Kevin Cronin is feeling reflective. And it goes beyond REO Speedwagon's "Hi Infidelity" coming up fast on its 40th anniversary.
The singer-guitarist iseight rewrites deep in the process of writing a memoir he started "by accident," as he explains it, in Nottingham, England.
"I had been away from home too long," he says. "And I just kind of started to unravel a bit in my hotel room. My go-to, default mechanism is writing. Get the feelings out of your soul and onto the page. So the book was startedas a therapeutic measure. I've been at it ever since."
He started writing in December 2016.
"The good news is I heard Bruce Springsteen did nine rewrites," Cronin says. "So I feel like I'm still in the area of not being insane."
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And then, he laughs.
With each rewrite, Croninadded anecdotes he'djust remembered while taking a bit of the sting out of some passages that may have come off harsher than intended.
"There's some stuff," Cronin says, "where you go, 'You know what?That's a little rough.' Because my intention is certainly not to be hurtful. I'm exposing myself,warts and all. It's not my right to do the same to others."
All that writing, Cronin says, has hadthe added benefit of making flights go faster.
"I love writing," Cronin says. "I love writing songs. I writemagazine articles. I write blogs for the REO Speedwagon Facebook page and Instagram. I likethe process of putting the puzzle together andfiguring out just the right word. My mom wrote poetry and song parodies. I would come downstairs and she'd be at the kitchen table with her Roget's thesaurus and her dictionary. She actually taught me how to use a thesaurus when I was probably in sixth or seventh grade."
Where the REO songs come from
The memoir was originally titled "Where the Songs Come From," and although he doesn't plan to use that title anymore, it still applies to what he's written.
"The thing I noticed as I was writing isthat I would get to a point and a song was there," he says. "And I realized how much my songwriting coincided with what I was living through at the time. In the moment, you're just writing what you're feeling. But when you look back, you see how the songs really do tell the story."
In a way, the success he enjoyed with the breakthrough of "Hi Infidelity" allowed him to put off the type of reflection he's done while working on his memoir.
"Becoming well known at a young age isgreat," he says. "Like, 'Wow, we're famous;We can do all this crazy (expletive).' But in the introduction to the book, I talk about how I ran off and joined a rock band and my college buddies had to graduate and find a job. And a lot of them had to come to the realization that the dream they had of being a professional baseball player maybe isn't gonna come true."
Meanwhile, Cronin kind of skated through those years.
"I was writing hit songs and nobody wanted to rock that apple cart," he says. "So now, here I am in my 60s, going through things that a number of people probably went through in their 20s or 30s. So it's kind exciting. I feel like I've kind of turned a corner, and of course you turn one corner and you'vegotta deal with what's there."
He's hoping to finish the rewrites in time to have the memoir published as part of the 40th anniversary celebration for his mainstream breakthrough. Released in late November 1980, "Hi Infidelity" was recently given a Diamond Award to honor U.S. sales in excess of 10 million.
"That's the centerpiece of REO Speedwagon," Cronin says. "That was the peak of our success. And to a great degree, it'sthe reason we're still touring to this day. That music just got into people's hearts and souls."
Putting the 'Infidelity' in your hi-fi
He and his bandmates were going through what he calls "similar life experiences" during the writing of "Hi Infidelity."
"We had been touring constantly for six straight years," he says. "That takes its toll on your personal life. So all of us were kind of struggling in our relationships. And we all come from the 'write what you know'schoolof lyrics,so there was an unintentional yet very powerful connection between all the songs."
The result was what he likes to call an "accidental" concept album.
"If we would have set out to make a concept album," he says, "we're way too dumb to be successful with that. But we kind of stumbled into this concept. If you think of the one-two punch that got that record off the ground, which was my song ‘Keep on Loving You’ and Gary (Richrath’s) ‘Take It on the Run,’ in my view, they’re companion pieces."
The title was Cronin's idea.
"One day I was driving down the same freeway I'm driving down nowand out of the clear blue sky —we were trying to think of an album title —'Hi Infidelity' popped into my head. Of course, it's a play on the old hi-fidelity record players. But you look a little closer and think, 'What was going on in these guys lives?'"
The process of sharing such personal struggles brought the bandmates closer than they'd ever been.
"We’re always laughing," Croninsays. "We find humor in everything, which is kind of how we'vemanaged to survive for 50 years. But in that particular time, we were actually vulnerable with each other. We were really open with our deeper feelings. And for men of my generation, that doesn't happen all that often or certainly didn't back then."
"Hi Infidelity" was the chart-topping triumph he thought they should'veenjoyed two years earlier with the brilliantly titled "You Can Tune a Piano, But You Can't Tuna Fish."
"That feltto me and to the bandlike that was gonna be a breakthrough," Cronin says. "And unfortunately, our record company went off the rails right in the middle of that project. As a result, it kind of fell by the wayside and that was a huge blow, especially to me, because that was the first record we produced andit was kind of my vision. I was at the head of the vision, put it that way."
On people loving'Keep on Loving You'
He had a similar sensation when he finished writing"Keep on Loving You."
"I had a feeling that there was something special there," he says. "I had written the verses in the middle of the nightand they were really raw. I was exposing a part of myself. If I would've known that would be a No. 1 record, I might've adjusted the lyrics a little. You never know what's gonna happen to a song until it gets released. When you're writing it, it's just a little song you wrote. But as a songwriter you do sometimes get a feeling about a song. And sometimes it comes true."
