Two For The Show Radio Preview

== Introduction...

Robby: Hi, this is Robby Steinhardt, form the band Kansas, and the
radio station here is about to do a special preview on our brand-new
double live album, called "Two For The Show", something that we think
you'll really enjoy, it's a little bit different than the normal live
album.  We hope that you'll give it a listen if you have the time.

== On the live album...

Robby: The reason it is different is because we are not doing over
every part that sounds wrong, and every part that has mistakes in it,
or is a little bit out of tune.

Kerry: "Hey, when are you guys going to do a live album, man?" I mean
after concerts people would, every night somebody would ask that.  It
happened so much, that we finally figured we'd better do one.

Robby: We're very, very, very critical about things, and people come
in and say "Boy you guys really kill yourselves to get those things
perfect because, I mean, it sounds great to me, and you guys are never
satisfied".

Steve: Our number one goal was to take the concert-goer into
consideration.  And that's what really makes me mad about bands, it's
because they look like they're just "take the money and run" bands.
Because they really don't even perform to the people.  There's nothing
I enjoy more, with the exception of sex, than playing in front of a
large audience of people.

Kerry: There's some performances on the live album that overall I like
quite a bit better than the studio.  "The Wall" sounds more the way I
envisioned it in my mind, and "Magnum Opus" is much stranger than it
came off on the album.  "Portrait", in particular, has all the guts
that it should have had on the studio album.  That's why I'm excited
about the album, because there are some things in it that are the way
they should have been on the studio album.

== Ed Shane: It's Ed Shane again, with Kansas, at Axis sound studios
in Atlanta, where the mixdown was done for Two For The Show.  Outside
you can hear the pinball machine that the studio provides for the
bands who record here, and inside here with me you can hear Kerry
Livgren.  Kerry, you were telling me about the reaction you had to
hearing the tapes for the first time, it's the first time you had
heard Kansas live.

Kerry: I think we come across very powerfully, a lot of power.
Obviously, I like our own music and that's a quality that I enjoy
because [segment missing] and so trying to listen to it objectively I
think I'd enjoy it.

Ed Shane: You guys are really hard on yourselves.  Ah, fresh from the
pinball machine, here's Rich Williams, the guitarist.  Rich, we're
talking about how hard on yourselves, the self-criticism that Kansas
gives to the members of the band.  Is it really that you're that
imperfect?

Rich: Oh, you could talk with people in the Mahavishnu Orchestra, or
people with Chick Corea, and they could tell you about the terrible
night they had, the mistakes they made. You talk with somebody in the
Philharmonic, and they say "Oh, we didn't have a very good night
tonight", and they might notice it, because they hear [the mistakes]
all the time.  Whereas, somebody will come back and tell us "God, I've
never heard you guys sound better", and before that we just had a 15
minute screaming match with each other, because we all played so bad.
I mean, we are our biggest critics.

== On "Song For America"...

Rich: I think that our older, hardcore fans, that have been with us
since the first and second album, if you're going to ask them of a
song that they would relate to as being representative of us,
especially in those days, it would be that song.  And I feel the same
way.  It sounds like us to me.

== On the sequence of the tracks on the album...

Robby: Some of the things dictate their own order.  Like "Magnum
Opus": there's no way on earth you could put that anywhere else but as
the very last song, as a finale.  And "Song For America" seems to --
it has no significance as being first to me, it's just that the band
has always thought that there was no way else to really do it.  I
think maybe we did it toward the end of a set once, but it's almost
always been the first thing on the agenda.

== Ed Shane: Steve Walsh says he wanted to print on the back of the
album cover, "No Overdubs": no re-recording of the live performances.

Steve: We came in with that attitude of doing as few overdubs as
possible.  There really had to be a good reason for them, and in a
couple of circumstances, there were no -- the keyboards were lost, due
to a technical problem.  So Kerry or myself, whoever's keyboards were
lost in the mix, we did come in and do those parts that we do live,
but there has been nothing really done on this album,
performance-wise, that I can say -- that is not in our live show.

"*Practically* no overdubs" (laughs)

== On concerts...

Steve: Every show, it doesn't matter if there's 3,000 people or
30,000, we give those people what they paid to see.

