REO Speedwagon's Kevin Cronin on 50 years of playing Wisconsin, carrying the rock mantle for the Midwest and kringle

How well does REO Speedwagon singer Kevin Cronin know Wisconsin? Let’s start with the kringle.

His wife Lisa is from Racine, where the official pastry of Wisconsin is made buttery layer after buttery layer at old world bakeries famous for the Danish treat. She gets it shipped in from her hometown to California, where Cronin, a noted healthy eater, has learned self-control.

“Fortunately, I’ve been able to limit my consumption. I just have a nice little slice so I taste it, I experience it and then I’m good,” Cronin said by phone. “It would be very easy to get over-involved with kringle and end up not being able to fit into one’s stage clothes.”

It’s a temptation that comes with the territory when you’re married to someone from Wisconsin.

“I have a big spot in my heart for Wisconsin girls,” said Cronin, who was born and raised in Chicago. “We’ve been together for 34 years now, which in rock ‘n’ roll years is a thousand years. I’m a Wisconsinite by marriage, put it that way.”

It’s not his only Wisconsin connection. His brother, Sean Cronin, worked as a meteorologist at WLUK-TV in Green Bay from 1984 to 1986 and then at WAOW-TV in Wausau from 1988 to 1999. He died in 2019.

REO Speedwagon's roots are in Illinois. The band formed in 1967 in Champaign, grew into a regional draw and found success in the ’70s and ’80s with such arena rock hits as “Ridin’ the Storm Out,” “Take It on the Run” and “Keep on Loving You.” It has been rolling with the changes for more than a half-century. Cronin, who joined in 1972 and left for a couple of years, has been the frontman ever since the mid-’70s.

The group returns to Green Bay on Thursday night for a concert with The Mavericks — its first time with the versatile country-rockabilly-Tex-Mex band — to help the Resch Center celebrate its 20th anniversary.

It further extends the band’s remarkable streak of playing an arena show in Green Bay in every decade since the 1970s, beginning with two concerts at Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena in 1974, first with Black Oak Arkansas and Montrose for a $4 ticket and again a few months later with Blue Oyster Cult for a $5 ticket.

The band was last in town in 2018 for a Resch Center performance with 38 Special and Warrant, a year before the nearby Brown County arena, the site of so many of those REO concerts during the band’s heyday, was torn down.

“I remember that building well,” Cronin said.

REO played a lot of Wisconsin little towns when drinking age was 18

He has a lot of memories of Wisconsin, which has long been one of REO’s most robust markets. After the band conquered its home base of Champaign, it slowly moved on to other Illinois college towns like Carbondale and then crossed the border to the north.

“We soon found our way up to Wisconsin, because back in those days, the drinking age in Wisconsin was 18. A lot of action, a lot of fun in Wisconsin. We used to play all the little towns,” Cronin said. “When we come to play in Wisconsin, it feels like home. There’s nothing like playing in the same places that you played 50 years ago. It’s crazy.”

Like fellow Illinois rock exports Styx and Cheap Trick, REO Speedwagon built its early following playing Wisconsin — a following that has remained loyal all these years later. Name a little town in Wisconsin, Cronin said, and he can probably tell you where it is in the state, because in those early years they played everywhere.

“We used to travel in a green Chevrolet station wagon with our tour manager and the five band members and the luggage in the back, and we drove the roads of Wisconsin. We crisscrossed your state a million times.”

It’s more than just Wisconsin that helped put REO on the rock ‘n’ roll map. The Midwest as whole has always been REO’s foundation, Cronin said.

He remembers a few years when they could sell out Busch Stadium in St. Louis, but as soon as they got west of the Rocky Mountains, they were back to playing a bar in Salt Lake City. In those early years when they were putting out records that radio wasn’t playing and they felt frustrated or discouraged, the Midwest kept them going.

“In our moments where we were at wit’s end, (late guitarist Gary) Richrath and I would look at each other and we would go, ‘If we can do it in the Midwest, we can do it anywhere.’ So we had that kind of support mechanism. We have the people in the Midwest to thank for everything. That’s why it’s so special for us when we come back and play in the Midwest,” Cronin said.

“The Midwest is not flyover states to me. The Midwest is my home. The people of the Midwest, I understand them, because I am them. I’ve always been proud and I’ve felt like it’s a responsibility to represent the Midwest wherever we go, whether it’s the East or West coasts here, whether we go to Europe or Australia or Japan, wherever we go, we carry the mantle of being Midwestern boys. I don’t know that any other band represents the Midwest in the same way as REO Speedwagon. ... Without it we would be nowhere.”

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Cronin, who turns 72 on Friday, says rock 'n' roll makes him feel 22

Audiences at an REO show these days runs the gamut from diehards who were at some of those Wisconsin bars the band played in the ’70s to people who weren’t even born back when the “Hi Infidelity” album came out in 1980. The band prides itself not just on its longevity but delivering a live show that doesn’t disappoint.

That means putting in the extra work. They do a soundcheck for at least an hour before every show and then have a room set up backstage where they can do additional practicing. Cronin, who will turn 72 on Friday, meets with a vocal coach via Zoom to continue to expand his vocal abilities.

“So by the time we walk onstage, we’re jacked, man. We’re ready to go,” Cronin said.

“Our little catchphrase is we like to exceed people’s expectations, because there’s people who might come to an REO Speedwagon concert and think, ‘Ah, these guys have been around a long time. They’re getting kind of old. I wonder if they can still do it?’” he said. “And then we come out there and blow the lid off the joint, and I think everybody leaves happy, including us.”

The band also proudly announces at its shows that you’re probably going to hear a mistake or two.

“Because I’m a fricking human being, and I’m not about to have some backing tracks so that I can sound perfect every night,” Cronin said. “I don’t want to hear a band that sounds perfect every night. I want to hear a band that’s human and flawed and doing their best. To me, that’s part of the experience.”

If hearing songs like “Time for Me to Fly” and “Don’t Let Him Go” takes fans back to their youth, it works the same way for Cronin when he feels the energy of a crowd singing along to every word. It keeps him young. Soon to be 72, yes, but he says he feels 22.

He and Styx guitarist Tommy Shaw were just talking about the power of rock ‘n’ roll as a fountain of youth when they talked not along ago. The two always touch base each year around Sept. 11, which is Shaw’s birthday and the birthday of Cronin’s twin sons, Shane and Josh.

“It’s an indescribable feeling that our audiences allow me to experience. To stand up there at the center mic singing a little song that I made up in an apartment in Chicago or a hotel room somewhere on the road or wherever and then to watch as these songs just get into people’s bloodstreams,” Cronin said. “To stand there and play the opening chords of a song, it’s the sound of a million arm hairs going up at the same time.”

REO Speedwagon, with opening act The Mavericks, is in concert at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Resch Center. Tickets are $33, $49, $69, $99 and $125 at ticketstaronline.com, 800-895-0071 and the Resch Center box office.

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Kendra Meinert is an entertainment and feature writer at the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Contact her at 920-431-8347 or kmeinert@greenbay.gannett.com. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @KendraMeinert. 

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: For REO Speedwagon's Kevin Cronin, playing Wisconsin feels like home