producer Danny Lawson asked, “You don’t like it?” Us, “Not really.” Danny said, “It sounds pretty good to me.”
In hindsight, obviously the producer stuck making a young band like us sound 1/10 as good as Cheap Trick was a daunting task. No doubt that Woke Up With A Monster was the greatest thing he had heard come out of those speakers since he started working with Watershed.
Looking back, I was just stuck in that super-fan mode where every time I heard a new Cheap Trick record, I wanted that dopamine rush like the first time I heard “Hello There” or “Downed” on the Over the Edge soundtrack. Point is, once your favorite band is competing against itself, it’s usually a no-win situation. So my first reaction, while Epic Records was burning a quarter million dollars on our three-piece, three-chord band was “meh.” I was wrong. (I got that rush when I heard “Anytime” on Cheap Trick ‘97. So it’s not impossible, just improbable)
Memories Of That Tour
Jeremy: The record came out in March of ‘94. Looking at my spreadsheet, I saw them 5 times on that tour.
3/27/94 - Windsor, Ontario - California's, 5 days after the album came out, my 4th overall and probably the most intimate Cheap Trick show I've seen. Tiny place, people were packed in. Road cases and other obstacles on the floor made it difficult to get a spot. Rick's guitars were everywhere - there wasn't much of a side/backstage. I left with a handful of picks. They were a band struggling to keep it going, but they did not phone it in - they played great and it was surreal seeing them in such a small place. I'll never forget this show. I was so glad I went.
7/28/94 - ($1.01 show with Foghat), 8/27/95 - (with Loverboy), and 7/20/96 (with the Dick the Bruiser Band), all at Pine Knob, Detroit's main shed venue. I saw them there six times total. The dollar show was rough. Seemed the low ticket price, many of which were just passed out for free by Detroit rock station 101 WRIF, brought out the - ahem - best of humanity from the area. The next two shows were a bit better. The band was great each time, the crowds were respectable, a far cry from California's, but these aren't among my favorite times seeing them. We had backstage passes for one of the Pine Knob/WUWAM shows (thanks again, future wife's record store job!) and Tigers' slugger Kirk Gibson was hanging out. (He is a good friend of the band, I'd run into him at a couple future shows too. His favorite song is "Heaven Tonight.") His forearms were the size of Popeye's. I'd never seen anything like it. It's been etched on my brain ever since. At one of the shows a torrential downpour came through, sending white-water rapids into the pavilion, and killing the power, interrupting the set for a good 15 minutes or more. They still play there today, opening for Heart and Rod Stewart, among others, and it's a lot of work (and cash) to get up there for a 45-minute set of mostly greatest hits in the daylight. For a few years straight, though, It was the once-a-summer trip up to Pine Knob, and always a good time.
12/29/96 - The Ritz (then called The Palladium) - Long time Detroit-area hard rock/metal venue in Roseville. Not a giant place, but not tiny - a club. After four shows from this tour I was getting bored with the set list and the WUWAM material wasn't new anymore and wasn't helping. I knew what was coming next on the set-list based on the guitar Rick was strapping on and the previous four shows I'd seen. I'll never forget hearing a couple songs from the forthcoming self-titled 1997 Red Ant record that night and thinking..."Well, this is a promising step in the right direction." The year and the tour (for me) ended on an optimistic note. That next album is my favorite since Dream Police, but that's another story.
Colin: Once again, it was an interesting time in my life. I only saw two shows on the WUWAM tour but Watershed happened to be the opening band for both. The first night, we were 3rd on the bill under Cheap Trick and Bachman-Turner Overdrive at the Deer Creek amphitheater outside Indianapolis. When our Chevy van pulled in between the trucks and buses, the loading dock was too high for us to load our gear so we had to back out and load from a different spot.
Before the show, we were startled when Rick called us down to say Hello There in his dressing room. We had gotten the gig through our Epic A&R guy and drummer-extraordinaire Frankie LaRocka. No doubt he was the one who put a bug in Rick’s ear about what huge fans we were. We started telling him all the times we had met him (and the band) out by the bus behind venues in Columbus and how we always gave him cassettes of our band (then called The Wire). Something clicked, his eyes got kind of wide and he looked at us and said “I remember you guys….you got signed to Epic?” with just a hint of wonder in his voice.
He was very kind and asked some questions about how it was going, but he had to be thinking, CT had picked the right time to leave Epic Records for Warner Brothers.
Anyway, we did our show, it went pretty well and we settled in on the side of the stage to watch our all-time favorite rock n roll band perform to 13,000 people. Pinch me. Kill me. If all our practices only led to this moment it was all worth it.
They opened with “My Gang” and I was watching stage left or whatever side Tom is on. They were good of course, but it wasn’t overwhelming. I figured I was just having a hard time processing being on the side of the stage. I always had cheap seats as a fan.
But then, they played two songs off the new record, “Girlfriend” and “You’re All I Wanna Do.” Suddenly they shifted into a higher gear. This wasn’t Cheap Trick banging out well-worn classics, this was a band excited to play new music and making damn sure the crowd would get an earful. It was breathtaking. I looked at Joe and Herb with my jaw agape. “Is it just me or is this the greatest thing ever?” They agreed. We were witnessing rock n roll performed at the very highest level. Mere mortals such as Watershed could only dream of such lofty heights. But it gave us something to shoot for. Like throwing rocks at the moon.