Phil: We're all up for a new stage set-up.  The way we position
ourselves on stage [has been the same] for the last -- for as long as
I can remember.  I think everybody's up for different positions on
stage, but how we're going to do that as yet we don't know.  Because
it's getting so expensive to take a tour out, especially if you are an
established band.  Like say you want to look into lasers.  Well you
walk in and say "Hi, I'm the light man for Kansas, and I want to talk
to you about lasers."  Well, they think, "Well, let's see, Kansas is a
big band so I'm really going to stick it to 'em, 'cause they're going
to have the money.

Steve: Our lighting man, who is Merle McLain, did the best job of
lighting *us* that he could.  We spent our money in that regard, not
with special effects so much as we did just making *us* perceivable
and making us look different from scene to scene, and not any
holograms and lasers and everything that we might have been able to
use -- and very tastefully -- but we just concentrated on the simplest
thing that we knew how to do.

Ed Shane: Would you describe the sound that people have been hearing
in the background?

Steve: I will, 'cause it's mine...

Phil: You tell 'em, Steve

Steve: It's a bug light that covers three acres, and you won't feel a
mosquito on your whole body, because it takes 'em and it...

Robby: Like the one I just killed on his neck, you mean?

Steve: Well, yeah.  Anyway, it electrocutes bugs -- and small birds
(laughter).  Just kidding about the birds...

== On "classical rock"...

Steve: I think a lot of our approaches to different songs has been
influenced greatly by classical music in the past, and European bands,
rock bands.  I've always said that.  For a while, we were really
getting sick of hearing "Kansas: a classical rock band".  Because we
really don't fit into there, that's too classy for us, because we're
not really that classically orientated, and we're not that dazzling of
musicians.  We just fit together as a band.

== On what Robby has always wanted to do...

Robby: I've done a couple of guest DJ spots around the country and
I've really enjoyed it when I was doing it.  The one I did in
Clearwater, I just took my own collection of albums, walked in with my
own albums, and she said "My gosh!".  I sat down, and we immediately
became friends.  I left a couple of them with her, she liked the
albums so well.  But I had everything pretty much all picked out when
I went there; I didn't use any of their music at all.

	I try to get the people that are working there to go against
what they normally do.  And somehow, sometimes they say, "Well, this
is a guest spot, so you really can do what you want, and we won't get
hell for it".

Ed Shane: Consider this a guest spot of the Kansas Special.  I'm going
to play "Portrait" and "Carry On Wayward Son".  Now you have a
national radio audience here, how would you introduce them?

Robby: I do not know!  God, this is on the spur of the moment here!
I'd probably say something to the effect that, um: "A couple of songs
from, from the new album we've just done, live, uh, "Portrait" and
"Carry On Wayward Son", off two different albums, two different Kansas
albums, um, and the difference between the songs you would hear on the
album and the ones you're gonna hear on the live album, uh, are the --
is, the difference is the fact that uh, "Portrait" runs right into
"Wayward Son"; we wrote it so that there's no pause between the two
songs and they just -- one runs right into the other, very effectively
I think, too."

Kerry: It's neat to do things like that live, because it hits the
audience very unexpectedly.  You're cruising along on "Portrait", and
all of a sudden it's a different song, and you don't even know what
happened.  Those kind of surprises make it interesting.

== On the pressure to write another hit after "Wayward Son" and "Dust
In The Wind"...

Kerry: I'm personally overlooking it.  At first, when that song was a
hit, I thought "My god, I'm going to have to wrote something to top
that!"  And that particular outlook can really gnaw away at you, and
erode your -- the whole creative process, because if you're totally
absorbed in trying to better something that you've done previously,
that absorption will cloud your mind and really make it difficult to
write.  So I didn't even try to top it, I just thought "Well, I'm
going to go on and write what I would have written anyway, and forget
that it even happened."  Then "Dust In The Wind" was an even bigger
hit.  Now I'm not going to go write twelve songs on acoustic guitar
that sound like "Dust In The Wind" because that was a hit.  It's nice
that that was, and that song served its purpose for me, it stated what
I wanted to state, and that was cool that that happened.  But to try
to make it happen again is just futile.

Steve: The band just doesn't sit down and try to write songs that way.
But we've been fortunate, we really have, because I think if it hadn't
been for a couple of songs, like "Dust In The Wind" and "Carry On
Wayward Son", we would still be somewhat obscure.  It keeps your head
in kind of a good place when you walk up to somebody and they say "Oh?
You play in a rock band, huh?"  and I say "Yeah" and they say "Well,
who do you play for?" and I say "Kansas" and they go "Who?"  It just
kind of keeps your head right there where it belongs.

