Fans of classic rock will be in seventh heaven when the iconic band, Kansas, makes an appearance on Friday, May 31 and Saturday June 1, 2019 at Sound Waves located in Atlantic City’s Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.
With a legendary career spanning more than four decades, Kansas has established itself as one of America’s preeminent classic rock groups.
The garage band from Topeka released their debut album in 1974 after being discovered by Wally Gold, who worked for Don Kirshner. That album, Kansas, defined the band’s signature sound — a mix of American-style rock and complex symphonic arrangements featuring changing time signatures.
Going on to create a catalogue which includes fifteen studio albums and five live recordings, Kansas produced eight gold records, three sextuple platinum albums including 1976’s Leftoverture and 1977’s Point of Know Return, a platinum live recording, and two million-selling gold singles. To this day, “Carry On Wayward Son” continues to be one of the top five most-played songs on classic rock radio, and “Dust In the Wind” has been played on the radio more than three million times.
A documentary on the group, Miracles Out of Nowhere, can currently be seen on AXS-TV. The program chronicles the rise to fame of the group which hit the airwaves with a line-up that included guitarist Richard Williams, drummer Phil Ehart, singer/keyboardist Steve Walsh, violinist Robbie Steinhardt, bassist Dave Hope, and guitarist/keyboardist Kerry Livgrin.
These days, founding members guitarist Richard Williams and drummer Phil Ehart continue to perform for audiences all over the world along with newer band members vocalist/keyboardist Ronnie Platt, violinist/guitarist David Ragsdale, bassist/vocalist, Billy Greer, guitarist Zak Rizvi, and keyboardist Tom Brislin.
Spotlight Central recently had a chance to catch up with one of the founding members of Kansas, guitarist Richard Williams, who talked about his days as a young musician, shared some of his recollections of the band as it developed its unique musical style, and previewed the group’s upcoming appearance at Atlantic City’s Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.
Spotlight Central: Did you grow up in a musical household?
Richard Williams: Not at all, but I did get started playing when I was pretty young. It was Christmas, and what do you buy your dad for Christmas? He didn’t need anything — not another tie or socks — (laughs) being a father now, I know this. And so I remember I was talking to my sister and my dad had mentioned that when he was young, he played the ukulele a little bit. I’d never seen him do anything like that, but I thought, “Let’s go to the music store and get him a ukulele.”
So we did, and he was amused with it slightly, but in short order, it was my ukulele and he showed me a couple of chords on it. And that’s really how I got started with just something that my dad barely did at one time.
Spotlight Central: And then you migrated from the ukulele over to the guitar?
Richard Williams: Pretty quickly, yeah — I picked it up and just wanted to, kind of, move on from there. With The Beatles appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, suddenly, Topeka, Kansas — just like rest of the planet — was just lit on fire. Suddenly, there was a garage band on every block. Everybody I knew was a musician, and I had to get a guitar.
Spotlight Central: Besides The Beatles, what other groups did you listen to as an up-and-coming musician?
Richard Williams: It was definitely the British Invasion that caught my ear, but it was more the music of the day — the hit songs on the radio at the time. There was a little bit of everything. People think that, growing up in Topeka, Kansas, my family lived in a fort and we herded cattle all day (laughs). Not so. My dad was a member of the country club; I lived in town. I had soft hands; I was not a farm laborer. And so we had the same influences that everybody everywhere else had — the same music came over the radio. So, really, it was the hit AM radio of the ’60s that I cut my teeth on.
I joined my first band during my junior year of high school and Phil Ehart, the drummer for Kansas, was the drummer in that band. And we played, again, the hits of the day — a lot of the British Invasion stuff; the Beatles stuff was a little too hard — (laughs) it took good vocals to do that. We did a lot of Animals, Rolling Stones — things like that — Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels — and progressed into a lot of Motown music after that. So, again, we covered a bit of it all.
Spotlight Central: And once you got Kansas going, did you know at the time — when you originally started the group — that the group would last nearly 50 years now? Did you have a clue, back then, that the music would be that special?
Richard Williams: No — (laughs) I probably would have relaxed a bit had I known! When you’re young and dumb and you’re living for the moment, in a way, you’re not really concerned with the future. You’ve been warned your whole life by your teachers, and your family — your parents — that music isn’t gonna work out for you and you better have something to fall back on, and all that. So it’s more the fear of that was implanted in your skull, rather than “I can read into the future and I know that this band is gonna still be around in 47 years.” That we’re still here amazes me every morning when I wake up.
