Bruce Hall of REO Speedwagon (INTERVIEW)

There was a time in 1981 when you couldn’t turn on a radio or walk into a record store and NOT hear a track from REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity. If it wasn’t “Keep On Loving You” then it was “Take It On The Run” or “In Your Letter.”

The album was gargantuan. Fifteen weeks at number one on the Billboard charts alone; magazine covers, sold out concerts, fame, fortune and everything in-between lay at the feet of the five men who made up the band at this time: singer Kevin Cronin, guitarist Gary Richrath, drummer Alan Gratzer, keyboard player Neal Doughty and bass player Bruce Hall. REO was on a speeding train to the highest highs, even though they had tasted some success with 1973’s “Ridin’ The Storm Out” and 1978’s “Roll With The Changes.” Although hailed as an overnight success, the band was actually formed by Doughty and Gratzer in the late 1960’s, went through some personnel changes, had a few hits in the seventies and finally found their golden ticket in the early 1980’s.

But with the advent of hard rock, hair metal and grunge, bands like REO Speedwagon got pushed to the side in everyone’s spectrum except their loyal fans. But a funny thing happened on the way to the discount bin – the band not only survived but thrived. Never losing their love for playing music and creating new songs, they stayed on the concert trail and kept winning over new fans while retaining their old ones. And here in 2013, their concerts are just as strong.

Just ask longtime bass player Bruce Hall: “That’s what we do better than anything, is play rock songs.”  One of the three long-timers left in the band (both Gratzer and Richraft left in the late 1980’s; Bryan Hitt and Dave Amato replacing them), Hall loves to talk about the band he joined following Gregg Philbin’s departure in 1977. So with some time before their show in Iowa earlier this month, Hall called in to talk about his early days, life with REO and why he will never cut his hair (hint: it’s longer than it was in the Hi Infidelity days).

Bruce, why don’t you start off by telling us where you grew up and what kind of kid you were like?

Well, I grew up in Champaign, Illinois; not just Champaign, but small towns around Champaign. There was a town called Philo and was there for a while; lived in Urbana, Tolono, a lot of little towns. Champaign is a farm community. It’s also the home of the University Of Illinois. When I was a teenager, because of the University Of Illinois, there were a lot of bands starting so I got into a band when I was about thirteen and I’ve been in bands ever since (laughs). It’s been a great life, I’ve loved it.

What was I like as a kid? I’m sure I was like most boys. I ran around a lot, climbed trees, went fishing, camped out, that sort of stuff. I love all that. But music has always been a big part of my family and when the bug hit me when I was about thirteen, it wasn’t just a liking. I was possessed with it. I just wanted to practice all the time, play music all the time. Of course, it didn’t help me with my school work all that much (laughs), but between girls and music and sports … I mean, I did ok in school but after a while I got, and don’t tell anyone I said this (laughs), but I started losing interest, there wasn’t a lot there anymore. I remember my counselor pulling me out of class going, “You’re going to have to try a little harder.” And I go, “Well, you know, I don’t see the sense of it.” (laughs) I know, that wasn’t the right thing to say at the time but I had kind of already decided that this was what I wanted to do. I was lucky enough to be able to pull it off but what kind of thinking was that really? I hadn’t done anything and to put all my eggs into one basket and say, “Well, I’m going to be a rock star in a band for the rest of my life.” (laughs). I had no idea that was going to happen but that’s what I wanted to happen.

What is your first memory of music?

I remember my dad was a clarinet player. He played clarinet and saxophone and he had his own band. When I was a kid he used to play and I remember hearing the saxophone or the clarinet, just him playing by himself, and he was very good. And I remember that I loved it. I loved hearing that and I remember my grandmother, my dad’s mother, had a piano at her house and I used to sit and just play on it for hours, not knowing what I was doing; this was when I was a little boy. But I found music wasn’t just something that I heard, it was something that kind of touched me deeper somehow.

Did your dad encourage you to play music?

No, not at all. In fact, my dad, and this is the funny part, when I first started playing music and getting in bands, it was hard to find places to practice, so we kind of took turns practicing at each other’s houses, if we could. So we practiced at my house one time, couple times, and my dad, he hated it. He thought rock music was just awful noise at first. He was like, “Turn it down.” He didn’t like it, he thought I was wasting my time, of course. He didn’t get it (laughs) and I couldn’t expect him to. Rock was basically made by and for people my age at the time, young people. And not that he was old but he was older and he was more into the kind of music he liked, like Pete Fountain and Dixieland Jazz and that sort of stuff. He loved that. In fact, I wish I had been able to take him to New Orleans to just visit the place when he was alive.

