REO SPEEDWAGON DO’WANNA B’WANAS!

You could probably call it “moot pizza” they were eating—pizza without the cheese on it—and it most certainly wasn’t because the fellows from REO Speedwagon couldn’t afford it. After nearly a two year absence, these multi-platinum Wagoneers were just two weeks into the first leg of a tour supporting their most recent LP, Wheels Are Turnin’, and still taking seriously a tennis pro health diet of only good-for-ya type stuff. No cheese, please.

Appearing somewhat contrary to the regimen, Neal Doughty, REO’s keyboardist, is carefully stirring up a styrofoam cup of instant coffee and feeding in a packet of Equal sugar substitute.

“I guess it’s OK to be eating synthetic things,” he muses, “since I play synthesizer.”

Whether it’s the funny food or not, the group seems fit and well-rested after their lengthy holiday-in-the-sun of Los Angeles, their adopted home since 1975. They also seem enthused to be back out on the road, playing this night to a full house in Battle Creek—“Cereal City” as the stage passes acknowledge—part of . the Midwestern belt that has helped the Speedwagon in chart motion.

It had been a year and eight months since the REO boys rolled their venerable Speedwagon into drydock for what was intended as a six-month rest and recreation period for an overworked touring band. The break turned into a vacation that extended so long that people began to wonder if these heart-throbs of the Heartland were still a going concern. As it turns out, when REO Speedwagon finally released Wheels Are Turnin’, their 13th album, they found themselves with a “comeback album” on their hands.

“Spinal Tap!” grimaces drummer Alan Gratzer, rolling his eyes in mock despair. “Yeah, this is our reunion tour,” he laughs. “The thing is, we went from selling six-and-a-half-million albums to selling a million-and-a-half albums, so if coming back from a platinum album is making a comeback, so be it. If you put it in that frame, then it is a comeback. I don’t think it is. It’s just that we haven’t been around for a while.”

“Just as long as they don’t call it an ‘attempted comeback.’” rejoins Doughty.

The band is understandably relieved to find that appreciative audiences are not a thing of the past, either. Doughty admits that there was some apprehension felt before hitting the bricks for this tour. “It feels great now, but it was a little scary at first. I kept thinking, ‘Have we lost our momentum? How are they gonna react?’ The break we took was more for making sure that we took enough time to do the album that we wanted to do. It wasn’t that we were sick of the road. We just wanted to step back and look at everything.”

“We were never considering not coming back,” Gratzer assures. “We had done this like clockwork for 10 years, come out with an album and do a tour. There was never any break, never any time that we disappeared for awhile so people could sit back and go, ‘Wow, what ever happened to REO?’, so we thought we’d try it. I think it worked—it got us all cleared out and made us fresher onstage. And I think the album reflects that.”

“We spent a year-and-a-half being normal people,” Doughty shrugs. “Really, it wasn’t that bad.”

Gratzer’s eyes widen. “Speak for yourself!,” he retorts.

Post-showtime at the band’s hotel suite: Kevin Cronin and Gary Richrath, REO’s two main scribes, are entertaining well-wishers and lapping at cups of champagne. Richrath is noticeably favoring one hand. “I got mad and punched out a light last night,” he reveals somewhat sheepishly. ‘‘It was a tough light—I had to hit it three times.”

Errant stage lamps aside, all seems hunkydory with this crew; they’re in good spirits. Tonight’s sell-out show was reassuring to REO after their long absence—and especially since Wheels Are Turnin’ had only been out for a paltry two weeks; hardly the kind of radio-cushioned advance word that most bands hope to tour with.

But whether it was from quicklyassimilated MTV exposure for REO’s music video of their single off the LP, ‘‘I Do’Wanna Know,” or simply from Cronin’s seemingly-effortless lip-singing along with the band.

“It’s encouraging to see,” Cronin explains, “cuz for a while there, a couple of years ago, we were on the radio so much that I was sick of us! In 1981, when the Hi Infidelity thing was going on, we had like seven albums on the chart—and once you headline Madison Square Garden, you can’t have that as your goal anymore. So we did all this incredible shit and, in my mind, I was a bit confused. But what I figured out was that those were the things we did to keep ourselves going through the tough times—and Lord knows we had some tough times—so you put that there just to keep the band together and everybody working. But that’s not at the bottom of it. There’s got to be more to it than that. The horse has got a carrot in front of it and it’s chasing it but, basically, that horse wants to run.”

Back in the band’s dressing room,

Alan Gratzer had dropped a remark about “middle-aged rock ’n’ rollers” as he detailed aspects of the healthy diet they’re on. It was just too tempting not to pursue it.

You guys have been at this a long time. Do you think you’ve reached the point where you’re too old to rock ’n’ roll?

Alan: Yeah, well, when you think of the alternative, this is actually a great way to make a living. We get along well as a band, we do what we do well and we have fun doing it.

Neal: I don’t know that we’re gonna want to do it 11 months out of the year; there might be a point where we do what we did last time and take some time in between, but I don’t know where you’d draw the line and say, ‘This is it, we’re too old for this.’ We haven’t reached that point.

Bruce: Most people don’t reach the peak of their career until they’re 50 or 60 years old.

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Alan: (imitating an old geezer) We’re gonna do it till we’re 60, goddammit! In rock ’n’ roll, it hasn’t been proven yet. I guess we wait and see. The Stones are the closest thing to anybody staying together and being that old and keeping it going. We’re in second place,

I think!

Well, who’s to say that rock ’n’ roll is just for kids, or that we of the baby-boom generation won’t be listening'to it when we’re 60?

Neal: I don’t think you’ll ever see 20,000 60-year-olds sardined into an auditorium! The band could take it a lot longer than the crowd could.

Alan: We have a lot of fans that we know their parents turned them onto us. We see these 15-year-olds who, when we made our first record, weren’t even born! Obviously their parents had to give them some sort of input. Whether or not their parents still listen to us is another story...but as long as their kids do,

I don’t care!

Neal: Right, and now we’re after their grandchildren!

And, as the Wagoneers packed up to hit the dusty trail again, Neal—still munching away on his slice of cheeseless pizza—called back over his shoulder: “You tell all those young kiddies that they better stay healthy or we’ll be rocking on their graves!”

I Do’Wanna Spel It Rite Ennyway Kevin Cronin on his novel use of the English language in conjunction with a song title: “It’s ‘I Do’Wanna Know’ and it’s been spelled one way on the album cover, one way on the single, one way on the label—all kinds of ways. I went back to my notebook and paged through it and the way I wrote it originally was “I DoWanna Know’ and that’s how I wanted to spell it. And then I thought, hey, wait a minute, that’s not grammatically right, maybe I’ll put an apostrophe there. And then it got all messed up. But you got the official spelling right there: ‘I Do’Wanna Know’.” ^