An Afternoon With Some Nice Guys...

LOS ANGELES: The rococco lobby of the Ambassador Hotel is infested with business men and conventioneers. The Ambassador is located in Los Angeles' "mid-Wilshire" district—which must be exactly like living in Kansas. All the bellhops are over sixty and look a little like Bing Crosby. The lobby floors are padded with some sort of damask tapestry which, although they clean it every month, smells musty (or Mufti in Sudan). The Ambassador features select bungalows in swelling beds of California bougainvillea. To say that this isn't a hotbed of frenzied drugcrazed activities is an understatement.

The Ambassador also boasts a barely surviving night club, the Coconut Grove, which serven as the "watering hole" of the stars pfuring the '40s and '50s. My parents went to places like this, or La Rue's on the Strip or The Mocambo after an evening at the theatre. Now it's just used for high school proms and Mexican birthday parties.

What a rock 'n' roll band would want from the Ambassador is loosely termed as peace & quiet. From the hotel's long distance from the Sunset Strip, we might as well be in San Clemente.

Kansas has a name which suits them. Like the state—broad, wide, plain, vacant, American, Midwestern...

Kansas has a name which suits them. Like the state—broad, wide, plain, vacant, American, and Midwestern—this six-man group is a blend of hybrid musical talents and varying personal attributes. They claim that absolutely nothing happens in Kansas, in the same way that absolutely nothing ever happens at the Ambassador Hotel.

Which brings us to the Kansas group interview. Nothing much happened! I have a half-hour tape on which three Kansases (Kerry Livgren, Steve Walsh, and Dave Hope) and myself exchange pleasantries and are very nice to one another. I could have gotten a juicy tape if I'd stayed in the lobby and recorded some clandestine lunch time conversations between some business men and women in gold lame pumps and aqua eye shadow who weren't wearing wedding rings...

From chatting with Kansas, though, I learned about the group's character, and I've told you they're nice. If they lived in Southern California, the band would probably take to Chevrolet vans with racing stripes, loaded with fiberglas surf boards.

Kansas are a very earnest and hardworking group, though they can laugh as well as the next guy. As a result of their stolid determination, their fourth album LeftOverture has hit the big time, meriting gold album status (representing 500,000 album sales) and well on its way to platinum status (one million). To say that their label is ecstatic is a mild joke.

I must say that during my chat with Livgren, Walsh and drummer Phil Ehart, I really thought we were saying heavy things worth repeating. In translation, though, the whole smooZe could be put down as light banter, which let me know that Kansas has a sense of humor. We did spend time on stuff like locker room jokes which aren't as funny when I tell them. The other Kansases: Dave Hope, Robby Steinhardt, and Rich Williams, were out in the California sunshine either playing tennis or talking to the ladies in the gold lame pumps. ,

The story, kiddies, begins in Kansas, where the group toured the pants off the square state. The six had known each other since junior high, and in 1972 began to include gigs throughout the Midwest.

Whether or not New Yorker Don Kirshner was visiting Muriel Humphrey in Minnesota is negotiable, but he stopped by the state of Kansas long enough to pay attention to the band and sign them to his brand new label. Kansas were bundled off to New York like so many tin soldiers. The resulting first album, Kansas, was followed by more touring, (opening for the Kinks this time) and a second LP, Song For America.

Their third and fourth albums were recorded in an interesting little studio in Boogaloosa, La. There was more focus on vocals and harmony and less sledgehammer guitar overkill. Although some of the lyrics appear pompous and overblown, (titles like "Icarus, Borne On Wings of Steel" and "The Pinnacle") Kansas is nowhere as pretentious and wind-filled fis gaga bands like Genesis and Yes.

TURN TO PAGE 74.

KANSAS

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 32.

Kansas went back into The Studio In The Country once again (about an hour and a half from New Orleans) in June of '76 with Jeff Glixman as their producer. The album LeftOverture was released in Oct. '76 and by January of this year the tune "Carry On Wayward Son" was being blasted in diners and bus stations across the country. The boxboys at my market hummed it every day.

LeftOverture has a multi-purpose vitamin pill song called "Magnus Opus" which can cure what ails you, 'cause it hits you with both barrels. Bells, drums, solos, vocals, gnats, flies, priests, men, blind valleys, whatever you want, it's got—this is Kansas' answer to a Jacqueline Susann novel.

Now then, if you thought that all that Kansas did was sit around conservative mid-Wilshire hotels talking to journalists without every saying anything, well, Kansas in concert is another thing altogether. In Los Angeles, due to rowdy crowds, they did not one but two shows at the Santa Monica Civic.

The band sounded very loud in the 3,000 seat hall. Kansas has the capacity (like having very large lungs) for blowing out a wide sound and sustaining the notes forever. Robby looked wild-eyed and hysterical throughout the show, as though someone had stuck him up there without his permission.

The curtain dramatically opens on stage to the beginning of "Carry On!" Most of the roaring audience were the surfer fifteen-year-olds, just what Kansas would have been like if they'd grown up in Southern California.

After the show the record company hosted a crappy reception with some church bake sale cakes and popcorn. The band stood around looking pleased and quiet'. Their music says most of it.

Later in the week I went to the market wearing my "There's Gold In Kansas" t-shirt. The boxboys all stared at my chest.