What was the first band that you discovered that you loved more than anything?

The Beatles

So I assume you saw them on Ed Sullivan like everybody else.

Of course I did (laughs). It changed everybody. The boys my age, it changed our lives, and it’s hard to explain. It was back when television was not like it is now. And The Ed Sullivan Show was on every Sunday and they always had comedians, a variety of different types of entertainment, jugglers, singers. But Ed Sullivan brought The Beatles over from England and for some reason, I don’t know what it was, but at that point in time, well, because rock & roll, we had invented it, rock & roll in America. We had Chuck Berry, we had Elvis, but The Beatles were totally something different. They looked different, they sounded different and I think a lot of people say because of the fact that it wasn’t too long before The Beatles came that John F Kennedy had been assassinated and the country was feeling a lot of sadness. And The Beatles were all happy and peppy and they were just exciting. So it was incredible and when they played on The Ed Sullivan Show, I think it was one of the highest-watched shows ever on television. And at that point in time, like I said, there was only like three stations and if you wanted to watch TV, you only had three choices (laughs). But The Ed Sullivan Show was pretty much a staple in everybody’s house on Sunday night.

When was your first time performing on a stage in front of people?

(laughs) Well, let’s see, I was about thirteen or fourteen. My first band was called Purple Haze and we played at St Pat’s. It was a church in Urbana but they had teen dances, I believe it was every Friday night and they were big. I mean, kids from all over came and it was a fairly big room, it wasn’t inside the church, it was like a conference room outside the church. They had battle of the bands and it was lots of fun and all the kids would come.

Do you remember what you played?

I remember we did a song by the Yardbirds called “For Your Love.” We did some Rolling Stones songs, “Under My Thumb.” I remember we did that song.

Were you playing guitar at the time?

Yeah, well, in the very beginning I was just singing lead. We had a bass player and a guitar player, drummer; I think two guitar players, a drummer and a bass player. But we found out our bass player was so freaked out, so scared of playing live in front of people, that he forgot to turn on his amplifier (laughs). So we kind of fired him. He had to go (laughs). So I took over bass and thank God I did cause, I don’t know, I connect with that instrument pretty easily. I like the bass.

I’ve heard you call it “a very mysterious instrument.” Why?

Well, a lot of people will think of a bass, it only has four strings and that it’s easy. But it’s probably the hardest instrument in the band to play. It has two jobs. The bass has to work with the drums, you have to work really well with the drums, and that’s called a unit, the rhythm section.

And the other part is, it has to be melodic, at least the way I like to play it. So you have to understand what chords are and know where the melody line to the song is. And you can weave in and out of that and it makes it sound better, I think. Paul McCartney did a great job of that. I learned a lot from just listening to Paul McCartney’s bass parts. But then there is the percussive part, which is the rhythm part, and a lot of guys get into that. You’ll hear guys that play poppity bass. They go, pippity-pop, pippity-pop, and that’s nice too. I play with a pick some and I play with my fingers some. It all depends on what the song is looking for, what it needs.

What was the difference playing with Alan Gratzer verses playing now with Bryan Hitt?

I’d known Alan for a long time and Alan is, and still is, a great drummer. He’s simpler as far as what he plays, if that makes any sense. Bryan is more schooled, he knows more about different rhythms and he knows how to play in time really well. He practices with a metronome a lot. Alan was more of just a feel drummer, where he would find a groove for a song and he would stick with it.

You’ve contributed a number of songs to REO Speedwagon. How do you create your songs? Where does your inspiration come from?

My inspiration is usually something that you’ve lived through, right; something that has touched you, something you want to talk about, get off your chest. Sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes it’s something that hasn’t been so good. Writing songs, first of all, I always grab my guitar first and I’ll just start playing chords or something, not even knowing what the song is going to be about. A little spark or a little something will happen that you’ll hear something in your head, a melody possibly or just some words that go together well, and you start finding ways to express what it is – if you had something that just happened to you, like a break-up with somebody or sometimes you can even write as a third person, like you didn’t actually live through it but you saw somebody else who went through it. That’s the thing about songs is that even though sometimes it feels very personal to you we’re all kind of connected cause we all go through the same things. So when you write a song that says I went through this, had a hard time and somebody left me or I just found the love of my life, these kinds of things. Well, these are the same things that everybody feels. But you have to be kind of careful how you say things. You have to tell the truth in order for it to connect all the way. That’s what I’ve found. Anyway, when I write songs, it’s kind of a process, kind of hard to describe how it’s done, but I have a lot of songs that have never been recorded with REO because they don’t really fit REO.

