By 1980, REO Speedwagon had nearly worn out their welcome at Epic Records. The label waited ten years for REO to hit the big time, and while things looked up two years earlier, when the album You Can Tune A Piano But You Can’t Tune A Fish spit out a couple of FM album staples in “Time For Me To Fly” and “Roll With The Changes,” the following years Nine Lives failed to build on the bands’ momentum. When it peaked at #33 on the Billboard charts, three spots lower than Tuna Fish, it seemed the end was near.

While the band had not become superstars, the label had not lost money on REO either. The decision was made to give them one more chance, though expectations remained low. One can only imagine the shock that the industry, the band and even their hardcore fans felt when Hi Infidelity, released in the fall of 1980, reached the top spot on the charts, not once, but three times in 1981. The album gave REO a new lease on life. REO continue to sell out concerts coast to coast and will be featured on Direct TV, and release a DVD of their performance at Moondance Jam, beginning in November.

In the interview that follows, vocalist, rhythm guitarist and songwriter, Kevin Cronin, looks back at the making of the classic album. He reveals the stories behind the albums biggest hits and shares the highs and lows of Hi Infidelity. Kevin also discusses the inevitable split with founding guitarist Gary Richrath and why he talks so much on stage.

Kevin: He was way too young. That is really a heartbreaker. I have heard his wife is going to keep the vibe alive for next year.

Kevin: We were very fortunate. We agreed to a ten or twelve camera high definition video shoot. There was a lot that could have gone wrong. Murphy’s Law says that any time you agree to a big video shoot then something really screws up and you end up going, “Why couldn’t the cameras have been there last night? That was a great show.” It always makes you nervous when the cameras are on you.

Of all the live shows that we have ever tried to capture on video, this was really the first one where we all went off stage and said, “Finally we have caught on camera the true vibe of an REO Speedwagon show.” I am happy that you caught that vibe. Wait until you see the results. We have been in the studio editing the video and we are trilled about how it turned out. It is debuting in November on Direct TV. We have come to an agreement with the Direct TV people where people can not only enjoy the concert on Direct TV; they can buy it on DVD.

The stars were aligned for us in a lot of ways. What a great place to capture the show; at Moondance Jam, a true old-fashioned style rock festival. Something really special really did happen that night. We did a lot of good shows last summer. You were there. The production on stage was beautiful. From the stage, looking over the Moondance crowd was inspiring. We didn’t even go on until Midnight. Everything was totally inspiring about the entire night.

Kevin: What was happening thirty years ago and what is happening now is very interesting and intriguing to me. Thirty years ago we were just in the studio making a record. We were making the demos and they were lost for twenty eight years. I found them in our manager’s garage. They searched the vaults in the record companies in New York and LA and we had literally been searching for these demos for decades. We took them to a mastering lab and we baked the tapes and restored everything. When we made the demos we just put them in the box where demos go and we didn’t think anymore about it.

I am not a nostalgic guy as a lot of anniversaries have come and gone but this one is different. Maybe it is because my perspective has changed but our lives changed so much at that time. It is something that needs to be embraced and celebrated by the band. It is something that doesn’t happen to very many people. The more time that goes by the more I appreciate it and the more I am curious and want to look into it and get down the bones of how it affected us and how it changed us. It almost deserves a book.

Kevin: We are in the midst of that. We got a project manager at Epic/Legacy Records, which is the start of it. I would like to release a package that includes the Crystal Studio demos. Those demo tapes were fifty to sixty percent of what ended up on the master recording. It all came from three days of recording in this dilapidated room. There was the smell of vomit from 1965 in this place; it was a shit hole but it was all we could afford at the time. We were actually about to get dropped from the label.

All you hear on the songs is the guitar, bass, drums and lead vocal versions of the songs on Hi Infidelity. We had not put any background vocals on yet and we had not put any keyboards on yet. It shows what the record sounded like at that point. It has solos and lead vocals that ended up being on the album. It is rough and it is raw but there is something really cool about it.

