By the end of 1978, Cheap Trick had three albums on the shelves and a great catalog of songs like “Surrender” and “I Want You to Want Me,” but they’d yet to attract a big audience in America. They did have a huge following in Japan and were treated like the Beatles when they arrived in April of that year, leading to a wild night of music at Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan. Originally released solely in Japan, the label wisely released it in America after radio stations began playing the live version of “I Want You to Want Me” and import copies began selling at hugely inflated prices. The album came out in the States in February of 1979, and “I Want You To Want Me” hit Number Seven on the Hot 100. Their cover of “Ain’t That A Shame” by Fats Domino also got tons of airplay. “We owned that material,” guitarist Rick Nielsen said in 2013. “We played everywhere we could, we toured constantly, we knew what we were doing.” Andy Greene