Spotlight Central: And with Kansas, you helped develop these really complex symphonic arrangements with shifting time signatures — where did all that come from?
Richard Williams: It’s kind of hard to say. Playing in bands prior to Kansas — and even when we first got together — to exist, you had to play cover material. And so while we were writing songs, club owners wouldn’t allow us to play originals, so we had to come up with a different way of doing it. We would say, “OK, this is a song by Deep Purple — it’s on the flip side of ‘Smoke on the Water’” — and then we would play our song, and as long as people thought it was Deep Purple, we could get away with it.
But, also, there would be certain songs of the time — and everyone was playing them because clubs wanted you to play them — that we didn’t really care for, so we would start to rewrite them. We’d say, “It needs an introduction” or “the middle sucks” — and so we would start rewriting things. I don’t think we realized it at the time, but being lazy and stubborn, it was like “We don’t want to learn something we don’t like,” so we started to rewrite things ourselves. And what we were really learning — unknown to ourselves at the time — was how to be ourselves.
And we were also starting to hear more progressive things coming out of England and Europe. All of sudden, we got to see that not everything was in this little square box, and eventually the doors opened; you know — “What if?” “What if we added a beat here…” and started getting rid of traditional chord structures and time signatures and all that, but still trying to keep the music melodic.
Spotlight Central: A lot of people know about the Kansas songs which were written by some of the other founding members of the group like Kerry Livgrin and Steve Walsh, but you wrote songs for Kansas, too. Had you written songs when you were younger, or did you start writing them once you were a member of Kansas?
Richard Williams: You know, when Steve and Kerry were really firing on all cylinders, you just stayed out of the way and let ’em go. That was a hard room to compete in. So, really, what we did was: we were a filter. Songs would come in as ideas, and then the band would just strip ’em down — but sometimes they didn’t need stripping down very much, and sometimes they needed a complete remake. So in the arranging — you know, “Keep this part — no, throw this part out” — there was band involvement in what you would call “writing,” but for the sake of royalties and all that, it got kind of put over to the “arrangement” side of writing, because, with writing, you know, you got a piece of the pie.
Spotlight Central: What about the song, “Can I Tell You,” which you wrote?
Richard Williams: “Can I Tell You” is the song that got us our record deal with Don Kirshner. Had we not done that song, you know, I’d probably be a bartender somewhere.
Spotlight Central: What was the initial inspiration for that one?
Richard Williams: I was in my parents’ basement and I just came up with this riff. The band was rehearsing in Springfield, Missouri. We were just getting started and beginning to write new material — this was before Kerry was in the band. At the time, we were a band called White Clover, and we were starting to create original material. And one of the first things we did was: I had come up with this riff — which is the opening of the song — along with the middle section — and I said, “I got this” and we worked it out, and then Steve Walsh took it home, wrote the verses to it, and we had a song.
So my one contribution — probably the biggest one — was probably that song, because without it, who knows if anything would have ever happened for us? You know, not to beat my chest — because I could never hold myself up to the standards of Kerry and Steve — but at least I did get our foot in the door with that song.
Spotlight Central: Absolutely! And, now, you’re going to be performing at Atlantic City’s Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on May 31 and June 1. What can fans expect to see and hear at these concerts?
Richard Williams: Well, we’re gonna have a lot of fun. This is a great band we’ve got here. We’ve just completed the Leftoverture and the Point of Know Return tours — to celebrate the anniversaries of those albums. We’ll be picking those tours back up in September — and that’s quite an undertaking — but, for now we’re gonna sit back and play more of a fan-friendly fun set at the casino, rather than playing one of the more hardcore shows where we go deeper into the albums and play some pretty obscure cuts.
So that’s what we’ll be doing, and, for us, it’s just a fun set of songs with recognizable material — and some material which still stretches things a bit — making for a faster-paced show… and a lot of fun, too!
Richard Williams will be performing with Kansas at Sound Waves inside Atlantic City’s Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on May 31 and June 1, 2019 at 8pm. Tickets are $45, $60, and $75. For more information and/or tickets please click on hardrockhotels.com or ticketmaster.com.
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