We made these demos and the plan was to take a week off. My job, as co-producer, was to listen to the demos and then go back into rehearsal and make the necessary arrangement and lyrical changes and then go into a real studio and record the actual record. After living with these demos for a week, I fell in love with them. There was something special about them and I thought, “This is it.” Everyone thought I was crazy. The engineer said, “We can’t use this. I didn’t have the right microphone on it.” I say you can always fix the technical stuff in the mix but what you can’t fix is inspiration. When inspiration strikes, you have to capture it; that is my job as a producer. I have to capture the magic and those tapes had magic on them.

When we went into the real studio and tried to recreate it everyone went, “You’re right. We already had it.” I always wanted to know what it was on those demos that spoke to me. Finally, after 28 years I got to listen to them again. There are actually things on those demos that I like better than what ended up on the album. We are looking at other possibilities that I can’t talk about but there are some exciting things being talked about.

Kevin: We were. We had just barely broke even with all of the albums we had made over the last ten years and that is why Epic never dropped us. They were always just about to drop us and someone would go, ‘We didn’t really lose anything with these guys so lets put them back in the studio.” In our minds we were just getting free studio time. We never got anything like a royalty check. We didn’t give a shit about a royalty check. We wanted to make music. Records were the way to get your music out there so people would come and see you play live. You get paid for touring. Making a record is a privilege and an honor. If you sell ten million then I do agree you should get a royalty check but the music is most important.

Kevin: We were all kind of in the same boat. The record is almost like a concept record but the truth is that we were all equally fucked up. We just took it from there and tried to make the best of our situation. There is a movie staring Jeff Bridges called Crazy Heart. There is a scene where he is being interviewed by this lady for a book she is writing about him and he is laying in bed and he has a pint of whiskey in his hand and he is all grizzled and she asks, “Where do the songs come from?” He takes a swig off the whiskey bottle and his voice is all gravely and he just goes, “Life…unfortunately.” The best songs come from trying to figure the mess that you find yourself in. There is usually an equal and opposite reaction where the more dire your circumstances are, the better the songs turn out. There was a lot going on at that particular time, no question.

Kevin: I usually write pretty autobiographically and there is usually some type of emotional therapy involved in it. I am trying to write to figure things out that are going on in my own heart. That song was different for me because I created a character. If you took all five of the band members and rolled them into one then that was our hero in “Don’t Let Him Go.” It was a pretty simple concept. This character was saying to the woman that he loved that he knew he was immature and that he was trying to be the best man he could be and not to give up on him. The chorus says, “Don’t let him go/Give him a chance to grow/Take it easy, take it slow/And don’t let him go.” It was not my deepest lyric ever but it was heartfelt and it was what all five of us were going through. All of our relationships were in turmoil. It was really a group cry for help to one degree or another.

Kevin: I wrote the verses in the middle of the night. I wandered into my home studio and sat down at an old Wurlitzer piano that was in there; it was about three or four in the morning. It was really one of those cathartic moments. I didn’t write the chorus at that time but I felt like I really connected with some pretty deep feelings with the verses. You don’t know when you are writing a song where it will end up. I just knew it was extremely honest, maybe honest to a fault.

I went into the rehearsal studio and started playing it and the band looked at me like I was nuts. I was working on the chorus and playing the versus and I was really excited about the song. Songwriters call it “Having one on the hook.” When you are fishing and you get a bite then you have to real it in and that is basically what I was doing at rehearsal. The band was not all that excited about it. Rock bands like rock songs, they do not necessarily like love songs. A few days into it, I carved out the chorus and Richrath was just sick of hearing the song. I was really relentless about it and no one else really wanted to participate.

One day, he just took out a Les Paul guitar, plugged it into a Marshall amp, turned it up to eleven and started playing along to the chorus. You would have to ask him, but my theory is that he was trying to drown me out. I think he thought if he could drown me out then I would stop playing it but the exact opposite happened. When I heard what the song sounded like with me playing piano and him cranking up the Les Paul through the Marshall I thought it sounded fucking great. He thought he was going to piss me off but it totally sounded cool to me. That was really the birth of the REO Speedwagon power balled; it was totally by accident. It was Richrath trying to piss me off, which really does characterize the relationship that Gary and I had. The best things we wrote were when the other one was trying to piss the other one off.

