Epic 36844
Producers: Kevin Cronin, Gary Richrath & Kevin Beamish
Track listing: Don’t Let Him Go / Keep on Loving You / Follow My Heart / In Your Letter / Take It on the Run / Tough Guys / Out of Season / Shakin’ It Loose / Someone Tonight / I Wish You Were There
February 21, 1981
15 weeks (nonconsecutive)
REO Speedwagon had been around the block and back more than a few times prior to the release of Hi Infidelity. The band formed in Champaign, Illinois, in 1968 with Terry Lutrell as the lead singer, but he was replaced by Kevin Cronin following the band’s 1971 self-titled debut. Cronin stuck around for 1972’s T.W.O. but left prior to the 1973 album Ridin’ the Storm Out, only to rejoin for 1976’s REO. “We had already gone through the ego thing when one guy wants to do a solo album,” Cronin says. “We already tried that and it didn’t work very well, so there was a lot of respect between us. We really did need each other.”
In the midst of all this maneuvering, the band had enjoyed only limited commercial success. Their highest-charting album had been 1978’s You Can Tune a Piano, But You Can’t Tuna Fish, which peaked at number 29. “We were the perennial underdog, which was a position that we felt comfortable in, because we had grown used to it,” says Cronin. “We were the up-and-comer, a band that had something to prove and had a message to get across and that wasn’t getting across. We had a real fighter-type attitude.” Although REO had been together for more than a decade, they were still basically a support act, not a headliner.
Part of the problem was that the band had fallen into a cyclical rut. “We had been in the habit of making an album every year since 1971,” says Cronin. “Every year we would make an album and do a tour and it kind of got to be a cycle.” However, with Hi Infidelity, the band broke that cycle. In the spring of 1980, Epic released A Decade of Rock and Roll 1970 to 1980, a greatest-hits compilation, although the band had few legitimate hits at the time. “We had an extra nine months of time, which gave me the chance to think and write,” Cronin says. “I wasn’t going to put out another record until I was satisfied with my writing and until we were rehearsed enough.”
The band members’ love lives at the time were “traumatic,” Cronin says, causing him to take a new approach to songwriting. Instead of just focusing on a male point of view, Cronin wrote songs that offered a feminine perspective, like “Keep on Loving You.” Also, the band had found a balance between the hard rock that guitarist Gary Richrath favored and the more folk-influenced sound preferred by Cronin. “There weren’t any other hard rock bands that were as folk music-oriented as us,” Cronin says. “We really played hard folk-rock, music about people how people feel and how they get along.”
The mix of hard-rock and syrupy ballads proved to be a winning combination for REO, as Hi Infidelity rose to the peak in its 12th week on the chart, unseating John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy. “It was really a success on all kinds of levels,” says Cronin. “We played all the biggest halls. It was incredible to be able to headline the Astrodome and the Superdome.” If there was a thorn in REO’s success, it was that the band never gained the respect of rock critics, who lumped the band together with other big mainstream rock attractions of the day. Says Cronin, “We were often compared to Journey and Styx, and usually in a less than complimentary fashion.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of February 21, 1981
1. Hi Infidelity, REO Speedwagon
2. Double Fantasy, John Lennon / Yoko Ono
3. The Jazz Singer, Neil Diamond
4. Crimes of Passion, Pat Benatar
5. Paradise Theater, Styx