Robby: You could line up ten, twenty people in a row that know our music, and ask each one of them, and almost each one of them would say something different if they couldn't hear the guy next to them. Inevitably, they would end up saying ELP and Yes, but some people say the Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker -- I mean, it gets so out of hand. And then when *I* try to compare us to somebody, it's really, really difficult. You may hear a little bit of this and that, but generally I don't think you can really compare us to any kind of music. I don't know of any kind of music that's being played that's that similar to ours.
Dave: To tell you really the truth, if you want to hear the worst copy band in your life, it's us.
Robby: Yeah
Dave: We *stink*.
Robby: We can't really copy other people
Dave: We've got this sound that we can't sound like anybody but us. It's ridiculous. We can't even play Johnny B Goode without sounding like us playing Johnny B Goode. Clubs want jukebox music, which has been a fact for I don't know how long. But I'll tell you the most crazy -- it kind of irks you -- is that I get a lot of guys that I know that go "God, I wish I could be doing what you're doing." You know? And I could have said that years ago. What you gotta do, is you gotta do it. You gotta do your own stuff, and that's what you gotta do. There's too many groups, and everybody wants to -- "God, I wish I was doing some original music" At the same time they can't pass up that Holiday Inn $200 a week.
Robby: Or more: $300 a week.
Dave: Sure, you know, it's like the same guy: "I can't stand my job, it's full of a bunch of jerky people" and he keeps working it because of the money. Well, are you man enough to just stand up and say "I'm not doing it, it's completely against everything I stand for"? Or are you gonna sit there and work for the money? That's the same way with music. You gonna play a Holiday Inn band, or you gonna try to go for an original band, for better or for worse?
== On how Robby got started on the violin, and the origin of the band...
Robby: It just kind of happened, really. Like my dad is a violinist, and my mom and dad both play piano, and etc, etc. That's actually how I got into it when I was turning nine, I think, nine years old. That's when I took up the violin. And from then on, I took lessons for about ten years. First I started with a lady just a few houses down the block from me, who was teaching at the college then. And then I graduated to some better teachers for the college, like a man that was head of the department. And he's also the gentleman that for the past several years while I've been in Lawrence has been fixing my instrument for me, and working on it, because he makes violins. There's a real neat group of people that are involved with music and the creative arts in Lawrence. Robby: I kind of grew up with a radio under my pillow at night, you know. It was one of those things. I wasn't really allowed to listen to it; I was supposed to be asleep. But my folks would have parties and stuff, and I couldn't sleep, because I wanted to be out there while it was all going on, so instead be listening to the radio. I had visions of something like this happening, but then about the time I reached 18 or so, I completely gave it up. I dropped the instrument entirely, and stopped playing entirely for about two years. I had been in several bands before as a vocalist, without any violin, because it had never occurred to me to do that. Even though, like, when I started hearing "It's A Beautiful Day" and stuff, I enjoyed them at the time, but I never even thought of myself as doing something like that. Then I was in a band called Graywhack where somebody had said "Why don't you try using the violin?", and I thought "Well, OK, I'll try".
Phil: We were all from the same hometown, we'd all played with different, you know, in the same bands and with friends around the town, so we all knew each other. But the band originally formed -- I had been in England, playing there for a while, maybe all of about two months. I was trying to find the "great band" which I never found, and came home and found it, which figures. But, I came back and called up Steve. Steve was doing nothing; I asked him if he wanted to get a band together. He said "great", so we got together. And I knew Rob, who at the time wasn't playing violin -- like he said, he'd given it up -- so I called him up and I said "Hey Rob, you wanna try something?" I sent him a tape of Steve's voice, so we had a threesome. Rich and Dave were playing together in another band, and they were kind of fed up with the commercial scene, and they heard we were forming a band, so Dave gave me a buzz and said "hey, we're available". I said "great", so then we had five. And we played as a five piece for about 6 months, and then a band Kerry was in -- his band fell apart, and he joined us. When he joined us, he brought the name "Kansas".
Kerry: It wasn't like a band gets together, is thrown together by a management or something for commercial purposes, and by the time they make their fifth album the guys are finally getting to know each other. It was nothing like that. It was a gelling process, maturing.
Steve: We're still doing that. Everybody learns from studio experience; that's the most valuable experience as far as I'm concerned that you can receive because there is so much to recording. The science of recording is growing so fast, and it's changing so drastically and everything that it's always interesting to do any session that you can do.
== On the success of "Carry On Wayward Son"...
