Can it possibly be a coincidence that REO Speedwagon, Styx, Richard Marx and, of course, Chicago, all are from (near) the great Second City? Each reached the very top of the Billboard charts, sold millions and millions of records, and were both admired for the craft and derided for their sentimentality. Several decades later, these artists are still sharing stages at state fairs and mega-churches, rocking out, so very gently. Marx’s success was the most accelerated and the least enduring. Chicago’s success was the most meandering. Styx’s was, perhaps, the most consistent and longest lasting. But, for me, it is the triumph of REO Speedwagon that is the most curious and compelling case.

On the surface, the story of REO Speedwagon can read like a tale of perseverance. But when you pull at the thread, you discover a band that, a decade into their career, found a Pop “cheat code.” With this code, they made a pair of completely irresistible, loud then quiet, then loud and quiet power ballads that would presage everything from Night Ranger to The Pixies to The Goo Goo Dolls. REO spent the rest of the 1980s occasionally reusing that code, because it was unbeatable, but mostly rationing it, as though to show that they could win without cheating. Along the way, they stumbled and fractured and, most notably, shattered the rules of hairdressing and attire. By the end of the 1980s, the band was decidedly out of fashion, but, amazingly, nowhere near their end.

REO Speedwagon formed in the late 1960s and worked tirelessly in the Midwest as they found their footing. It was several years before the band, founded and named by keyboardist Mike Doughty, would land their longtime lead guitarist, Gary Richrath. And it would be a few years after that before Kevin Cronin, and his high tenor, would join the group as lead singer. While they were developing a reputation as a formidable live act in the early 70s, and releasing albums with minor commercial appeal, the band actually changed lead singers three times. Cronin himself left the band after one album, only to return two years later and formally begin the band’s mid-70s ascent. 

The band’s rise was a process of searching and refining. In their early days, they occupied a rather marginal and unnecessary space between the bluesy bar Rock of Thin Lizzy and the more progressive excess of their neighbors, Styx. During this period, Cronin and Richrath worked together and in competition as the ostensible songwriting team. To hear those later 70s albums, including “R.E.O.,” “You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can't Tuna Fish,” and “Nine Lives” is to hear a highly competent band that is struggling to distinguish itself. Though they didn’t lack for skill or prowess, they fail to rock bigger or better than Journey or Foreigner. And though they didn’t lack for melody or sensitivity, they failed to match the balladry of Air Supply and Little River Band. During this phase, Cronin, whose voice would soon become the band’s trademark, can sound constrained, as though he is unable or unwilling to match the heights of the song. Stuck somewhere in the middle of nowhere, the band enjoyed marginal breakthroughs and intermittent commercial success as the 70s ended, but their reputation was still entirely domestic and made largely on the basis of their live show.

Towards the end of the decade, on 1978’s “You Can Tune a Piano…”, Kevin Cronin tested his wings on “Time for Me to Fly.” That track combined light, perfectly articulated vocals on top of acoustic guitar, and then added crystalline harmonies in the chorus just as the electric guitar appeared. It was not quite a ballad and not quite a Rock song. It was something on the cusp of the power ballad “cheat code.” It had most of the elements but was still a notch too fast, short one piano and more earnest than romantic. But, in that hit, you can hear Cronin and Richrath seeing a future that is somehow bigger and lighter. In that song, the duo were the Wright Brothers before Kitty Hawk. They could imagine aviation. They just needed to adjust a few things.

Those adjustments came in 1980 on the sky-scraping hit, “Keep on Loving You,” from the album “Hi Infidelity.” With keyboard in the place of acoustic guitar, everything slowed down and the harmonies soaring even higher than the chorus’ electric guitars, REO had found the “cheat code.” This is how the band was meant to sound -- bigger than Little River Band, more anthemic than Air Supply and more melodic than Styx. It was a sound that, in 1980, you could roller skate to, you could grow old to, and you could pump your fist and sing along to. Even if you resented its sentimentality or its perfection, it was hard to truly dislike and impossible to ignore. 

