REO Speedwagon

At REO Speedwagon's last concert, on the twenty-first of December 2024, there were five musicians on stage: Kevin Cronin on vocals, guitar and piano, Dave Amato on guitar, Matt Bissonette on bass, Derek Hilland on keyboards and Bryan Hitt on drums. None of the five had founded the band. The only one who had —keyboard player Neal Allan Doughty, the man who also gave it its name— stayed on as a member and a partner until the end, but he had stepped off touring in February 2023, after fifty-five years. The band that made itself out on the road said goodbye to the road without a single founder playing.

And it did not say goodbye out of exhaustion. On the sixteenth of September 2024 the band itself announced on Facebook that it would stop touring effective the first of January 2025 because of "irreconcilable differences" between bassist Bruce Hall and Cronin. The name REO Speedwagon belonged to three partners —Cronin, Hall and Doughty—, the decision was put to a vote, and Cronin was left in the minority. He told it in four words: "I just got outvoted". Fifty-seven years of a band ended two votes to one.

A blackboard in a transport history class

Doughty did not choose a name: he copied a blackboard. In a university class titled "The History of Transportation" he saw "R.E.O. Speed Wagon" written up, which was a 1915 truck built by the REO Motor Car Company, founded in 1905 by Ransom Eli Olds, the same man who had given his surname to Oldsmobile. The three letters are his initials, and the band pronounces them one by one, R-E-O, never "Reo" as a single word. The truck was called a Speed Wagon because it ran fast with a load on. The band was born in the autumn of 1967 in Champaign, Illinois, out of the friendship of two electrical engineering students who were doing badly on the degree: Doughty, born on the twenty-ninth of July 1946 in Evansville, Indiana, on keyboards, and Alan Gratzer on drums. With them, Mike Blair on bass and Joe Matt on guitar and lead vocals.

That lead vocal changed four times before it settled, and there is the other fact the popular account gets wrong. Joe Matt sang until early 1968. Then came Terry Luttrell, born in 1947 in Champaign itself, who recorded the debut, R.E.O. Speedwagon, in October 1971 for Epic Records and left in 1972 over his friction with guitarist Gary Richrath; he ended up singing in Starcastle. The third was Kevin Patrick Cronin Jr., born on the sixth of October 1951 in Evanston, Illinois, who joined in 1972 for R.E.O./T.W.O. and left the following year, during the sessions for Ridin' the Storm Out. So the fourth singer in REO Speedwagon was Michael Bryan Murphy, and he is not a footnote: Murphy sang from 1973 to 1975, on the album that carries that title and the two that followed, Lost in a Dream and This Time We Mean It. The song "Ridin' the Storm Out" had been recorded by Cronin before he left, but his version was not released until the compilations of 2014 and 2018. Cronin came back in 1976, for the album R.E.O., and he only came back after Greg X. Volz turned the job down. From then on, and until 2024, the voice was his; but to talk about him as the singer "all along" is to erase three people.

What is literally true is the decade of work without a prize. Gregg Philbin took over on bass in 1968 and left it in 1977, when Bruce Hall came in, having been his schoolmate at Champaign Centennial High School. Richrath arrived on lead guitar in 1970 and became, alongside Cronin, the house songwriter. With that line-up the band spent the seventies touring hard rock without a single national top forty: their best mark was number fifty-six on the Hot 100, reached by "Time for Me to Fly", from You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can't Tuna Fish, released in July 1978. Cronin had written it in the early seventies in Boulder, Colorado, and producer John Stronach had dropped it from the 1976 album. In 2020, after it played in the series Ozark, it reached number thirty-four on Digital Songs: forty-two years later.