He knows exactly where he was when he first realized it was coming true with "Keep On Loving You."
"We had finished the album but it takes about six weeks for pressing plants to do their thing, so usually, in those days, you released the first single a month or so ahead of the album dropping," he says.
So "Keep on Loving You" came out and because they were broke at the time, having spent all their money on recording, they went back out on the road.
"We were just playing the same kind of gigs we had been playing up to that point, which was not bad,2,500 to 3,000-seaters, certainly in the Midwest," he says.
But something funny happened on the way to Louisiana.
"My hotel room shared a parking lot with the Baton Rouge Metroplex," he says. "And they had curtained off the venue because they figured there wouldn't be more than 3,000, 4,000 people."
By 3 p.m., when Cronin looked across the parking lot, a line was forming at the venue.
"Every time I looked, there were more and more people," he says. "By 7, they realized that there were about 10,000 people in line around the arena. So they had to pull down the curtains and go out and buy rolls of carnival tickets to sell because they didn't have enough tickets printed. What had happened was that 'Keep on Loving You' had gotten picked up by a radio station in Baton Rouge and had become a hit."
When they played 'Keep on Loving You' that night, he says, the place wentnuts.
And as goes Baton Rouge, so goes the nation.
When 'Hi Infidelity' changed everything
"That year was insanity," Cronin says of 1981, the year the album broke wide open.
"There were 250,000 records a week being sold," he says. "It was No. 1 for 14 straight weeks. Our buddies Styx bumped us off with 'Paradise Theatre' and moved us down to No. 2 for a couple weeks. Then 'Hi Infidelity' took a deep breath, bumped them back off and went back to the top spot for another month."
Looking back on it now, Cronin says, 'You start feeling like you're gonna be No. 1 forever. And that's the trap. That really is the trap. It’s hard not to get an inflated sense of self. But it was a high. And, as with all highs, there's a crash at some point."
Although it spawned another Top 10 hit in "Keep the Fire Burnin'," Cronin was so disappointed in the followup, "Good Trouble," he won't even touch that album live.
"I was living under the false assumption that my insecurities and anxieties,any personal problems I had, were due to the fact that my music wasn't recognized to the extent that I felt it deserved to be," he says. "When you hitwith an album like 'Hi Infidelity,' it doesn't get much bigger than that. And guess what didn't happen? All those problems that I thought were going to magically disappear did not. They were magnified. It kind of blew my mind."
By the time they went in to record "Good Trouble," Cronin says, "I didn't even want to be there. We don't play any of the songs from that record live. We never have. Our fans get (annoyed) because there were some songs on that record they liked, but it was just a period of time that I don't care to remember every night."
It took a trip to Molokai to snap him out of it.
"I wanted to go someplace to regroup," he says. "So I went to the island of Molokai and spent about a month there. That was where I refocused.I wrote a song called 'Live Every Moment' as I was walking along the beach and that kind of snapped me back. It was like, wait a minute, we had a bunch of great years anda couple really (expletive) years. But that's life. So that was a wake-up call."
He also wrote their biggest hit since "Keep on Loving You," "Can't Fight This Feeling," which became their second No. 1 appearance on the Hot 100.
"Luckily, we were able to recover," Cronin says. "Then we had another rough period around the early ‘90s when the grunge bands started. Sowe sucked it up again and I was very fortunate to meet the woman who's driving my car right now at a time when the band was really not sure whether we were gonna carry on. It's times like that you really you need to be loved. At least I do."
He's more than happy to be touring on the old hits, reconnecting with the fans whose continued support allows him to keep living out his dreams.
"It's an amazing place to be," Croninsays. "We've got 10 or 12 songs that if we don't play those, there will be an angry mob outside the tour bus after the show. But we also have that space where I can do a little acoustic interlude in the middle of the show and play whatever songs I feel like playing and otherspecial moments we call audibles."
Saluting Eddie Money with 'Two Tickets'
They've been closing their recent shows with "Two Tickets to Paradise" in tribute to a friend they lost in mid-September, Eddie Money.
Cronin says he and Money, a "lovable, friendly guy," had grown"extremely close" after touring together through the years, eventuallybecoming neighbors.
Cronin learned of Money's death as they were about to perform at the KAABOO Del Mar Festival.
"Strangely," he says, "it was four years to the day from when my good friend and original guitar player for REO, Gary Richrath, passed away. So it was a kick in the gut."
It was drummer Bryan Hitt who suggested they end their performance that day with "Two Tickets to Paradise," a song they'd played withMoney at various charity shows.
"As I was introducing it," Cronin recalls, "the word got out that Eddie passed and the entire audience, I don't know how many thousand people, all of a sudden, they were chanting,'Eddie. Eddie. Eddie.' I didn't start it. I was just introducing the song and they knew where we were going with it. It was this amazing moment. Then we broke into 'Two Tickets' and the place went crazy."
Money was in many ways the Rodney Dangerfield of rock, he says. "He’d always joke, 'I get no respect.' That was his kind of thing. And I just wished so much that Eddie could’ve been there to see all the love for him that was coming from this crowd. We've played it as our final encore every night since then. It's amazing how much love there isfor Eddieand it's just our way of honoring our friend. We miss him."
PHOENIX CONCERTS:Best concerts in the Valley this October
REO Speedwagon
When: 6 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 16.
Where: Mesa Amphitheatre, 263 N. Center St.
Admission: $55-$79.
Details: 480-644-2560,mesaamp.com.
Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.
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