Kevin: Before we went into the studio, but after we had rehearsed for a while, I would go out to Gary’s ranch. At that time, Gary was very prolific and he wrote a lot. It wasn’t all good. He was not necessarily the best judge of his own songwriting, which is part of what I loved about him. He just wrote and wrote and wrote. It was my job to come out and find the gem.

We had been working all day and it was late at night and I said, “Gary, is there anything else?” He said, “Well, there is kind of this slow song called ‘Don’t Let Me Down.’” There was already a Beatles song by the same name already but I said, “Let me hear what you’ve got.” He starts out, “Heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who heard it from another you’ve been messing around.” I was like, ‘Wow, that is one of the best opening lines in rock n’ roll history.” I said to Gary, “We have to work on this. I don’t think ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ should be the title of this song.” The first line of the chorus was “Take it on the run” and I said, “Gary, this song is called ‘Take It On The Run.”

I just kind of finished up the last couple of lines of the chorus and I wrote the instrumental section. By today’s standards it would have been a co-written song but Gary and I did that a lot. If Gary came in with an idea then I would help him and if I came in with a song then Gary would help me. Gary is a country guy; he’s from Peoria, which is downstate Illinois. “Take It On The Run” is a country song, lets face it. We just cranked up the Les Paul and made it a rock song.

Kevin: Totally. No one could have predicted what was going to happen. It took us by surprise and it was great in most ways but like everything, there is the ying and yang. There was pressure by the record company to follow it up right away. They wanted the follow up while Hi Infidelity was still on the charts. In fact, the follow up, Good Trouble, was released and Hi Infidelity was still in the Top 100.

I will tell you this, I don’t have a whole lot of regrets that I have made as a person or that we made as a band, but the decision to go ahead and release the Good Trouble album is one time where I feel that I let myself down and I let the band down. There was a lot of pressure and everyone in the band felt it. I knew in my gut that I hadn’t written the best songs for the album yet and that I needed more time. I was the singer of the band so therefore I was the one guy --- If the drummer, Alan Gratzer, said that he didn’t want to do it then they could have brought in a studio drummer to go ahead with the album. I was the singer; I was the one guy who could have said that I didn’t want to do it and we would not have done it. I folded to the peer pressure and I paid the price for it in a lot of ways. If we had waited just a little bit longer then we would have had “Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore” as the follow up. How cool would that have been? It is what it is and we learn.

Kevin: That was the frustration for the band for years and I took the brunt of it because people said, “You know, they were a rock band before they got him. Now the band went soft.” When I met Gary I was a folk singer. I played coffee houses in Chicago and I had a folk rock band that was more along the lines of Buffalo Springfield or The Byrds. I liked to rock too. I learned a lot about rock n’ roll from Richrath, he was my rock n’ roll mentor.

A band is a combination of the current members, whomever those members might be. When they decided to accept me into the group, to a great degree, it was because of the songs that I wrote. Every band needs to have songs so what are you going to do? When I played “Time For Me To Fly” for the first time the producer said, “That is not an REO Speedwagon song. It only has three chords and it is too soft.” We didn’t record it on the first album we made but by the time we got to You Can Tune A Piano But You Can’t Tuna Fish I said, “Guys, how can we say that this is not an REO Speedwagon song? If I am in charge of writing at least half of the songs and I wrote this song then it is an REO Speedwagon song. We just have to figure out a way to make it sound like an REO Speedwagon song.” It took a little bit of effort; it was a process.

I think the experience we had with “Keep On Loving You” iced it. It was the ultimate accident. We got a lot of shit. It looked from the outside like REO had been around for years and they have never had a hit, so now they were going to go into the studio and use a magic formula to make a hit record.” It was really an accident. Once it happened, it did provide a template from which to work, but it was nothing that anyone planned. It was just how the cookie crumbled.

