Cheap Trick
Friday, May 21
Celebrate Virginia Live

Cheap Trick fans, including teens Jacob Harris and Zach Smith, await the band's performance to kick off this year's Celebrate Virginia Live season last Friday.

The fact that Cheap Trick’s seminal Live at Budokan album is now more than 30 years old wasn’t lost on lead guitarist Rick Nielsen last Friday night. The band has taken on a kitschy quality in some regards since its early ’80s heyday. Nielsen held up an eight-track of their most recent album (aptly titled The Latest) and thanked fans for making it the No. 1 eight-track in the country.

Cheap Trick fans

But the self-effacing humor the band shared was met in equal part by a high-octane performance that reminded original fans in attendance—and proved to the many younger audience members sporting Cheap Trick shirts—just what made them so phenomenal.

Nielsen’s onstage showmanship—jumping in the air one moment and striking a pose the next—revved things up, while singer Robin Zander’s standard-bearing monster-rock vocals seem to have lost none of their falsetto range.

As with many of last year’s Celebrate Virginia shows, the feel was equal parts carnival and concert. That can be a tough situation for a band trying to hold listeners’ attention. But Cheap Trick put forth a solid effort, filling the set with a mix of the brand-new material (which, though less familiar, is still just as good as the old) and tracks from Budokan, as well as their version of Big Star’s “In the Street,” which some remember as the theme to “That ’70s Show.”

The band also did not disappoint with its biggest hits. It got perhaps the best known of these, “I Want You to Want Me,” out of the way early, but held on to its other hits—“Surrender” (Mama’s all right, daddy’s all right …) and “The Flame”—for the close of the set. Finally, fans who stuck around were able to cross “Dream Police” off the list during the encore.

With a very promising lineup of acts ahead, some observers may have been interested to see what progress the Celebrate Virginia folks had made in re-grading the field, which flooded last season, resulting in a few rescheduled dates and a few other very muddy ones. Some new gravel and filled-in spots were evident, though it was difficult to tell last Friday with many audience members set up in their lawn chairs. The true test, of course, will come with the first rain.  

—Ben Sellers