Our musical approach is very different, but our peaks of popularity were in the same 10- to 12-year period. Everybody in the bands and crews know each other well. On a personal level, REO and Styx, for the last 20 years, we’ve become this well-oiled machine. We’ll do a few shows, just because you have to, otherwise you get rusty. We’ll pretty much lay low for the first half of next year. I think we pretty much covered everything, or at least we will have, by the end of December. This year we’ve been trying to make up as many of the shows that were postponed because of COVID as we could. I don’t take it for granted for one second. I was like, “Man, it’s gotta be Loverboy.”Īfter the crazy year that was 2020, I know it means a lot for you to be getting back out on a proper tour.
We were trying to figure out who, because you need that third band on the show. Loverboy is four out of the five guys that made all of the records. He walks out there, and he sings his ass off. And he’s got one of the greatest voices of rock 'n' roll. I’ve known him forever, and he’s one of the sweetest guys you’ll ever meet. I bumped into Reno in the hotel lobby the next day and, luckily, day off, because there was no way we were getting onstage that night! I don’t remember what it was called, but he started pouring after dinner and we just roared. The tour manager, an Italian guy, bought this bottle of something. I remember one night we were somewhere in Germany, and our tour manager took Mike and his wife and Lisa and myself out to dinner. Reno and I got to know each other really well, because we were together for almost a month, pretty much every day. To hear your music played by strings and horns was amazing. It was one of the most amazing in so many ways. They also had a double guitar, bass, drums and Hammond organ, piano 10-piece choir. We took turns every night fronting a 50- or 60-piece symphony orchestra. But it was in 2019 that I did a tour in Europe with Ian Gillan from Deep Purple, Mike Reno from Loverboy and Andy Scott from the Sweet. We’ve done shows with them over the years, many times. It’s a long and sordid tale, but it’s chronicled in my book, which hopefully will be out in time to be released with the tour. They were a couple of years older than us, so they were a little bit better and their girlfriends were a little bit hotter. We were kind of rivals on the south side of Chicago. We have a long history that goes back to when I was in high school. I’m from Chicago, and all of the original Styx guys are from Chicago. I became aware of Styx before they were Styx. We spoke with Cronin on the eve of the tour announcement to discuss what fans can look forward to in the new year.
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