Today, 1970s and 1980s rockers REO Speedwagon keep on rolling down the road, performing their hits, including “Keep on Loving You,” “Take It on the Run” and “Ridin’ the Storm Out.”
And they’ll be making a stop Thursday at Robinson Center Music Hall. The band includes frontman Kevin Cronin and bandmates keyboardist Neal Doughty, lead guitarist Dave Amato, drummer Bryan Hitt and bassist Bruce Hall.
More than 40 years, a string of gold and platinum albums, and international hit singles later, REO Speedwagon can boast that not a year has passed when the group, first signed to Epic Records in 1971, didn’t perform live.
Hall explains why they are still rocking on, decades later.
“We love what we do,” he says. “And while all the traveling might be hard for most people, it’s not as hard on us.”
After years of experience, they have mastered the art of touring comfortably.
“We stay healthy and make sure we are able to sleep,” he explains of traveling by bus. “We have a driver and after shows, we sleep; the key is you have to learn how to sleep in a moving bed.”
But today’s modern conveniences, including cellphones and laptop computers, are a big improvement on the band’s early days of touring.
“What we travel in now is a luxury bus,” Hall says. “It has a refrigerator and a TV; it’s like a moving house.”
It’s a far cry from tour buses of the 1970s when stops at truck stops were necessary.
“I remember once, we stopped at a truck stop to go to the bathroom or grab something to eat and the bus driver didn’t realize we’d left one of our members behind,” he says. “Well, there weren’t any cellphones back then so he ended up having to call the police to track the bus down and bring it back.”
And the group only tours for about two weeks before returning home for a break.
“If you’re out there too long, all the days start running together and you start forgetting what day it is,” Hall says.
He explains what drives the band’s members, now in their early 60s, to continue living the sometimes grueling, rock star lifestyle.
“We love our fans,” he says. “They are great and we just love what we do.”
Drawing its name from the station wagon the group drove to its early shows, REO Speedwagon’s beginnings date to the late 1960s as a college band in Champaign, Ill.
The group’s original music was a far cry from the Top 40 pop rock hits that they are now known for such as “Time for Me to Fly” from the 1978 album You Can Tune a Piano But You Can’t Tuna Fish.
“Our early music was more extended-play, instrumental type of music that would get play on college FM stations and we loved doing that type of music,” Hall says. “But after a while, we realized if we were going to truly make a career out of this, we needed to make sure that we also created some songs that would be played on the AM stations and be commercial hits.”
With Cronin writing most of the group’s songs, the band soon became a part of the Midwest rock movement that included Styx, Kansas, Cheap Trick and others.
REO Speedwagon’s 1980 platinum album Hi Infidelity spent 15 weeks as No. 1 on the charts.
In 2007, after an 11-year hiatus from recording, the band released its 15th studio album, Find Your Own Way Home. In 2009, they joined with Styx to record a new single,“Can’t Stop Rockin’,” which later that year became the title track for a tour featuring the two bands and .38 Special. The tour, sponsored by VH1 and Rock Band, led to the three bands being nominated for the Most Creative Tour Package by Pollstar. And in November of that year, REO Speedwagon released Not So Silent Night: Christmas With REO Speedwagon.
In 2010, the band paired up with Pat Benatar for a summer tour package and that year, the band announced the release of a 30th anniversary deluxe edition reissue of the chart-topping Hi Infidelity. In 2012, REO Speedwagon joined Ted Nugent and Styx for a spring and summer tour, “Midwest Rock ’n’ Roll Express” and returned with that tour in spring 2013.
While their hits are always in demand and performed at shows, the band is still making new music today, Hall says.
“We are in a very fortunate situation where we have a friend who has the Blue Moon Studios in Agoura Hills, Calif.,” he says of the recording studio just north of downtown Los Angeles. “And we can pretty much go in there whenever we want and record a couple of tracks here and there.”
Hall says the band is still trying to decide how they want to release their new music.
“We might choose to put out an EP,” Hall says. “Or we might decide to release it on the Internet instead.”
REO Speedwagon
8 p.m. Thursday, Robinson Center Music Hall, Broadway and West Markham Street, Little Rock
Admission: $63, $68, $88.50
(800) 745-3000
ticketmaster.com
Style, Pages 29 on 05/06/2014