Kevin: I think that when it came to that record no one was telling us what to do. The record company put the inmates in charge of the asylum. No producer had been able to capture the true REO sound. When Gary, Alan and I began producing we just wanted to make sure we had a great engineer because none of us knew how to do that. We did know what we wanted the band to sound like. We had very limited experience as producers but we decided to sink or swim on our own merit. We had become very frustrated with producers trying to mold us into something we weren’t. We were just five guys from Illinois trying to make some music so we just went with what he had. Obviously, people liked it. A lot of people still do. That music has transcended a lot of different trends in music and we are still here, thirty years after Hi Infidelity, with thirty thousand people cheering for us at Moondance Jam. That’s pretty cool.

Kevin: I wish that things had never ended with Gary. I am not taking anything away from Dave Amato, as he is one of my best friends and I love him. He has been an amazing addition to the band because of his guitar playing and his singing ability.

It could have gone two ways with Gary. It was the friction between the two of us that made the sparks fly. It wasn’t like we stopped getting along well so we broke up. We always had a love/hate relationship. It was always a little bit thorny. I was a city boy from Chicago and he was a country boy from Peoria. There were two kinds of energies that when rubbed together made the sparks fly. What happened is that the sparks stopped flying. I was feeling like I was carrying too much of the load.

REO Speedwagon was best when there was a good balance between Gary’s energy and my energy. That is what stopped happening. Believe me, it wasn’t a rash decision. It was a situation that had been going on for years until finally it was just not working anymore. There was no question that Gary and I were no longer functional as a songwriting team or as a production team and something needed to change. The question was, ‘What are we going to do?” The choices were for the band to carry out without either me or without Gary or the band could just stop because without both of us in the band we were not REO Speedwagon anymore.

There was a moment where we were going to hang it up. Our management said to us, “If that is what is going to happen then we should put the equipment up for sale and sell our rehearsal space.” That hit me hard. I was not ready to let it go. If I couldn’t do it with Gary then I had to give it a try and see what I could do without him. I felt like the music was bigger than any of the individuals in the band. The spirit of REO Speedwagon, and what it meant to our fans, was bigger than any of us. I thought if I tried to lead the band by myself --- that is not taking anything way from Bruce [Hall] or Neal [Doughty], who are wonderful people, but as far as being the quarterback I knew I might fall flat on my face and I might end up hurting the legacy of REO Speedwagon. Even knowing that, I was not willing to let it go without giving it my best shot.

Honestly, my thought was that when Gary got wind that I was going to keep it going it would piss him off and he would do whatever he needed to do and comeback the same way that I came back in the early Seventies. I left and I came back way stronger than I when I left. In my mind, that is what was going to happen with Gary, too. When that didn’t happen, then it makes you think, “I wonder if I would have disbanded the whole thing then would that have been the thing that pissed him off and got him back in the band?” I will never know. I just did what I thought was the right thing to do at the time. You have got to live with your decisions and that was a tough one. I really thought in a year or two, or maybe three, that Gary would eventually be back. It is sad that it never happened.

Kevin: It is not a bad note; it is just a true note. Hey listen, I love Gary. I learned everything I know about rock n’ roll from Gary Richrath. I don’t know if he realizes that. Maybe if you write this article and he reads it, then he will get to hear how much I appreciate everything he did for me. He believed in me at a time when I was nowhere. Everything I know about rock n’ roll I owe to him. I wouldn’t be where I am today without my relationship with Gary Richrath and I love the man. I hope he reads this article and I hope it maybe explains to him what happened.

Kevin: The first major tour we ever did was with a band called Black Oak Arkansas. Jim Dandy, their vocalist, kind of mentored me. After every show, we would sit there and get a little high and talk about things. Jim was a talker on stage. There was also a band out of Chicago called Mason Proffit who had a lead singer who was a storyteller as well. You have got to understand that I started out as a solo performer in coffee houses. I learned to talk to the audience from having to because I was by myself.

It is what I do and it is a part of me and I know it pisses people off and I know they would just as soon have me shut the fuck up. I know the band probably feels that way to a degree too. I’ve tried to find a balance there lately. I think I am yakking a little bit less between songs than I used too. I can’t totally shut up though because it is just too much a part of who I am.