Finding and Documenting Cheap Trick's 1979 Tour History
If you are trying to piece together Cheap Trick's tour activity from 1979, you are dealing with one of those frustrating gaps in rock documentation. Their breakthrough album Cheap Trick at Budokan had dropped in March 1979 and completely reshaped their trajectory, but the live record from that year is messy. Bootlegs, radio recordings, and setlist archive entries often contradict each other, and the official touring schedule was never properly logged at the time. The 1979 tour cycle is generally split into two distinct legs, and knowing that boundary helps you organize whatever sources you find. The first leg ran from roughly February through August and was built around the At Budokan album rollout and the follow-up In Color album, which came out in September. The second leg kicked off in October and ran through early 1980, headlining large theaters and some amphitheaters as the band transitioned into the next cycle. Start your research on setlistdotcom, which has the most complete fan-contributed records for this period. The data there is not perfect, but it is the single best consolidated source. Then cross-reference with the Internet Archive's Cheap Trick collection. Several complete audience recordings from 1979 shows exist there in varying quality, and the metadata on those uploads sometimes includes date and venue information that is more accurate than what you will find on setlist archives alone.
For actual venue-level detail, the Billboard concert listings from February through December 1979 are worth pulling up. You can access archived copies through the Billboard retrospective database or find scanned issues on archive.org. These listings confirm which cities the band actually promoted tickets in, which catches cases where a show was listed on setlist databases but ended up being canceled or moved at the last minute. I spent a long time trying to reconcile a discrepancy on the August 1979 dates between what setlistdotcom listed and what ticket records showed. There was a show at the Starwood in Nashville that appears in multiple bootleg circles as an August 11 performance, but the actual venue log and local newspaper listing confirm it was played on August 10. The bootleg community had been re-dating it for years based on a wrong master release. The workaround I used was pulling the original Tennessean concert preview from the library's microfilm archive, which listed the exact date along with support acts, and that single primary source resolved the conflict. When you are building out a tour history, do not trust concert databases that aggregate from other databases. One popular site copied its 1979 data from a forum post that had several errors baked in, and then dozens of other sites copied from that one. The error propagated and became hard to untangle. Always trace back to a venue program, a newspaper listing, or an audio recording with a verified source timestamp.
One thing beginners miss when working with this era is that Cheap Trick toured differently in 1979 than most people assume. They did not play arena-sized rooms yet despite the album's success. Most of the 1979 dates were in theaters and mid-size venues ranging from 1,500 to 4,000 capacity. The few larger shows were festivals or amphitheaters. If you see a source claiming they were playing arenas consistently in 1979, it is either misdated or confused with their 1980 onward schedule. Another nuance is the support act rotation. In early 1979, they opened for or shared bills with bands like Queen and Aerosmith on select dates before going solo headliner. The lineup changed frequently, and assuming a consistent support act across the entire year will lead you astray. Check each leg separately. The main weakness in any 1979 tour reconstruction is simply that the band did not keep official backstage logs or tour books that have survived publicly. Nothing I can do about that. You are working with fan documentation and press records, which means some dates will always have lower confidence than others. If you need a fully verified itinerary, your options are limited to the documented highlights rather than a complete night-by-night account.
Get the Full Details
For audio documentation, the Internet Archive remains the strongest free resource. Search for "Cheap Trick 1979 live" and sort by date. Several complete shows from that tour are available there, including recordings from Chicago, Cleveland, and various Japanese dates from the same period. The audio quality varies from decent audience tapes to professional FOH mixes, but having the actual recordings helps you verify setlists against the written records. If you are compiling this for a personal project or article, my recommendation is to build a spreadsheet with columns for date, venue, city, state or country, supporting act, setlist source confidence level, and audio availability. Mark each entry as confirmed, probable, or unverified. That system will save you from making assumptions you cannot later defend.
