While most of the music to which I listened as a child and youth has disappeared in the wake of much better music to which I have been exposed, one band that I still cherish from the 1970's in a non-cheesy way (which is the way I appreciate Black Sabbath and Judas Priest; it's all good fun and not too serious at all) is Kansas. While too often lumped with Styx, REO Speedwagon, and other stadium rock bands from the late 1970's, Kansas was different in a number of ways. Unlike Styx, their songs were much better, much more interesting, and not at all laughably horrible as, for example, "Come Sail Away". They were both musically trained and unselfconscious enough to just "do what they do" without a whole lot of muss and fuss. Finally, in Kerry Livgren, they had perhaps the best songwriter in America in the mid-1970's. He wrote for his bandmates, and they responded by pushing the boundaries between rock, progressive rock, and country music. In Jeff Glixman, they had a seventh member who knew them, understood them, and managed, most of the time, to produce albums of superb quality (I think the production values on Point of Know Return slipped a bit; the album is a bit, um, muddy, although my CD copy is not remastered). First, from the album Masque is the song "The Pinnacle":
Not my favorite song of theirs, but here's "Play the Game Tonight":
Finally, from Somewhere to Elsewhere, the Kerry Livgren song "Distant Vision":
Incidentally, if Goat was wondering, I first got in to Kansas in the 1970's. Again, not a new discovery. Wanker.
