Photo courtesy of Cindy Jacobs - Longfellow
By Debbie Gardner
If you’re a member of the band called KANSAS, there’s one thing you can count on.
You tour.
“To me, it’s not an effort. This is my chosen profession, something I chose to do,” founding KANSAS’s guitarist Richard Williams, explained when PRIME reached him on a stop in Georgia. “I’ve got 60 dates this year before I start recording. It’s a dream.”
The iconic rock group, Williams explained, is crisscrossing the country as it has nearly every year since the 1974 release of its self-titled first album, KANSAS. That initial road trip – and the countless ones that have followed – was and is about keeping the band name, and its music, connected with fans.
The songs have evolved, band members have come and gone, but one thing about KANSAS has never changed. These guys live to play for an audience.
“It’s what we’ve done for 41 years. We’re a live band and the best part of it is going out and doing it,” Williams said.
It’s all about the music
This year’s tour includes a stop in Springfield, Massachusetts on May 29 at the MassMutual Center Exhall stage with fellow ‘70s rock legend, Blue Oyster Cult.
Asked for details about the stop, Williams was cagey about what songs fans might hear at the upcoming Springfield show.
“[KANSAS’ original singer/songwriter] Steve Walsh retired last August, and with that we’ve gone back into the vault and added five or six songs we haven‘t played in a long time,” Williams said. “It’s a lot of fun to go back, some of these songs we haven’t played in 30 years.”
Williams said this trip back into the band’s archives is about more than bringing back some early cuts. It’s a chance for the band to return to its musical roots.
“What we’ve done this time is go back to as close to the original arrangements as possible, they have mutated over the years, “ Williams explained. Yet though today’s technology may make it easier to recreate the sounds of certain instruments – “we’ve come a million miles in 40 years,” Williams noted – it hasn’t changed the experience of performing for him or his band mates.
“You’re still putting your heart in and playing the same notes” when you get onstage,” he said.
“Something like ‘Dust in the Wind,’ people say, ‘how can you keep playing it [concert after concert]?’’ Williams continued. “The stage is dark, and I count the song out, and from the first note everybody in earshot knows the song and has a personal story [connected with it].
“I’m caught up in that, not directing it … I’m in that experience with [everyone]. That song is so much bigger than the band. It’s a living, breathing experience in the room … I don’t know too many people who get to do that,” Williams explained.
“I hope that I never become so jaded that I wouldn’t appreciate it. That would be awful,” he added.
… and the road
Still, it’s not every musician that can handle touring for so many years.
“You have to make peace with the travel,” Williams said. “It’s late hours and early mornings and cancelled flights. I just somehow learned to make the best of it.”
Playing with KANSAS, after all, has given him the chance to travel the world several times.
“I love to travel; my wife travels with me quite a bit now. It’s a constant free vacation with a great bunch of guys,” Williams said. “[But] I get it, why someone might leave a band. He might not enjoy it. If I were miserable, it would be hell, this touring life.”
Despite cutting eight gold albums, three sextuplet platinum albums, one platinum live album, a million-selling gold single with “Dust in the Wind” and spending 200 weeks on the billboard charts in the 1970s and 80s, the 1974 “garage band from Topeka” inevitably fell apart, disbanding in 1984. One year later the band reformed without all of its original members.
Those members have regrouped and drifted apart over the years; the last time four of the five original members performed together was at a special 2013 fan appreciation concert in Pennsylvania.
Today, Williams and his high-school buddy, drummer Phil Ehart, are the only founding members of KANSAS who still play – and tour – with the band.
“There have been a lot of changes along the way and Phil and I have become very adept at ‘here comes the change’ and taking the next thing and moving forward,” Williams said.
“Change is hard for anyone, but after awhile you get good at seeing the back side of it and you see the good. We move forward in a positive manner and it works for us,” he added.
It’s a great life
With KANSAS, Williams said, it’s been about the music right from the beginning.
“We’d all played in different bands and played contemporary music [and] wanted to do our own thing, original stuff in our own manner,” he said of the original founding five.
Everything influenced them back then, he said, from the eclectic mix of music on the radio in the 1960s – “Back in the day of old radio they played Wilson Pickett and the Supremes and the Rolling Stones followed by Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, and dance music in the evenings” – to the progressive rock sound of British bands like Yes, King Crimson and Jethro Tull played a hand in creating KANSAS’ unique style.
“[We wanted] to do something a little bit outside the box, different time signatures, completely different chord structures, a different lyrical style,” Williams said.
Their signature violin sound, he added, was the band’s way of adding a “voice” to their music, in much the same way Jethro Tull used a flute.
“We decided on a particular structure for [the violin] and played those parts together, giving it more of a symphonic feel that the country approach or the string parts behind the Righteous Brothers,” he said.
It’s been quite a ride for a kid who, Williams said, saw The Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan Show and thought, “Gee, that’s great, I want to do that ” and decided to make music his life.
Who knew back then what a few guitar lessons and that first high school garage band with buddy Phil Ehart would lead to.
“You start writing songs and you keep doing it and then you look back 41 years and think ‘Wow, this is what happens when you are persistent and keep going,” Williams said.
“To me this is great,” he continued. “I can’t think of doing anything else.”
And Williams had one last comment about the band’s stop in Springfield.
“We won’t disappoint,” he said.
Tickets to the May 29 Kansas with Blue Oyster Cult concert at the Mass Mutual Center, Springfield, start at $27 and are on sale at all Ticketmaster outlets, charge by phone at 800.745.3000, at Ticketmaster.com or at the MassMutual Center Box Office. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit www.MassMutualCenter.com.
To read the complete interview with Richard Williams, visit www.primeontheweb.com.