I don’t remember anything else from the set. In my defense, I have seen them 53 times. The takeaway is this: I know most fans come to hear the hits, but for real rock n roll bands, it’s the new songs that give them the rush they first felt practicing in a garage. That’s why Cheap Trick continues to record and play new material. I felt that power and excitement watching them from 20 feet away.
The next day we opened for them in our hometown of Columbus, Ohio. I have some vivid memories of soundcheck. Zander walking around having a smoke and drinking a beer. The guys hugging each other and wishing each other Happy Father’s Day. And they played a blistering version of “Let Her Go” (from WUWAM) that for a moment I thought might reduce the Newport Music Hall to a smoldering pile of rubble. Watershed got our sound check as doors were opening so we treated the early arrivals to our versions of “Downed” and “Still Competition.” I remember Tom rushing back in to watch us with a big smile on his face.
After the show, in a night that will live in Columbus rock n roll legend, the whole band joined us at our favorite local watering hole, The Library Bar, and we closed that place down. This was pre-cell phones so if you happened to be at the bar, you got to hang out with Cheap Trick all night. If not, you just heard about it the next day. There were lots of interesting conversations but what is most pertinent to this story is when Rick told me “Tell Me Everything” was his favorite track on WUWAM.
Thoughts on this performance from Japan and Bun E Bootlegs in general.
Jeremy: Call it nostalgia, but I love this recording. The band sounds so good, almost like it's been overdubbed, though I'm sure it wasn't. Rick's playing is often a little sloppy live as he's running around being a goofball. Most people probably don't notice. But he's mostly spot-on here. (And don't @ me - I love Rick and think he's a very under-rated guitarist, but you can't put on that kind of a show and play like Steve Howe.) I found it interesting that Robin does so much of the between song banter. He does very little nowadays, basically just the final thank you and the intro to “IWYTWM.”
I bought all of the Bun E. Boots when he was releasing them on hand-stamped cardboard sleeves and CDR’s in the...2000s? and loved them. I had rips of the cassettes that preceded those. As much as I love this show, and the ’79 show that's also up there, and I am thrilled this stuff is out there and that there's more to come...I loathe listening to music on YouTube. It's worse than Spotify and iTunes, which I loathe as well. I understand there's probably all kinds of hoops to jump through to release these as some sort of downloadable-for-a-price thing (Bandcamp, anyone?), but that would be just golden. I shouldn't complain. Keep ‘em comin', I'll keep listening and be grateful
Colin: As always, I am stunned, STUNNED, by what I am listening to. This is a board tape. There is nowhere to hide. It is absolutely flawless. Cheap Trick is simply the greatest rock n roll band that has ever existed. The heaviness of “Woke Up With Monster” followed by the melody of “Didn’t Know I Had It” is jarring. How can the same band be so proficient at two completely different styles of song?
I won’t drag you through the whole 1994 set (you can listen below), but I find the periods where Cheap Trick were off the radar much more interesting than the glory days of the late seventies. We have numerous versions of the pre-Dream Police era captured and released. We get it, they were awesome. But I hope future Bun E Bootlegs move away from that well-trodden upon path to more interesting tours such as Next Position Please, Special One, The Latest, 1997, and gulp, The Doctor.
Putting Woke Up With a Monster and this period into proper historical context in 2023.
Jeremy: I haven't listened to it in 25 years, but I did today. I like it a lot more now. The title track has a bit of a John Lennon "I'm Losing You" thing going on that I never caught on to before. Zander's vocal is insane on that one. "Didn't Know I Had It" is a respectable grab for a hit, also a bit of a nod to the Fab Four in parts. It's not all hits, though. "Ride the Pony" is like early 80's reject Bowie cocaine disco. It would have been better served with the "My Gang" feel. Then they hit you with "Girlfriends" which is part "High Roller" part "Route 66." Another insane Zander vocal. "Tell Me Everything" isn't great. The production is not dated (like Busted) - a big rock sound, snare jumps out, Robin on top, where he belongs, but the guitars are loud. It's aged well for the most part and I'm gonna put it back into rotation.
Those years, ‘94-’96, were about the band struggling to be relevant in a post-Nevermind world where ‘70s and especially ‘80s bands were cast away like trash. Right around the corner was the ‘97 album and accolades from the likes of Dave Grohl and arena-tour support slots for Pearl Jam and Motley Crue. In that sense, WUWAM was almost transitional in hindsight. I'm so thankful that they trudged through and came out the other side. It wasn't a disaster by any means, but many lesser bands didn't make it.
Colin: I touched on this above, but I really can’t explain why I was so dismissive of this record upon release other than to blame my immature and ignorant rock n roll palette. It’s a pretty damn solid album and definitely a huge step up from the previous Epic efforts The Doctor, Lap of Luxury and Busted. Especially when considering this was the band’s twelfth studio release. How many bands ever record 12 albums? I’m no mathematician but I would guess the percentage is somewhere around .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%
I would say WUWAM slots in comfortably in the top half of the 20 Cheap Trick records that have been released. In fact it could be #9 of all their studio releases. I’ll leave it to you to figure out 1-8. I’ll let you know if you are right. Click here for my updated Cheap Trick Top 20 and songs 1-182.
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