Phil: It's like Yes, or Pink Floyd. Yes had "Roundabout". But I wouldn't call them a commercial band. They had their one hit that really exposed them to the mass audiences. But I don't walk into hundreds of bars and hear solid Yes music. I think we'll have our one or two good hits, but I don't think we'll ever be considered a commercial [band], or a band like Three Dog Night or somebody that just has hit after hit after hit.
== On songwriting...
Steve: Every album has essentially been a different formula for going in and doing it. The first one, we were in the dark completely. We had a producer assigned to us, and we didn't know anything about studios, really, essentially. We had all been in them, but never to work on an album. The second album, we knew a lot more about it, but it was kind of our dark album, really. It was the album where we received most of our following, because of "Song For America" being on that album. I think that's probably everybody's favorite. Then the third album, I'd say it was kind of a search for direction, because we did a couple songs that I wrote, what, three or four years ago at least. The group was thinking that we'd pop a single off of "Masque". We got some airplay, but really not as much as we'd like. The fourth album, then, I think was our new direction because of the ideas that were pressed for by the band; it has kind of a unified kind of idea within the whole album. I'm really looking forward to the fifth album.
We're both versatile enough to change shoes, I think, and put on a different kind of story line, but I think mostly what concerns Kerry is just painting a story, and I guess I deal more with the harsh realities of life in the city.
Kerry: In general -- this isn't always the case -- I tend to write about lofty, spiritual, grandiose things, and Steve writes more down-to-earth.
Steve: In most of Kerry's songs, it's just -- questions. There's never any answer, it always a subject brought up, and not much of any conclusion.
== On the band's lyrics as "religious"...
Steve: So many people are starting to think of the group that way that I always snap on that word, because we're getting classified in pretty much the wrong kind of thing, really.
== On lyrics in general...
Dave: That's why we're so different. Me? I think lyrics are just -- pppt.
Phil: The three of us are mainly more into the arrangement.
Dave: I don't want to hear some guy that's drugged out his mind some night and wrote some lyrics that absolutely -- what is being said? You're talking about lyrics, I don't even know what you're getting out of my -- I don't understand: what have you heard that you didn't know or hear ten years ago?
Rich: I think lyrics are more personal to the person who wrote the song. The people who write the song have more feeling in the lyrics than I would. I didn't write it; it was somebody else's thoughts.
Dave: I think music *wipes* lyrics!
Rich: I don't think the lyrics make the song, at least for the type of things that we like to do, or I like to play.
Robby: Their immediate reaction in the theater, I guess, is mostly due to sound, and not to what lyrics have been written.
== On drugs...
Steve: People ask us, like they say "Hey, man, do you get stoned before you go on?" and everything like that, but it used to be in the old days, you could, because there wasn't much to playing Young Rascals or anything. I leave it up to the crowd to enjoy themselves, and I do some work. I think that's the way everybody in the band feels.
Kerry: Our songs are structured in a way that demands pretty much your total attention all the time. It's like running a big machine.
== On the tuxedo...
Rich: I don't feel comfortable in the so-called "discotheque rock band" type clothes. It's just not my style. I bought a tuxedo; it's fun to wear. I get a kick out of it. At least we don't all look like the stereotype rock musician anyway. There's a little variety to it anyway.
== On reviews...
Dave: For the life of me, I can't figure out how you can get cut for it, but the only cutting review was that we were too tight, and too professional. Now what's that mean?
Robby: We didn't smile...
Dave: "You're too good", is that what they're saying? They say we didn't smile. Well good lord, I'm not up there to show off my damn teeth, which are crooked anyway. I'm up there to play bass.
== On production...
Jeff Glixman: I played with Phil, Dave, Rich and Steve -- four of the members in this band -- at various times, but not as this band as it stands.
The goal of producing or engineering to me is just to really capture what the musicians hear in their heads. And I feel that having played with them before, I have a little insight, because I can understand what they are doing really well, and I understand what they want to achieve.
In a situation like Alan Parsons, his current album, which I admire greatly, it's a situation where if you have the time available -- he spent two years working on this -- it's a writing/producing situation. He has an effect in mind going into it, and he'll write to achieve that effect. And we're starting to get into that situation. Instead of just writing a song, he'll write the tie-in between the songs, or the effects that'll carry part of the song over. If you know you're going to use an effect at a certain part of a song, you'll write to enhance that effect, or if you know the song is written a certain way, you'll try to think of an effect that will enhance the writing. So it is slipping together, it really is.
== A final thought...
Steve: I don't think we have just one style or two styles, we have so many. We lean toward a more classical piece, and then we'll come out and just do a rock'n'roll number, or something like that.
The group, also, was very involved in "Leftoverture". Every aspect of it seemed like more of a band venture than it was just me or Kerry coming to practice saying "here's the song and here's your part that we want you to play".