The one that sounded like Barry Manilow

The best fact in the whole history of REO Speedwagon is that nobody wanted the song that changed their lives. Cronin wrote "Keep On Loving You" on finding out his wife had been unfaithful, took it to rehearsal as a piano ballad and the group rejected it as soppy: they said it sounded too much like Barry Manilow. What saved it was Gary Richrath plugging into the Marshalls and putting power chords on it; according to Ultimate Classic Rock's account, Richrath turned the volume up meaning to drown Cronin out, and that sound turned out to be exactly what the song needed. Then came a second rejection, Epic Records', which did not want it as a single and which the band had to argue the decision out with. It came out on the fourth of November 1980, it was their first Hot 100 top fifty in nine years of records and, with no stop in between, their first number one: a single week, the chart dated the twenty-first of March 1981, plus number seven in Britain, number two in Canada and number three in Australia. And on the first of August 1981 its video was the seventeenth MTV aired on its first day alive.

Fifteen weeks, and not in a row

Hi Infidelity was released on the twenty-first of November 1980 on Epic, recorded between June and October of that year at Crystal Studios in Los Angeles and at Kendun Recorders, Burbank, and produced by Kevin Beamish, Cronin, Gratzer and Richrath. It reached number one on the Billboard 200 on the twenty-first of February 1981 and piled up fifteen weeks at the summit, but not in a row: six, then three, then six more, because in April and May it was displaced for three weeks by Paradise Theatre, by Styx, the other big group from Illinois. It spent sixty-five weeks on the chart, it was the best-selling album of 1981 and on the seventeenth of August 2017 the RIAA certified it Diamond: ten million units. In Canada it is five times platinum.

The title is a joke on the "high fidelity" of the sleeves of the period, and the record is made of real infidelities, but not only Cronin's. "In Your Letter" was written by Richrath out of the letter in which Neal Doughty's wife told him she was leaving him for another man while the band was on tour; it reached number twenty on the Hot 100. Cronin summed it up this way: "our personal lives and our home lives were fracturing". And Richrath's, not Cronin's, is "Take It on the Run" as well, the album's other big single, number five on the Hot 100 and nineteen in the United Kingdom, RIAA gold on the seventeenth of April 1989. It was going to be called "Don't Let Me Down"; it was Cronin who insisted on changing the title, because the hook was in the third-hand rumour of the first line, and who contributed the chorus in the studio on pure impulse. The fourth single, "Don't Let Him Go", by Cronin, stopped at number twenty-four.

The number one arrived in March 1985

Wheels Are Turnin' came out on the thirty-first of October 1984, recorded at Rumbo Recorders in Los Angeles between January and August of that year and produced by Cronin, Richrath and Gratzer; it was number seven on the Billboard 200 and twice platinum. The first single, "I Do'wanna Know", reached twenty-nine. The second was "Can't Fight This Feeling", which Cronin wrote and which tends to be dated to 1984 because the album and the single are from that year —the seventeenth of December—, but which as a hit belongs to 1985: it was number one on the Hot 100 on the ninth of March 1985 and stayed three weeks, those of the ninth, the sixteenth and the twenty-third, the band's longest number one. In the United Kingdom it reached sixteen. Off that same album came "One Lonely Night", written by Neal Doughty, number nineteen, and "Live Every Moment", number thirty-four. In all the band put thirteen singles into the top forty and sold more than forty million records.

Life As We Know It, from 1987, was the last album with Richrath. Gratzer left the band in 1988 and Graham Lear replaced him; Richrath left in early 1989 and in May Dave Amato came in, with Bryan Hitt on drums from that same year. Press obituaries describe that departure as bitter and hold that Richrath had long been fighting alcoholism; there is no statement of his own and no document to back it up, and the nearest thing to a first-hand source is Cronin explaining, years later, that he found it hard to imagine him in any shape to come back. What is on the record is the work —out of his guitar come the two sounds that made this band great, the one that saved "Keep On Loving You" and the riff of "Take It on the Run"— and there is the gesture: on the fourth of December 2013 he played with REO Speedwagon again at the Rock to the Rescue benefit, in Bloomington, Illinois, and did "Ridin' the Storm Out" and the encore. He died on the thirteenth of September 2015 in Wooster, Ohio, aged sixty-five. The family was waiting for the autopsy result and it was never made public: the cause of his death remains unknown.

