“This band has no past” was the first line of the farcical biography printed on the inner sleeve of Cheap Trick’s first album, but the band, of course, did have a past—a past that straddles two very different decades: from the tumult of the sixties to the anticlimax of the seventies, from the British Invasion to the record industry renaissance, with the band’s debut album arriving in 1977, the year vinyl sales peaked.
This Band Has No Past tells the story of a bar band from the Midwest—the best and weirdest bar band in the Midwest—and how these four baby boomers, having been lucky enough to avoid the Vietnam draft, doggedly pursued a most unlikely career in rock’n’roll and made it on their own terms. It traces every gnarly limb of the family tree of bands that culminated in Cheap Trick, then details how this unlikely foursome paid their dues—with interest—night after night, slogging it out everyw
