We continue with our brief series on 70’s arena rock, staying in the Midwest to hang with the favorite sons of Champaign, Illinois, Reo Speedwagon.

You Can Tune A Piano, But You Can’t Tune A Fish

Preconceived Notions: When I was growing up, everyone in my general vicinity loved REO. Their guitarist, Gary Richrath, was born in the same town I was, and grew up ten minutes driving distance from where I live now. I’ve heard first-hand stories from people who insisted they partied with Gary in the early seventies. REO were hometown boys made good, and it wouldn’t matter if their collected output sounded like The Shaggs— Central Illinois was going to love ‘em.
I distinctly remember getting a dubbed cassette of A Decade of Rock And Roll from my mother in my early teens. This was soon traded out for a vinyl copy, bought for a birthday or somesuch. Everyone assumed I would like this stuff, I suppose. And Decade is pretty likable— a lovingly assembled greatest hits collection that didn’t have any hits on it¹. Scanning the tracklist now, I see a half dozen songs that I would classify as pretty good, and most of those were culled from the more recent albums at that time. That should bode well for You Can Tune A Piano, since it is one of those recent albums with better “singles.”
Side Note: I am aware that High Infidelity songs were all over the radio in 1980, years before I even got a copy of Decade. Somehow I never equated the band that did “Keep On Loving You” with the elevated bar band that ended up in my record collection—they felt like two different groups to me. Still do.

Merch I Have Owned: see above. I never got beyond A Decade of Rock and Roll, and was highly allergic to everything the band did after Hi Infidelity, especially the noxious “In My Dreams,” which inexplicably made it to number 19 on the Billboard Top 40 in 1987.

Miscellany: The video for REO’s 1980 hit “Keep on Loving You” is on my list of The Ten Stupidest Videos of All Time. We not only get the casual misogyny and extremely poor production values² that were endemic of videos from that time, we also are graced with Kevin Cronin’s complete inability to act. In today’s age, where every pop star seems to be an ex-Disney actor or a YouTube discovery, it’s easy to forget how ill-equipped a lot of rock stars were to be performers at the dawn of the video age.

Track by Track:
Roll With the Changes— From the jump, you can tell these guys have been playing with each other for a long time. This is tight. I enjoy the rolling piano riff, the harmonies, and that the lyrics feature a metaphor or two. The solos all work very well, and are integrated seamlessly into the song. Gary Richrath was a much flashier guitarist than anybody in Styx, and he plays well off the other instruments. This might be the height of hard-rockin’ REO, where they show what all those years of touring have accomplished.

Time For Me to Fly— We are two for two! The first verse with the acoustic guitar and spacey keyboard is a singalong, as is the chorus. Kevin Cronin doesn’t have a great voice, but by God, he might have the most sincere voice in 70’s rock. This feels like the first big ballad the band ever did, even if it never hit the Top 40— this was the blueprint for all the hits that were coming soon, even including the “why do I have to put up with this shit from you” lyrical theme that is prevalent in so many REO songs³. I could dock it a notch for being a precursor to a load of swoony crap, but this is still a great REO song.
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Running Blind— Part of the problem with REO is their lack of imagination. This song sounds like a carbon copy of a song that comes later in the album⁴, and half a dozen other songs in their discography. Standard uptempo rocker, lyrics you won’t remember as soon as the song ends, samey samey boring blather.

Blazing Your Own Trail Again— The verses are “Time for Me to Fly” and the chorus is “Crimson and Clover”. I mean, the exact same chords. Tommy James could’ve probably sued. Worst song so far.

Sing to Me—Back to A Decade of Rock n Roll: A song on there I remember liking was “Lightning,” a slightly spookier version of “Time For Me to Fly”. And here we have an inferior attempt at the same song. Really bad, but at least it’s short, and Richrath’s guitar solo isn’t bad.

Lucky for You— at least this one doesn’t immediately remind me of another REO song. However, the lyrics are extraordinarily dumb⁵, there’s a hoedown on the bridge, and the only memorable thing in the song is Richrath’s guitar playing. I bet he hated the move to pop shit. I guess there is some nice honkeytonk piano here, too— I think the song was simply a vehicle for solos. I can appreciate that more than REO continually copying off their own test paper.

Do You Know Where Your Woman Is Tonight— These 70’s rock guys were super paranoid and sorely lacking in lyrical imagination. I know that lots of 70’s songs are about worrying that your lover is unfaithful, but that seems to be a feature of so much of REO’s catalog. Maybe don’t tour so damn much, guys. Stay home. Pay attention to your partner, huh? This song is slight, over quickly, unmemorable, what my wife would call a filler track.

The Unidentified Flying Tuna Trot— Solos, solos, solos. Even this is a tip of the cap to another instrumental off their last album. You know what killed REO? They only knew how to write two songs, and they filled their later albums with imperfect clones of those songs.

Say You Love Me or Say Goodnight—I liked this better on Decade, where it wasn’t surrounded by songs that sound a great deal like it. It rolls along nicely, a rollicking bar band type of number, but it really feels like REO had three good songs for this album and filled the rest of it up with crap they dashed off in an hour.

Final Impressions/Evaluation: To be honest, this album would work better as a 45— put “Time For Me to Fly” on side A, and “Roll With the Changes” on the flip side. That gives you two great songs, and points you in the direction REO would travel over their next handful of albums. Nothing else on You Can Tune A Piano (save the last song) is really memorable or worth repeated listens.
On his YouTube channel, Robert Fithen frequently mentions that his favorite albums are those where there is a wide array of styles and approaches. I would agree with him. Not to sound like a broken record ⁶, but my old copy of A Decade of Rock and Roll had much more variety and points of interest. Even when the songs stumbled, they didn’t all sound like they were spliced from the same tune, like we have here. Reo Speedwagon might have figured out the path to mainstream success on You Can Tune A Piano, but it’s a road with limited excitement and few surprises.

1. No song on Decade made the Billboard Top 40. The closest was “Time For Me To Fly,” which hit number 56. ↩︎
2. I could have shot a better-looking video on my cell phone. ↩︎
3. See “Take it on the Run,” “Keep on Loving You,” “In Your Letter,” et al. ↩︎
4. “Say You Love Me or Say Goodnight,” which I was familiar with from A Decade of Rock and Roll. ↩︎
5. “Love in the air and the wind in my hair is makin’ me real.” What?! ↩︎
6. Maybe the copycat nature of this album has infiltrated my brain. ↩︎