Two votes to one

The end began with two absences. Doughty retired from touring in February 2023 and out on the road Derek Hilland replaced him, though he kept his standing as a member and a partner. In November 2023 Bruce Hall took leave to have back surgery and Matt Bissonette stood in for him at the Las Vegas residency. When the statement of the sixteenth of September 2024 came, the text said that Hall "has intended to be Back On the Road Again by now" and that, in the group's view, he had not recovered enough to play at the level expected: "it is with great sadness that we announce REO Speedwagon will cease touring effective January 1, 2025".

Hall put out his own message the same day, and it told something different. "Never ever thought it would end like this and I'm heartbroken", he wrote; he wanted the band to carry on touring with the line-up of Cronin, himself, Amato, Hitt and Hilland, "just as it was prior to my necessary, planned and successful back surgery", and he was asking for a farewell tour at the very least. He also said that he and Doughty "did everything in our power to try and keep the Wagon rolling". His is the version Wikipedia records: he was sufficiently recovered and cleared by his doctors to go back out on the road.

Cronin's is incompatible with that one. On Dean Delray's podcast Let There Be Talk he said that, on coming back from the surgery, Hall set two conditions: one of which it would have been irresponsible to accept, and the other impossible. And there the detail that decides the story appears, because the owners of the name were three and it went to a vote: two to one, with Cronin in the minority. He said that to Billboard on the sixteenth of December 2024, five days before the last concert: "I just got outvoted". On Eddie Trunk's podcast, in February 2025, he was blunter —"it just got ugly"— and blamed in part leaks from people around Hall, insisting that "I never quit REO Speedwagon. I would never quit REO Speedwagon". On Billy Corgan's, in January 2026, he left it at "it just became an impossible situation", that the pandemic had opened "a little bit of a chasm" inside the group, that he holds no grudge against Hall and that he had believed REO Speedwagon was going to roll into the barn in one piece: "it just didn't work out that way". When the statement came out, Cronin was convalescing from emergency surgery.

There was no court-ordered dissolution and no trademark suit: there was a halt to touring and a name taken off the road. Cronin went on playing the repertoire with the last line-up, now called the Kevin Cronin Band —"nobody can stop me from singing these songs"—, and in 2025 he co-headlined the Brotherhood of Rock Tour with Styx, the same band that in 1981 had taken three weeks of number one off him. That tour is the reason he was not there on the fourteenth of June 2025 at the State Farm Center in Champaign, where Hall, Doughty, Gratzer, Mike Murphy, Terry Luttrell, early guitarist Steve Scorfina and Eric Richrath, Gary's son, got together to do a retrospective. Hall announced it from the stage, after "Keep on Loving You", as what he believed it was: "in all reality, this is REO's last show".

It was not. On the twenty-seventh of September 2025 the four of the classic line-up —Cronin, Hall, Doughty and Gratzer— played three numbers with the Marching Illini at half-time of the University of Illinois homecoming game, the day after riding as marshals in the parade. And on the seventh of March 2026, at the Peoria Riverfront Museum, in Richrath's home town, those four plus Mike Murphy and Eric Richrath played in front of two hundred guests at the opening of the exhibition devoted to Gary: "Ridin' the Storm Out", "Take It on the Run", "Roll With the Changes" and a Van Morrison song. Murphy and Cronin, the two singers of the seventies, sang "Ridin' the Storm Out" together for the first time in history, and embraced. Cronin said afterwards that the reunion had exceeded his expectations and that "something's gotta give". There is no tour announced and the name is still retired.

What to remember

REO Speedwagon was called that because an electrical engineering student copied a blackboard in 1967, it spent a whole decade touring without getting into the top forty, and in 1980 it released an album made out of the infidelities of its own household that sold ten million copies and spent fifteen weeks at number one, not in a row, because Styx interrupted them for three. The band did not want the song that launched it, because it sounded like Barry Manilow, and the label did not want it as a single either. And half of that songbook is not Cronin's: "Take It on the Run" and "In Your Letter" were written by Gary Richrath.

