999,833: REO Speedwagon - Take It On the Run

Arena rock is one of the more critically maligned genres of rock music, mostly for reasons that were intrinsic to its very being. It was great big music meant to be played in great big spaces. Your style can’t be subtle when you need to reach all the way back to the cheap seats. And if you’re going to fill up a sports stadium for some reason other than sports, your lyrics have got to be as universally relatable as possible. If you’re gonna go big, you’ve gotta go commercial. Grandeur – at least the human-made variety – doesn’t happen without cash.

Has there ever been a more thoroughly average grandeur than that of REO Speedwagon? On the surface they fulfill all the major arena-rock checklist items. Big fist-pumping choruses! Dramatically ringing power chords! Cigarette-lighter-ready ballads! But listen carefully, to what they’re actually doing. None of this stuff is all that hard to play. The melodies are usually fairly simple. The guitar solos rarely leave much of an impression. It certainly doesn’t require the jazz-trained chops of Journey. Any competent band could do this. (Of course, it was the misfortune of many competent bands to not have done this.) Kevin Cronin’s vocals lack the range, power, and supple elasticity of the incomparable Steve Perry – and if you can’t hear the contrast, just try singing one or the other at karaoke. Now, there’s no law that says great music requires great technical ability. It’s only that REO Speedwagon’s chosen, grandeur-obsessed idiom would seem to demand something above…average. Here is an average band of average Midwestern guys, constantly reaching for the stars, yet the spacecraft they’re using to get there is more akin to a model rocket.

“Average” doesn’t mean “bad.” The Speedwagon (as they no doubt affectionately dubbed themselves) aren’t that great at anything – they’re just good enough. Perhaps there is no better illustration of their mundane everyman stabs at transcendence than the big ol’ ballad “Take It On the Run,” which went Top Five in 1981. It’s instantly catchy, right from the opening lines – “Heard it from a friend who/Heard it from a friend who/Heard it from another you’d been messin’ around.” But this is as much a function of the repetition as it is the tune. When I was a young man, I saw a commercial for a car stereo with a detachable face to deter thieves, and I still remember it to this day. Why? Here’s how it went:

GUY 1 (showing the product): “It’s a detachable face for the car stereo.”
GUY 2 (confused by the novelty of this concept): “A detachable face for the car stereo?”
GUY 1 (pleased with his avant-garde consumption choice): “Yeah. A detachable face for the car stereo.”
GUY 2 (nodding as the light of understanding dawns): “Ohhhhh. A detachable face for the car stereo!”

For the remainder of the song, the Speedwagon (whose nickname contains the same number of letters as their full name) reveal their thoroughly average pedigree in much the same fashion as modern-day reality TV stars. That is, they prove incapable of expressing all but the most basic thoughts without the aid of clichéd stock phrases. Why does Kevin’s baby have to “take it on the run”? Why, because she’s “under the gun,” of course. This is also why she tells “white lies” and then puts on “bedroom eyes.” O, the maddening hypocrisy!

But we all know that lyrics don’t really matter in arena rock – hooks do. And if the Speedwagon’s hooks are simpler than competitors like Journey, Boston, or Styx, it doesn’t mean they aren’t memorable. If nothing here is challenging, it is comfortingly familiar. And if the song’s tale of betrayal might have held more menace or anguish in the hands of a more versatile vocalist, it would also lose Kevin Cronin’s perennial nice-guy presence. No matter how angry or disappointed the lyrics get, Kevin sounds like exactly the same aw-shucks fellow who’s gonna “Keep On Loving You.” Yes, everything here is good enough.

So an average band of average musicians, with aspirations of grandeur, gets to the point where, through dedication and hard work, they can come reasonably close to grandeur. What does this mean? Is it a sad commentary on American mediocrity, that people are only admiring the great big aspirations of common folks they recognize, and can’t judge the substance of the results anyway? Or should we be inspired, that through good old American stick-to-it-ive-ness (i.e. touring and recording for an ENTIRE FUCKING DECADE before everything suddenly clicks and we make a really catchy album that sells NINE FUCKING MILLION COPIES), we can rise far beyond what our natural limitations may have seemed to be when we started out? Well, your answer probably depends on how successful you’ve been at what you wanted to do, and how easy it was to attain that level of success.

Me? Well, a few years back, thieves broke into my car to steal my Sony Discman (which lacked a detachable face). They also took my flashlight and my Andrew W.K. CD. They did not, however, take my REO Speedwagon tape. Whether that was because of the format or the music contained therein, I say, it’s their loss. Keep on rollin’, Speedwagon.

Take It On The Run - REO Speed...