As with any superpower, REO Speedwagon also had a great, new responsibility. There was unprecedented success to protect, so the band had to make a Sophie’s Choice: repeat and exploit their greatest gift or show the world that they could be heroic without it. First, the band tried the latter, and mostly failed. The slightly harder “Good Trouble” showed all of the competency the world expected from the band but none of the magical, lighter in the air moments. So, four years removed from their greatest hit, REO did it again with “Can’t Fight This Feeling,” from the album “Good Trouble.” With an ounce more guitar and a dash of windchimes, the band actually managed to improve on the cheat code by staying closer to the chorus and keeping the hook simpler. On this, their second (and final) number one hit, Cronin’s voice is so light and the chorus so huge that the song sounds positively hymnal. It’s a flawless three and a half minute power ballad -- perhaps the apex of the form. And it was also the beginning of the end of REO Speedwagon as Rock stars. 

For years there were apparent, although not public, tensions between Cronin and Richrath, the band’s leaders. However, with the addition of marital problems, substance abuse problems and the changing winds of popular taste, REO buckled. In a moment, the very form that the band had perfected was co-opted by heavier bands like Poison, Bon Jovi and countless lesser bands. By the later 80s, the huge, long curls that rested on the heads of REO’s members seemed silly by New Wave standards and unironic by Hair Metal standards. The band released one more album in the 1980s, to relatively modest fanfare. In 1989, Gary Richrath left the band. Soldiering on, Cronin and company tried twice more in the 1990s, and failed both times, as Grunge and then Alternative Rock were coming of age. By 1996, REO Speedwagon was without a record label and hanging on largely by the thread of their previous hits. For the better part of a decade, the band largely vamped, repackaging greatest hits albums and live recordings while Cronin tried to figure out a next move. They naturally aged and cut their hair, but unnaturally stayed very tan and increasingly blonde. Without new material or a clear audience to play or record for, it was a wonder that REO Speedwagon persisted. 

As the twentieth century became the twenty-first, though, tectonic cultural shifts began to favor the band. With Boomers aging and older Generation X’ers coming of age, a market for recent nostalgic acts began to develop. Additionally, the role of Rock music in churches and in Christianity, in general, began to increase. By the early 2000s, those hymnal power ballads that REO Speedwagon had become famous for were perfect for “80s Nights” at local arenas, state fairs and -- yes -- mega-churches around the country. The band was by no means “cool” again, but they were very much alive and relevant. It took them two decades, but REO had found a second cheat code. 

More than ten years after the commercial disaster of “Building the Bridge,” the group returned in 2007 with “Find Your Own Way Home.” Less midwest conquering heroes and more middle-age stars for the Bible Belt and Middle America, Kevin Cronin and the band proved again to be nothing if not shrewd in their packaging (and repackaging). “Find Your Own Way Home” was first released as a three CD exclusive with Walmart and Sam’s Club and included one live CD and a separate live DVD, in addition to the studio album. With purchase, customers also received a free trial subscription for XM satellite radio. In conjunction with the album, the band embarked on a forty date tour, exclusively in the US, eschewing major cities in favor of southern amphitheaters and fairs. They played The Hog Creek Icehouse in Waco, The Horny Toad in Lake Ozark and The Prairie Meadows Racino in Altoona, Iowa. While “Keep on Loving You” was paying for the mortgages on the second homes and the hair and make-up team, the new album proved to be much more than lunch money.

“Find Your Own Way Home” is not a great album. But is tremendously competent and surprisingly broad in its range. Moreover, for a singer well into his fifties and a band firmly in middle-age, REO Speedwagon does nothing to embarrass themselves here. They don’t chase trends. They don’t attempt to remake their 80s glory. They don’t paint over vocal or technical limitations with studio effects. They don’t try to rap. No, in many ways, this band resembles the late 70s REO Speedwagon, but with the full knowledge of Adult Contemporary and Christian Rock as markets. Every song is well played and much of the record is surprisingly muscular for a band that had been accused of rocking softly. Other once excellent bands that were hanging on for dear life -- Foreigner, Toto and others come to mind -- were guilty of far worse than REOs final album.  In fact, surprising as it might be, I think that “Find Your Own Way Home” would rest comfortably in the band’s top five albums.  And if this sounds like faint praise from a reluctant fan, you’d be mostly correct. 