So why don’t you just record a solo album?

I don’t know (laughs). Maybe someday I will. I haven’t really because I like my band too much and honestly, when we’re not touring I’m usually just trying to be normal (laughs), doing things like fishing or golfing or something like that. I’m pretty satisfied with what I have right here, to tell you the truth. I am very lucky.

When you came into the band around 1977, what was the atmosphere like within the band at that time?

The band had just got done putting out their live album called You Get What You Play For. It was a double live album and I think they had made quite a few records and they had been successful regionally, around the mid-west, but they’d never really broke, they’d never had a big hit single and were pretty much an opening act for a lot of the bigger bands, especially around the mid-west. They had just moved to California. They were trying to become more than what they were at that point in time. But they were kind of scared a little bit because, I wasn’t in the band but I heard talk about what was happening, and they were afraid they were going to lose their recording contract only because they were not selling a lot of records but enough to just barely make ends meet. So the record company didn’t think it was a good idea to keep REO on the label.

So when I joined the band, they were optimistic about a couple of things: One was that I was fresh blood in the band and made the band sound a little different. I knew all the guys, which really helped. And the songwriting in the band was getting better. Kevin Cronin and Gary Richraft, at the time, were starting to become really good at writing songs. So my first record when I joined the band was You Can Tune A Piano But You Can’t Tuna Fish and that record had “Time For Me To Fly” on it, it had “Roll With The Changes” on it. We still play those two songs live. And the record company heard something, somebody over there thought, “Well, now they’re starting to sound like we can get some of their songs on the radio.” And that’s exactly what started happening.

We tried to start without changing who we were too much. We knew that we needed to make it where we were a little bit more radio friendly. Because the band up to that point before I joined, the band was kind of, closest I could tell you it was kind of like a jam band. A little bit more like the Grateful Dead but not like the Grateful Dead. It was more like the Allman Brothers or something like that. There were a lot of long extended instrumentals in the middle of songs. They were great, REO Speedwagon was great at that at the time. They did it better than a lot of bands but it’s not the kind of stuff that is going to get you on the radio. So the only way to get a bigger fan base is you had to get airplay so we had to start working towards that. So we started working towards writing songs that were still good songs but they were more radio friendly. So that’s kind of what happened when I joined the band. We did You Can Tune A Piano But You Can’t Tuna Fish, which had “Time For Me To Fly” and “Roll With The Changes.” Then the next album was Nine Lives and that had my song on it, “Back On The Road Again.” Then we put out A Decade Of Rock & Roll, which was just basically a compilation album, while we were working on the Hi Infidelity record. So THAT was the one that really took off for us.

When all that fame hit you, how did you guys stay grounded? Was it because you had been doing this for so long?

Sure, of course, that was a big part of it. It was because of where we came from too, I think. We weren’t, I mean, we were impressed and we were very excited about what was happening to us but at the same time we liked simple things, like we loved to play basketball so we played a lot of basketball all the time (laughs). And the traveling was easy because we’d been traveling so much. REO Speedwagon has always just traveled. It’s what we do – just tour and tour and tour and tour. And when we’re not touring we’re writing songs and recording songs. So that wasn’t hard. It was a new planet we went to. It’s like we left the Earth for a while. But it didn’t overwhelm us, honestly. It was a joy, it was fun, but I think we kept our wits about us.

When Gary left, was there a moment where you were worried about the band because he was such a big part of the songwriting?

Oh sure. Gary was a big part of REO and he was a great songwriter and his presence on stage, he had great stage presence. We knew it had to change. When Gary left, it was going to take an effort to keep REO Speedwagon even together, honestly. I mean, Kevin is a strong personality, he writes a lot of great songs and a great lead singer and frontman and it was because of that, you have to give a lot of credit to Kevin because before it was Gary and Kevin as the two focal points of the band, and now it came down to just Kevin. And I am sure it was hard for him. I know that I tried to step up my songwriting some and do a better job of just being a performer. REO changed some but we never lost our roots and that’s the thing about REO Speedwagon, because we do come from the mid-west and where I come from if somebody needs help you help them; it’s more simple, you don’t try to be anything you’re not. So we just dug down, dug down deep and tried to do our best. That’s all you can do.

