In 1979, Cheap Trick had a Billboard Hot 100 hit with an unlikely song. The track, “I Want You to Want Me,” was one of the Illinois rock band’s biggest songs, but it failed to chart when it was originally released as a studio version on their 1977 album In Color. Two years later, the stars aligned to make a live version of the song the band’s breakout hit in the U.S.
Who can forget lead singer Robin Zander’s intro, which is still widely viewed on YouTube. “And this next song is called ‘I Want You … to Want Me,” Zander slowly said, pointing to himself as thousands of fans screamed hysterically.
The live version of “I Want You to Want Me” appeared on Cheap Trick Live at Budokan, and it was on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 for 19 weeks in 1979, peaking at No. 7. But while the song received a second life, it almost wasn’t included on the live album at all.
In an interview with Louder, founding guitarist Tom Petersson recalled that his bandmate RickNeilson wrote the song in response to the pop and disco songs that were taking over the radio.
“My recollection is that he just did that song as a bit of a joke, because at the time when we had done that song, there was a lot of pop music on the radio – ABBA, and all sorts of things, disco,” Petersson said. “He thought, ‘I’m just going to do an over-the-top pop song. I just want to do one that’s so silly – total pop – and then we’ll do a heavy version of it’. He didn’t know what was going to happen with it. The idea was to have it like heavy metal pop song. Cheap Trick doing ABBA – except a very heavy version.”
Nielson explained that the idea for the song came to him because he “always wanted what wasn’t there.” “It was the easiest lyric I could think of,” he told the outlet. “It was just as bad as all the other songs that were out at the time. It’s hummable and it’s listenable.”
When the studio version of “I Want You to Want Me” didn’t hit, the band still played it in shows—sometimes. In the spring of 1978, they included “I Want You to Want Me” in their sold-out show at Nippon Budokan in Tokyo. But Zander told the St. Pete Catalystthat the song wasn’t originally on the set list that night.
“We had played that song over the first couple of years live, in clubs and stuff, and it got kind of an ‘Ehhh, okay’ response,” Zander said in 2020. “We didn’t do it every night or anything.” [It] wasn’t even in the set that we were gonna do. About 15 minutes before we were going to go on, our manager came up to us and said the Japanese production guy said we needed another song, because our set’s not long enough. He suggested putting ‘I Want You to Want Me’ in the set, so we did, and that became the big hit off the album. Who knew?”
Nearly 50 years after penning “I Want You to Want Me,” Nielson told USA Today it was an easy song to write. “I always joke that I wish I was that stupid more often, to write something that’s gone on to put my kids through school. I probably wrote it in about five minutes, and now it’s been around for ages,” he said. “Everybody kind of knows it, and it makes people happy.”
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