== On the Kansas softball team...

Phil: Our reputation's gotten out, and people are just kinda running
from us, that's the feeling I get (laughter).

Phil: We're the best team in rock & roll...

Rich: ...personal satisfaction with pounding people into the ground...

Phil: I think it should be known throughout the country that we've
made a challenge to the Eagles, and we haven't heard anything from
them.  They're supposed to be great, well, why don't they accept our
challenge?  We haven't heard anything from them.  We're ready to take
'em on, and we'll take on anybody -- within the rock & roll realm.

Ed Shane: Can't you guys get a cover on Rolling Stone [as] another way
of challenging the Eagles? (laughter)

Phil: Uh, right.  We're working on that...  No, most of our games are
for charity, and it's a good release, a lot of fun, something we can
get involved with our crew.  We field a whole team from the crew and
the band.  We have uniforms... we're tough, we even have our own bag
of bats...

Dave: Bat bag...

Phil: ...Bat bag! (sung like "Batman"?)

Ed Shane: They took their "bat bag!" onto the diamond against an
Atlanta radio station...

Phil: They did a real great job of promoting it, they just didn't do a
very good job of playing the game.  The final score was about 36 to
6...

Rich: 32...

Phil: ...32?

Rich: ...32 to 6.

Phil: That was the official score, we lost count after 30.  We were --
some of the guys were asleep on the bench, just waiting to bat.  We
outdrew the Atlanta Braves that particular night, they were in town.

Steve: You should tell him about the pie in the face that they
received...

Phil: Yes, the consolation for the losers -- or for the winners, I
should say -- was that they got to hit the losers with pie in the
face.  We brought along, what, 13 cream pies, and each guy in the band
got a pie, and nailed...

Steve: Lined 'em up!

Phil: Lined 'em up, and gave 'em tin hats!

Steve: Very satisfying!

Phil: It was great.

Ed Shane: Once again, the challenge...

Phil: The Eagles.  I'm tired of reading about 'em, I want to see them
in action.  I want to see them with pie on their face!

== On "Journey From Mariabronn"

Rich: We always wanted to do it a little bit different way, now that
we had a chance to.  We were so green, as far as anything to do with
recording and things, that it was one of those albums where -- it was
the first album and we didn't know anything about it -- get in and do
it and exit, and that's the way it is.  We re-arranged parts of it
slightly and stuff, and just after a few years of listening to it the
way it was, it's sort of more the way we wanted to re-do it.  Plus,
it's fun to pull out an old song that you haven't played in a long
time.  So it was my favorite spot of the night to play, and it, in a
lot of ways, is my favorite song on the album.

== On "Dust In The Wind"

Phil: If somebody would have told me two years ago that an *acoustic*
song, like "Dust In The Wind", would be our biggest hit *ever*, I
would have told them they were nuts!

Robby: It's a mellow side of us that doesn't always come out, but that
it shows on that record is really worthy of listening to the mellow
side of Kansas.

== On Kansas as a rock & roll, not an acoustic, band...

Steve: One thing that we like doing is being the first *loud* music
that you hear.  Because you get an opening band that is just cranking
through 50 million Marshalls -- by the end of their set, the audience
is deaf.  We really respect acoustical instruments, such as Leo Kottke
[plays?], and the way he sings and everything.  We always wanted to do
a tour with him.  We did a date once, in LA, with a magician once,
called "Mr. Electric"!

Rich: And his bug machine! (laughter)

Steve: It was funny, 'cause he had himself wired up so that he could
come near a lightbulb, almost touch the lightbulb, and it would light
up.  And he was telling me backstage, before he went on, that he
almost electrocuted this drunk one time who just kinda meandered over
and fell upon Mr. Electric, and Mr. Electric almost went up for
manslaughter!  For killing this guy! (laughter)

Phil: Oh, did it kill him? (laughs)

Steve: ...he said he got away fast!  No! (laughs)

== On Kansas' earlier music...

Steve: We were playing up in the eastern section of the United States,
and there was a couple of kids that drove -- oh hell, how far did they
drive? -- over a hundred miles, they were only like 17 or 18 years
old.  They drove to this gig because we weren't going to be playing
around their area.  They were really nice kids and everything, we
talked for a while, and they were just thrilled to death that they got
to talk to people in Kansas.  And I said "I don't want you to be
offended if I ask you guys a question..." and they said "OK" and I
said "How many albums do you think we have out?" and they said "two"!
Everything that I thought was true, really was, because the fact that
those hit singles were there.  So when they went to the concert that
night, they heard some definitely new material.

