Book Review: American Standard

American Standard: Cheap Trick from the Bars to the Budokan and Beyond
Backbeat Books
by Ross Warner

The subject of Cheap Trick is no stranger to book treatment. Brian Kramp’s well-received 2022 book This Band Has No Past is among the most highly-regarded of several books about the rocking foursome from Rockford, Illinois. Just two years earlier, Doug Brod’s 2020 They Just Seem a Little Weird chronicled the band’s rise, placing it into context alongside the successes of KISS, Aerosmith and (perhaps oddly) Starz. Three years before that came Still Competition: The Listener’s Guide to Cheap Trick by Robert Lawson. And that same year – 2017 – saw the release of Out of the Basement, a look at Rockford’s music scene that inevitably centered upon Cheap Trick. There have surely been others.

All of which raises a salient question: Is there a place for yet another book about the band? The editors at Rowman & Littlefield imprint Backbeat Books certainly seem to think so. They greenlit Ross Warner’s American Standard: Cheap Trick from the Bars to the Budokan and Beyond.

Warner takes a decidedly different tack than many of those who came before him. Focusing primarily on the group’s live history, he spends comparatively little time discussing the group’s catalog of studio albums. An admittedly contrarian favorite of mine, the Todd Rundgren-produced Next Position Please gets no more than a couple of sentences in Warner’s 230+ page book. And when he does focus on an album, it’s – wait for it – Cheap Trick at Budokan.

To be fair, that album was the juggernaut and albatross that defined Cheap Trick’s career. And to Warner’s credit, he explores both the yin and the yang of that album’s staggering success. There’s comparatively little firsthand material in the books pages; Warner’s efforts seem more focused on research than interviewing. A notable primary source was Cary Baker, the journalist (and later key industry exec, and later still celebrated publicist); Baker was an important and early champion of the band, and provides keen insight.

Beyond that, rather than talking to the principals themselves, Warner did a very deep dive into the archives. Drawing from the many interviews the band has done over the years – and injecting a healthy dose of skepticism applied to what Zander, Petersson, Carlos and Nielsen have told journalists on the record – he stitches together a perspective that sets American Standard apart from previous books on the band.

Those interested in the ups and downs of Cheap Trick since its formation will learn a good bit by reading Warner’s book. One quality that it – here’s that word again – inevitably shares with other titles covering the band is that it falls short of definitive. The book doesn’t fully address the band’s influence, nor their major part in ushering in the wave of power pop bands, nor (as mentioned above) their work in the studio.

But because Cheap Trick has always been larger than life, one book could never tell their story. American Standard certainly adds to the reader’s understanding of how and why the band soared to the top thanks to Budokan, as well as why the record became something of a millstone around the group’s metaphorical neck.

In fact – owing to nearly a third of the book addressing the famed live album in one form or another – American Standard might be thought of an an in-depth essay (with quotes) on Cheap Trick at Budokan, with some contextual content applied before and after it. That’s not a knock: not for nothing did the record sell more than 3 million units in the U.S., earn a place in one of Rolling Stone’s best-ever-albums lists and earn recognition from the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry as an important recording. So in the same way that Cheap Trick deserves coverage in multiple books, At Budokan deserves – and with Ross Warner’s American Standard, gets – extensive coverage as well.