Of Richrath those two sounds remain, and a name remains that the press pinned a label on which no first-hand source supports; he died on the thirteenth of September 2015, aged sixty-five, and the cause was never released. If anyone recognises in their own household what the obituaries attributed to him, in Chile SENDA's Fono Drogas y Alcohol, 1412, answers free of charge and anonymously.

The rest ended in a vote. When that piano intro of "Can't Fight This Feeling" plays and somebody sings the whole thing without knowing whose it is, there is what they were: a band from Champaign that earned everything out on the road and that, on the last night of its life, the twenty-first of December 2024, walked onto the stage without any of the people who had founded it.

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Sources

REO Speedwagon, American rock band formed in the autumn of 1967 in Champaign, Illinois, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The name comes from the REO Speed Wagon truck (1915) built by the REO Motor Car Company, founded in 1905 by Ransom Eli Olds (R-E-O are his initials), the founder of Oldsmobile; Neal Doughty saw it written on the blackboard of a class titled "The History of Transportation" (American Songwriter, "Behind the Band Name: REO Speedwagon"). Founders: Neal Allan Doughty (keyboards; b. 29 July 1946, Evansville, Indiana), Alan Gratzer (drums), Mike Blair (bass) and Joe Matt (guitar and vocals). Lead vocalists: Joe Matt (1967–early 1968), Terry Luttrell (b. 1947, Champaign; 1968–1972, departure over his friction with Gary Richrath, later in Starcastle; the "personal differences" formula in circulation is unsourced Wikipedia prose), Kevin Patrick Cronin Jr. (b. 6 October 1951, Evanston, Illinois; 1972–1973), Michael Bryan Murphy (1973–1975) and Cronin again (1976–2024, after Greg X. Volz turned the job down). Other members: Gregg Philbin, bass 1968–1977 (died in October 2022, with no day or cause in reliable sources); Bruce Hall, bass 1977–2024, Philbin's schoolmate at Champaign Centennial High School; Gary Dean Richrath, guitar 1970–1989; Graham Lear, drums from 1988; Dave Amato, guitar from May 1989; Bryan Hitt, drums from 1989; Derek Hilland, touring keyboards from February 2023; Matt Bissonette, bass from 2023. Albums and charts: "R.E.O. Speedwagon" (October 1971, Epic); "R.E.O./T.W.O." (1972); "Ridin' the Storm Out" (21 December 1973); "Lost in a Dream" (1974); "This Time We Mean It" (1975); "R.E.O." (1976); "You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can't Tuna Fish" (July 1978), with "Time for Me to Fly" (Cronin), no. 56 on the Hot 100 and no. 34 on Digital Songs in 2020 after appearing in the series "Ozark"; "Hi Infidelity" (21 November 1980, Epic), recorded between June and October 1980 at Crystal Studios (Los Angeles) and Kendun Recorders (Burbank) and produced by Kevin Beamish, Cronin, Gratzer and Richrath, no. 1 on the Billboard 200 from 21 February 1981 with 15 non-consecutive weeks at the summit (21 February–28 March, 18 April–2 May and 16 May–20 June), interrupted for 3 weeks by Styx's "Paradise Theatre" (4 and 11 April and 9 May), 65 weeks on the chart, best-selling album of 1981 and RIAA Diamond (10,000,000 units) on 17 August 2017, 5× platinum in Canada and silver in the United Kingdom; "Wheels Are Turnin'" (31 October 1984, Epic), recorded at Rumbo Recorders between January and August 1984, no. 7 on the Billboard 200 and 2× platinum RIAA; "Life As We Know It" (1987), the last with Richrath. Singles: "Keep On Loving You" (Cronin; Epic, 4 November 1980), no. 1 on the Hot 100 for one week, chart of 21 March 1981, no. 7 in the United Kingdom, no. 2 in Canada (CHUM) and no. 3 in Australia (Kent), RIAA platinum, the band's first top 50 on the Hot 100, and its video was the 17th MTV aired on 1 August 1981; "Take It on the Run" (Gary Richrath; 27 March 1981), no. 5 on the Hot 100, no. 19 in the United Kingdom, RIAA gold on 17 April 1989, with the original title "Don't Let Me Down"; "In Your Letter" (Richrath, July 