![]() 1978’s excellently titled You Can Tune A Piano, But You Can’t Tuna Fish went double plat. 1973’s Ridin’ The Storm Out out went platinum. Louis but couldn’t pack a club the size of the Whiskey in LA. Cronin likes to say that the band could sell out Busch Stadium in St. Four years later, after Speedwagon had gone through a couple of different singers, Cronin returned to the fold.ĭuring these years, REO Speedwagon did real business on the road, though it was a regional thing. ![]() Kevin Cronin came aboard as lead singer in 1972, recorded an album with the band, and then either left or was fired. They also went through tons of personnel changes. REO Speedwagon, like plenty of hard rock bands before and since, found their audience on the road, playing constantly. It didn’t chart, and neither did any of their singles. In 1971, they signed to Epic and released their self-titled debut. Eventually, they came up with their own songs and gigged around the Midwest. The band started out playing covers at campus bars and fraternity parties. Keyboardist and electrical engineering student Neal Doughty took the name from an early truck that he’d learned about in a history of transportation class. The band formed at a University Of Illinois dorm in Champaign in 1967. It took years for REO Speedwagon to figure out what they were doing. REO Speedwagon’s formula for success was simple enough: They weaponized the power ballad, fusing soft rock and hard rock into one unstoppable whole. ![]() But when REO Speedwagon hit their commercial zenith, you couldn’t ignore them.ġ980’s Hi Infidelity, the Wagon’s ninth album, sold 10 million copies in the US, and it was Billboard‘s #1 album of 1981, beating out even John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy. In the proud tradition of Grand Funk Railroad, a lot of these bands - Boston, Journey, Foreigner - would sell tons of records and play to vast crowds without getting any attention from pop radio or from critics. REO Speedwagon were part of the wave of semi-anonymous studio-rock titans that had first flourished in the mid-’70s. But REO Speedwagon were probably the band who, at the turn of the ’80s, turned the power ballad into the gold-plated commercial beast that it would be in the decade ahead. The ’70s were the decade that gave us most of the canonical pioneering power ballads: “Stairway To Heaven,” “Free Bird,” “Dream On,” “Beth,” Nazareth’s version of the Everlys’ “Love Hurts.” In those songs, you can hear the bands figuring out exactly how this whole thing should work - how quiet it should be at the beginning, how loud you should sing the final chorus, when the screaming guitar solo should come in. Sometime in the ’70s, people figured out that stretched-out slow-builders could have their own kind of majesty and that they could make for magical arena moments. Ballads were crucial parts of rock ‘n’ roll right from the beginning Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers all had them. The lighters-aloft thing was the perfect response to the power ballad - the stadium-rocking sensitive-soul yowler that became a rock-show staple before I was born. When I went to my first concert - Guns N’ Roses/Metallica/Faith No More, RFK Stadium, July ’92 - I had no idea what was happening when the lighters came out during “Fade To Black.” Nobody had ever explained to me that this was a thing that people did. That ritual had descended into goofy cliche by the time I started going to shows regularly, and it was fully replaced by the phone screen by the mid-’00s. Who was the first person ever to stand on a chair during a slow song and hold a lighter in the air? History has forgotten this person’s name, but we should salute a pioneer. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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