Prog on the Prairie: Midwestern Bands Roll Over Beethoven
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On the back of Kansas‘s self-titled first album, which came roaring out of Topeka in 1974, the band looks like six long-haired farmboys, out standing in their field: Blue jeans, Daniel Boone fringe jackets – one big guy even has overalls on. The front cover is a famous portrait of insurrectionary 19th-century Bleeding Kansas abolitionist John Brown; the last track a eulogy for Mother Nature. Though released on a label run by Don Kirshner, the bizzer who’d mastermined the Monkees, the record never got higher than No. 174 in Billboard. A shame, because “Belexes” had the doom-ridden punch of early British metal, “Bringing It All Back” was a good-timey boogie-woogie about smuggling drugs, and the band had a way of extracting Charlie Daniels-style hillbilly fiddle hoedowns out of demi-classical violin bombast, like they instinctively realized that lots of that high-flown British orchestral foo-foo started off as jiggy dance music to begin with.
Kansas’s second and third albums – Song From America and Masque, which respectively managed to climb chartwise to No. 57 and No. 70 in 1975 – worked similar pastiches of mean, chunky, even funky redneck rock and 10-minute-plus mini-symphonies overflowing with time-changes, crescendos, Moog filigrees and delusions of grandeur. The heftier harvest mode holds up best: “The Devil Game,” “Mysteries and Mayhem,” another small-time dope-pusher tale called “Down The Road,” the Nazareth-like vengeance rager “Lonely Street,” which may or may not be about hunting down a “black man.” (Lyric sheet says “bad man,” but your ears might determine otherwise.) But it was the fancy stuff, which lent itself more to ballets than barn dances or bar fights, that most presaged Kansas’s lucrative future. In 1976 and 1977, they scored two huge hit singles off of punfully titled Top 10 albums that generally left their more crass hard rock side behind – “Carry On My Wayward Son” from Leftoverture, “Dust In The Wind” from Point Of Know Return. Complex, windswept, multi-part harmonies became a band signature of sorts, but it wasn’t long before the group succumbed to the market-researched restraint that turned underground FM radio into AOR in the Lee Abrams-consulted late ’70s. Eventually, guitarist Kerry Livgren and bassist Dave Hope were born again, playing music for Christ.
“Q: How do you tell American art-rockers from their European forebears?,” Bob Christgau asked in 1976. “A: They sound dumber, they don’t play as fast, and their fatalism lacks conviction.” Not always true. It’s impossible to imagine cultured Brit conceptualists like Yes or Genesis dirtying their hands with most of the louder numbers on those first few Kansas LPs, or for that matter the tougher tracks on early platters by the Illinois bands Head East or Styx – the latter of whom, even more than Kansas, stuck it out through several excellent but barely heard albums before breaking through to a big audience with prissier, more pop-oriented material. But prog-rock had initially pranced its way out of from England for good reasons, and there’s something innately ridiculous, yet fascinating, about hicks from the American heartland picking up on its virtuoso high-brow bombast in the mid ’70s. In the discography at the back of John Rockwell’s “The Emergence Of Art Rock” chapter in 1980′s Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock’n'Roll, the only Americans listed are expatriates Sparks and avant comedian Frank Zappa, hardly mainstream acts. “In comparison with the British,” Rockwell theorizes, “Americans tend to be happy cavepeople. Most American rockers wouldn’t know a Beethoven symphony if they were run down by one in the middle of the freeway.”
So as often as not, progressive rockers from the Midwestern prairie just rolled over Beethoven entirely. In fact, it might be a stretch to call REO Speedwagon prog at all, if they didn’t temper the riverboat-pianoed bonfire-in-the-woods choogle of their first two albums with occasional outrageously ambitious, amp-cranking, Hammond-pumping gloom monsters that, like sundry early Kansas/Head East/Styx tracks, seemed to owe more than a bit to the majestic post-psychedelic organ-metal funerals of the U.K.’s Uriah Heep. The apocalyptic 10-minute epic “Dead At Last” on 1971′s R.E.O. Speedwagon and the astounding left-leaning dirge-unto-raveup protest “Golden Country” on 1972′s R.E.O. T.W.O., especially, will come as shocks to anyone whose familiarity with REO is limited to their ’80s housewife hits. “Five Men Were Killed Today,” another menacing debut selection, employs an eerie 1920′s electronic instrument known as the ondes Martenot; all the songs about various kinds of ladies (“Gypsy Woman’s Passion,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Prison Women”) have a palpable kick to them as well. On the only slightly less raw second album, five songs out of eight exceed 5:50 in length. Prog enough for you?
Neither record even dented the Billboard 200 – an inauspicious beginning for a band that, a few years later, would top that chart for 15 weeks with the savvy popcraft of 1980′s Hi Infidelity. REO came from a college town – Champaign, Illinois – and went through three singers on their first three albums: Terry Lutrell, then Kevin Cronin, then Mike Murphy, who somehow managed to stick around for the fourth one. His two 1974 sets, Ridin ‘the Storm Out and Lost In A Dream, were more rustic and less heavy than REO’s first two, but with meaty songs and no lack of tasty Gary Richrath guitar; Lost In A Dream even had Sly Stone helping out, and its title track partook in an ornate swing not too far from early Aerosmith. By album five, though, Cronin’s high, nasal, not-quite-Southern drawl was back. And by 1978′s Top 30 You Can Tune A Piano, But You Can’t Tuna Fish – album eight, if you’re still counting – even girls were taking notice. Anyone who doubts just how revered REO were in flyover country by the late ’70s should consult the Facebook page of my 1978 West Bloomfield, Michigan, high school graduating class, where last time I checked, the only link was to a 1978 performance of “Roll With The Changes” on NBC’s Midnight Special.
Original REO mouth Terry Lutrell, meanwhile, wound up fronting a St. Louis/ Champaign sextet known as Starcastle, who barely sounded American at all, opting instead to mimic the convoluted engineering-schematic arrangements and angelic Morse Code harmonies of their heroes Yes. On their own self-titled 1975 debut LP – also their highest-charting, topping off at a mere #95 – the guitars remain mostly frictionless and the rhythm section never plows through any cow pies. But the record ends with a wacked-out percussion instrumental called “Nova,” and both key lyrics quoted on the vinyl version’s inner sleeve notably contain the word “crystal.” The LP cover literally depicts a castle in the stars.
By 1978′s non-charting Real to Reel, Robert Christgau was complaining that “in the great tradition of heartland eclecticism,” Starcastle were “adding power-rock and pop-melody moves to the art-rock casserole. With hooks, yet. Lord save us.” Sound familiar? Prog in general, on both sides of the Atlantic, was tightening up its fanfare into what the genre’s latter-day web-chat aficionados prefer to call “pomp”; by the early ’80s, even longtime cult weirdos Genesis would be all over Top 40. So out on the prog prairie, the last great shot was perhaps fired by the Kansas City band Shooting Star, who debuted in 1980 with a refined pop-pomp-powerchord hybrid that used strings and synths for shading, and prettied as often as it stomped; if they’d come instead from England a few years later and named themselves Def Leppard, they’d now be multi-millionaires. “Last Chance,” the inspirationally cheerleading six-minute climax of their first LP, was some kind of flatland pinnacle, somehow overblown and economical, regal and humble, at the same time. Inside the sleeve of 1982′s III Wishes, their third and biggest album – peaked at No. 82, so perhaps it got airplay as far away as Iowa – their violin-cum-fiddle player is shown on stage, and he’s posed with his instrument like a rock guitar, as only a Midwestern boy unversed in Beethoven would think to do. His name? Charles Waltz. Swear I’m not making that up.