1981), no. 20, written out of the break-up letter Neal Doughty received; "Don't Let Him Go" (Cronin, June 1981), no. 24; "I Do'wanna Know" (October 1984), no. 29; "Can't Fight This Feeling" (Cronin; 17 December 1984), no. 1 on the Hot 100 on 9 March 1985 and for three weeks (9, 16 and 23 March), no. 16 in the United Kingdom; "One Lonely Night" (Neal Doughty, March 1985), no. 19; "Live Every Moment" (July 1985), no. 34. Band totals: more than 40 million records sold and 13 singles in the top 40. Gary Dean Richrath: b. 18 October 1949 in Peoria, Illinois; left the band in early 1989; released "Only the Strong Survive" (1992) with his group Richrath; played with REO Speedwagon again on 4 December 2013 at the Rock to the Rescue benefit, Bloomington, Illinois; died on 13 September 2015 in Wooster, Ohio, aged 65. His cause of death was not released: the family was waiting for the autopsy and the result was never made public (CNN, 14 September 2015); the only public description is Cronin's, who spoke of a stomach problem, hospitalisation and complications. The alcoholism attributed to him by press retrospectives (Vermilion County First, 12 September 2022; Geeks of Doom, 2015) has no statement of his own and no document behind it and does not appear in his encyclopaedic entry. The end: Doughty retired from touring in February 2023 after 55 years, keeping his standing as a member and a partner; Hall took leave in November 2023 to have back surgery; on 16 September 2024 the band announced on Facebook that it would cease touring effective 1 January 2025 because of "irreconcilable differences" between Hall and Cronin, and Hall put out his own message the same day ("never ever thought it would end like this and I'm heartbroken"); Wikipedia records that he was recovered and medically cleared. Cronin said on Dean Delray's podcast "Let There Be Talk" that Hall set two unacceptable conditions —"one of them it would have been irresponsible for me to go along with, and the other one, it was impossible for me to go along with. And so we just hit a stalemate"— (reported by American Songwriter, Erinn Callahan, 16 February 2025), and told Billboard on 16 December 2024, before the last concert, that the decision was taken by a 2-1 vote among the three partners who owned the name —Cronin, Hall and Doughty—, leaving him in the minority: "I just got outvoted and… have to stop calling it REO Speedwagon at the end of this year". He expanded on Eddie Trunk's podcast, SiriusXM (note of 22 February 2025) and on Billy Corgan's The Magnificent Others (note of 23 January 2026). Last concert: 21 December 2024 (venue unconfirmed by a direct source). There was no court-ordered dissolution and no trademark dispute: the name was left retired and Cronin tours as the Kevin Cronin Band, co-headlining the Brotherhood of Rock Tour with Styx in 2025. Later reunions: 14 June 2025, State Farm Center in Champaign, with Hall, Doughty, Gratzer, Mike Murphy, Terry Luttrell, Steve Scorfina and Eric Richrath, without Cronin, 19 numbers, and Hall saying from the stage after "Keep on Loving You": "in all reality, this is REO's last show" (Ultimate Classic Rock, Matt Wardlaw, 15 June 2025); 27 September 2025, three numbers with the Marching Illini at half-time of the University of Illinois homecoming game against USC, with the parade on the 26th (Wikipedia gives the 28th and the team calendar confirms Saturday the 27th); 7 March 2026, a 200-guest gala at the Peoria Riverfront Museum for the exhibition devoted to Gary Richrath, with Cronin, Hall, Doughty, Gratzer, Mike Murphy and Eric Richrath. As of October 2026 there is no REO Speedwagon tour announced. In Chile, SENDA's Fono Drogas y Alcohol is 1412. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from the English-language Wikipedia, the RIAA's Gold & Platinum database, TODAY, NBC Los Angeles, American Songwriter, Billboard (16 December 2024), Dean Delray's podcast "Let There Be Talk", Ultimate Classic Rock, the Songfacts Calendar, CNN and Vermilion County First.