There’s a vision imprinted in Kevin Cronin’s memory of a sparkling waterfall on a sunny day in Tucson’s picturesque Sabino Canyon.
And as he and his friends rounded a bend and came upon the rippling cool waters, all the REO Speedwagon frontman could see was people getting naked.
“And I’m like, ‘What? Wait a minute. What is going on here?’ It totally took me by surprise,” he recalled during a phone call to chat about the band’s Pima County Fair show on Friday, April 27. “I was like, I guess I should do this, too. Take off my clothes out in public out in this waterfall. And it felt great, but I totally wasn’t expecting it. It kind of blew my mind a little bit.”
Note to Cronin: Should you make the drive to Sabino from the Pima County Fairgrounds, keep your clothes on. That was so 1970s.
“They don’t do that anymore? Well all right, I better be careful,” he joked. “I was from Chicago. I was an altar boy. My consciousness wasn’t as expanded as other people’s, especially in Tucson back in those days. Tucson was a happening place.”
Cronin’s relationship with Tucson goes back almost as long as his affiliation with the 1970s pop-rock band, which he joined in its infancy.
“I really do enjoy the city, the vibe there,” Cronin, 66, said days after the band came off the road from a Southern run to cities in Alabama, Florida, Arkansas and West Virginia. “I go back a long way with Tucson, so I’m looking forward to it.”
In addition to seeing naked Tucsonans, Cronin said he fell in love with a girl from Tucson. She became his muse — for a little while, anyway.
“I wrote ‘Can’t Fight This Feeling’ partially with her in mind,” he said, explaining that the song took him a decade to finish. “There were a couple of muses involved in the life of that song. You never know how it’s going to happen, you just have to be ready for it when it does.”
Friday’s concert is the first for REO in Tucson in several years. Cronin said they will play all the hits — “Can’t Fight This Feeling,” “Take it On the Run,” “Time For Me To Fly,” “Keep On Loving You” — and mix in new songs off their most recent records, including 2007’s “Find Your Own Way Home.” Then there’s the really new material, songs they haven’t recorded yet. They’ll slip those in if they feel like the audience is along for the ride.
“I remember when we first started, we had one song in our setlist that anyone really knew and we would save it for the very end of the concert,” Cronin recalled. “I remember coming off stage and thinking wouldn’t it be awesome — and this was in the early ’70s — if some day we could play a concert set where people knew every song that we played and could pretty much sing along to it. That was just kind of a fantasy of mine because we would open the shows for headline acts that had that going on and I remember thinking, ‘God that would be awesome.’”
These days, they have an entirely different problem: When they play a concert, not only do fans know the songs, they know which ones are left out.
“There’s about 10 songs that if we don’t play them there will be an angry mob outside the tour bus afterwards,” Cronin said.
“People know the songs and it’s such a great feeling to play the first chords of a song and you feel everyone’s energy. I call it the sound of 20,000 people’s arm hairs standing up at the same time, and you kind of feel it when it happens.”