“Smiling in the End,” the track that opens “Find Your Own Way Home,” puts the listener on notice. This is not 1984 anymore. Kevin’s voice is rougher and unadorned, delivered in a deeper register than we’ve come to expect. In his fifties, he sounds more like David Coverdale or Robert Plant after Led Zeppelin. It’s still a strong instrument. The guitars are big and fuzzy with distortion. The drums are athletic and (too far) forward. REO Speedwagon is saying “this is a Rock band!” The song itself is a very solid mid-90s “Album Oriented Rock” track. And before we remind the singer that it is not the 1990s, Cronin beats us to the punch, daring us to underestimate him. This is a man who has survived decades of super-stardom. He’s survived perms. He once wore a necktie around a t-shirt in a music video. He defies the Walmart shoppers to doubt his resiliency: 

I was told I'd never make it so many times before

The best and the brightest had shown me the door

But the more they tried to hold me back, the stronger I got

They said my songs were too simple, my voice was too weak

Said I was too young, too dumb, too much of a freak

They thought they could write me off

But there's somethin' they forgot

Elsewhere, namely on the title track and “I Needed to Fall,” the band excels in a sort of big, Hallmark balladry wherein the pathos and the passion could as easily be about a Love of god as a secular love. It’s not simply the vagaries of the lyrics that could easily be borrowed by religion. It’s also the soaring harmonies, the church organ, the classical guitar and the metaphors or searching and revelation. “Find Your Own Way Home” may be the best of the lot in that it has the most power of the ballads and plays it straight. “I Needed to Fall,” however, is the most familiar. Instead of lead piano, the song opens with the gentle, Spanish acoustic guitar that decorated 90s RomCom scores. But once the verses open up, Cronin and the band take flight in the chorus. In the 1980s, this would have made for grown up MTV fare. In the 90s, it would have sounded middle-aged. Oddly, in the new millennium, it sounds both reverent and technically impressive. 

For most of “Find Your Own Way Home,” REO avoids using their 80s cheat code. In playing it mostly straight, though, the band does offer up some surprises. “Run Away Baby” is a short, bluesy number with some boogie, wherein Cronin sounds not unlike Robert Plant fronting Cheap Trick. It sounds less interesting than it reads, but it is fun. And on “Everything You Feel,” the band tries its hand with something vaguely mystical that gives way to a crystalline harmony straight from early Big Star. It’s less a good song than a lovely moment in an interesting experiment. 

The album’s closer, “Let My Love Find You,” tests those lines between power and ballad and between Christian and Rock. The track has the bend of Country in its guitar and there are some genuinely impressive vocals that showcase Cronin’s gift for tunefully milking every sound from every syllable of every word. The track sound is both towering and light as a feather, designed perfectly for either the Hallmark Channel or a Sunday Televangelist’s closing. The problem is less the oversentiment and more the fact that, by resisting that formula that was so successful -- quiet piano and then loud electric guitar, one melodic voice and then many harmonic voices -- the track ends up sounding like a less interesting version of those Alternative power ballads of the 90s that REO made possible. “Let My Love Find You” is like a more flaccid, religious answer to The Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” or Live’s “Lightning Crashes” -- two songs that could not have existed without “Can’t Fight this Feeling.” For a band that so famously recycled its hits for so long, you end up leaving the album wondering why they didn’t cheat just once.

Since 2007, REO Speedwagon has been notably consistent in their touring and lacking in new material. In 2015, following a rapprochement with Cronin and a few return trips to the stage with his old band, Gary Richrath passed away. Before and since Richrath’s passing, the band continued its third act formula — state fairs, megachurches, recent nostalgia, bleached hair, spray tans and tight pants. In early 2020, they even appeared in an episode of HBOs “Ozark” and performed a rousing version of “Time For Me to Fly.” In that moment, which amounted to a knowing wink to both their fans and critics, I felt pretty convinced that Kevin Cronin would find a fourth act. The next day, I found that “Time For Me to Fly” had been renamed on Spotify as “Time For Me to Fly: As Heard on the HBO Series “Ozark.” They did it — they found another cheat code.

by Matty Wishnow