== On "Carry On Wayward Son"...

Phil: You have to be careful on how you play that song, that you don't
fill it up too much, you don't play too *much*.  About 95% of this
band is taste, because that's where everybody shines, we don't really
have any real "ripping" type musicians, like a John McLaughlin or
anything that can just set the guitar on fire, but each musician in
this band works on taste.  They know their limitations, they know what
they can do and what they can't do.

== On humility...

Kerry: The band has a little defense mechanism against ego, because
we've seen it happen to too many other people. I think we're kinda
over the hump in that respect.  When we first started getting popular,
which wasn't really -- I mean to be a really big mega-group wasn't
something that Kansas ever set out to do to begin with, I don't think.
That wasn't a major goal.  I mean, we wanted to be proficient at what
we did and be able to make a living and everything, but we didn't plan
on being rock stars.  And I still don't think we do.  Just kind of
take it all with a grain of salt; that's the only way I find you can
survive in the crazy business that this is.  We fit in like oil and
water at Hollywood parties (laughs).  That's just not our bag; we're
kind of your basic Midwestern guys.  That's about all you can say.

== On Steve and Phil's handguns [!]...

Phil: It's just strictly sport shooting, set up targets and shoot.
It's relaxing, it's fun.

Steve: People are scared of guns, naturally.  Now you don't want to
blame them; as a matter of fact, it's a good thing to respect your
weapon.  It's just a -- it's fun for us.

== On "Closet Chronicles"...

Kerry: Well that song actually pre-dates our first album.  I wrote the
original "Closet Chronicles" in 1973, and then when this band first
got together we learned it, and then we dropped it after a while.  And
then when it came time to do "Point Of Know Return", the album, Steve
dredged it up from the "forgotten file", and we re-worked a lot of it,
and it turned out to be a cool song.

== On future plans...

Robby: We will take a 3 month break, and Steve will be doing a solo
album during that period.  We'll take 6 weeks to practice for the new
album, recording it for about 4 weeks in the studio, mixing it for
about 4 weeks.  The album will be released hopefully the last week in
May sometime, then we'll go out on the road, doing about 35 dates
around the country, starting with a couple of smaller dates to get in
the groove of playing live again.  And then we'll be playing hopefully
Australia first, and then Japan, and the band *wants* to play Russia
but the thing that just happened over there recently with Bill Graham
and all that stuff probably means that it won't happen, but we're
dying to play Russia.  And a few other places we'd like to play:
perhaps South America.  The next year looks real good; like I say, the
band as a unit off-stage is miles above where we've ever been before,
and as a unit on-stage we're getting closer to what I want it to sound
like.  Of course, I guess you never quite achieve that point that
you're reaching for, but I suppose it's always best that when you
almost are up on that point that you move it a little farther ahead.
There's always -- we always want to strive for something better.

== On "Magnum Opus"

Robby: This particular mix of "Magnum Opus" kind of makes a statement
as far as the unity of the band, and what we can do as an ensemble.
And the fact that everybody -- even though like my part was very
minute -- everybody in the band had something to do with the writing
of that song.  And I think it's really kind of neat that that song
turned out that way live.  It's always been a neat live song, but --
ah! -- it's really gonna grab some people.

Steve: We had this guy, that we talked him into wearing this nun's
outfit during this one particular point of the song -- he was a roadie
-- and he would just come out on stage and act like he just came out
of the crowd, and it was just this nun that was going crazy for the
band, loved the band, and everything.  Then Jolly, one of the biggest
roadies I've ever seen in my life, would come out on stage and take
this "nun" and escort "her" off-stage.  But she would try to get away
from him and everything, and he would accidentally end up tearing her
habit off!  And so there would be this naked guy on stage with this
nun's veil on, running around under these strobe lights.  Because we
didn't want it to be too visual, or too sacrilegious or whatever, so
we put him under strobe light; we figure that's alright! (laughs)

Kerry: A really bizarre piece of music!  And I had never really
thought of it so much that way.  I wrote a good portion of it, and of
course I've performed it a million times, but I've never really sat
back and listened to it from an audience point of view.  And I found
that very interesting.  I think if I was in the audience, I'd be a
little scared of it.  Because it is pretty bizarre, it really is.