Cheap Trick

One of the most enduring and beloved guitar rock bands of all time, Cheap Trick were formed in Illinois in 1975. Founding member, guitarist Rick Nielsen had been playing around the Rockford area for several years in groups like The Boyz and The Grim Reapers, before joining bassist Tom Petersson in the rock band Fuse in 1970. After devoting five years to a self-titled album, a European tour, and a number of name changes, Fuse was unable to find success, and the group returned to Rockford. There, they accepted singer Robin Zander and drummer Bun E. Carlos into the lineup and began working on new material.

After attending a Slade concert together and Petersson noticed that the glam rockers employed "every cheap trick in the book" during their stage act, the musicians began playing under the cheeky name Cheap Trick. After signing to Epic Records, the band released a self-titled debut in 1977, which they soon followed with In Color and Heaven Tonight. Though these albums made little impact stateside, they proved massively popular in Japan, where Cheap Trick toured in 1978. They met with such rapturous crowds in the Asian country that they opted to record a live album there in 1979, Cheap Trick at Budokan. The popularity of this live album finally put Cheap Trick on the map in the U.S., where singles like "I Want You to Want Me" made them stars of AM radio. They would remain fixtures of the American rock scene for the next several decades, with hit songs like 1988's "The Flame" and 1986's "Mighty Wings," which appeared over the closing credits of the hit film "Top Gun" (1986). Although the hits dried up by the end of the '80s, Cheap Trick's appeal to hard rock, punk and power pop audiences made them a consistent fixture on the touring circuit, and they continued making occasional albums. Cheap Trick was inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 2016.