We had to replace Alan. Alan decided he wanted to try his hand at being a restaurant owner so he did that and he was successful at it too. Gary went his way and we got Dave Amato and we are very fortunate to find Dave, very fortunate to find Bryan, and they fit right in. We just had to show them what REO was all about but they’re both great players. In that way, we are very fortunate to have kept REO still working. There was a time, I’m sure, when we could have tossed in the towel and gone, well, you know, we ran our course. But we just never did. I don’t think that’s in us. We’re just going to take this, we’re going to run REO Speedwagon as long as people want to hear the songs, I think we’ll play them.

Who was the first real rock star that you ever met?

I think it was probably, oh my gosh, that’s a good question. It may have been Steve Marriott when he was with Humble Pie. Humble Pie came to Champaign. He was the lead singer and he was just hanging out at this gig and we were doing the opening, and I think it was the Student Union, I think, someplace like that and they were playing and we got to play before them so I got to meet him and he was a nice guy, super nice guy. I remember at the time I was going, “Holy Cow.” I shook his hand and I was kind of like shaking a little bit, you know (laughs) cause I loved Humble Pie. I thought they were great.

What is the most interesting piece of memorabilia that you own from your career?

That would be my bass guitar Butter. I play her every night. I bought that bass from Gregg Philbin, who was the bass player in REO Speedwagon before I was. I was about fifteen or sixteen years old and Gregg was selling the bass and I was in the market for a new bass and I heard that he was selling his guitar. So I went to his apartment at the time in Champaign and I think I bought it for like $250 (laughs). And I’ve had it ever since. It’s my favorite guitar.

I heard that Judas Priest opened for you guys in the seventies. Is that true?

Sure, I mean, there were a lot of bands but we’ve played shows with Judas Priest.

That’s a totally different crowd than you guys normally play to.

Yeah, there’s been times when you’ll get involved with a band that’s a different kind of niche than REO. I think it’s more pronounced these days if two bands play together like that. But back then, I remember in Chicago at the Aragon Ballroom, Jimi Hendrix, and if you can believe this, Jimi Hendrix was opening up for the Monkees. That’s how crazy you can get. But people accepted it. It’s music. If you want to go there and have an open mind and believe that you’re going to like it, the likelihood is that you’re going to like it.

After all these years of doing what you do, is it what you imagined being a rock musician would be like?

Oh yeah, of course. I mean, I don’t know what other people think but I can’t tell you how much fun it is because this is what I love to do. There are hard parts about it, being away from your family, that’s hard. But at the same time, this is just part of the deal, this is who I am, this is how I work, this is the only way I know to make a living; the only way I want to make a living. So that takes me away from home and I miss my wife and I miss my kids. But they all understand and they come out quite a bit. The other part is traveling. Traveling is harder than you think. It just is. We’ve got it down to a science almost (laughs). We travel in these luxury buses, there’s bunks inside, but it still bounces and you have to learn how to sleep through that. I’ve compared it before to like having a three year old jumping up and down on your bed all night (laughs). You just kind of have to learn how to sleep through it and you also have to know how to eat right and you have to exercise; there’s a science to all this to where if you want to keep going you have to learn to adapt. And that’s probably the biggest trick of it all: knowing how to handle the road.

The biggest misperception is that you guys are all about ballads. But you actually rock out. There are some really great REO rock songs.

That is correct. That is kind of a mis-perception because we didn’t make it out of the mid-west by being a ballad band. We rock, we rock hard. I think we rock as good as anybody. In fact, probably better than a lot. Honestly, there are some bands that think they’re pretty good but I’d hold a candle to them any day. The reason people think that is because we’ve been successful with ballads and we can write a love ballad better than anybody. But people who don’t know who we are, and that seems kind of odd in this day and age, it seems we’ve been around long enough for everybody to know that we can rock. But yeah, we love to do that. That’s what we do better than anything, is play rock songs.

Will you ever cut your hair?

Well, I just got one yesterday (laughs). But no. I fought too hard to get it in the first place. My old man used to cut my hair when I was a kid. He would set us down every Saturday morning, every other Saturday morning, and took the hair clippers and he had one attachment he put on and then he’d just buzz your head (laughs). That’s when we were kids. So when I started getting involved in music and The Beatles came out and they had long hair and everybody was trying to grow their hair, I had to fight with my old man. I swore then, I said, I’m going to have long hair the rest of my life (laughs). And I’m going to do it, by golly.

Live photos by Vera Harder