REO SPEEDWAGON : FANS CAN’T FIGHT THIS COMEBACK

“Good Trouble” was nothing but trouble for REO Speedwagon. It was the follow-up to “Hi Infidelity,” the blockbuster album that in 1981 changed REO almost overnight from a middle-level rock band into the biggest act in pop music.

REO was riding high after “Hi Infidelity,” which sold more than 7 million albums. But then “Good Trouble,” released in 1982, struggled to the million mark, a paltry amount after the “Hi Infidelity” phenomenon. Suddenly, REO was speeding downhill. Skeptical music-business forecasters insisted that REO would never rise again.

And once again, the forecasters blew it. REO, appearing Thursday at the Forum, has rolled back into prominence. The band’s latest album, “Wheels Are Turning,” is in the Top 10. The second single, “Can’t Fight This Feeling,” recently was No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart. “One Lonely Night,” the new single, is off to a fast start.

One evening during a hasty dinner before heading to the airport to catch a late-night plane, lead singer Kevin Cronin, 33, discussed REO’s recent troubles. Though he announced that he was starving, Cronin hardly touched his seafood fettuccine. It wasn’t an indictment of the food. Cronin is one of those excitable people who chatters at machine-gun pace. When he’s wound up--and he was that night--he’s too excited to eat.

“ ‘Hi Infidelity’ changed everything for us,” he explained. “It was like a firecracker. It just exploded.”

Featuring smash hit singles like “Take It on the Run” and “Keep On Loving You,” the album was unlike anything REO had done. As Cronin explained in a Calendar interview shortly after the album came out in 1980: “We used to write songs about things that were mild, about things that people between 15 and 25 were thinking about. But this album is more about our personal experiences. This time we bared our souls.”

It worked. Those songs touched millions of pop fans. But on “Good Trouble,” their songwriting skills deserted them. Sarcastically summing up that effort, Cronin observed: “It was a confused album about confusion.”

“Good Trouble” was schlock rock, clearly the worst batch of songs they had written since their early years. Even Cronin indirectly admitted that the album was woefully subpar.

“It did as well as I expected it to do,” he said tactfully. That’s another way of saying it wasn’t good enough to do any better.

The big problem with “Good Trouble,” Cronin explained, was that it was done in haste. Most artists, following a monster best seller like “Hi Infidelity,” relax, bask in the glory and watch the money roll in. So why did REO rush into another album?

“We were caught up in the excitement of being on top,” he recalled. “We had all this positive energy we had to get rid of, so we did an album. We obviously didn’t have to do one right away--I wish we had taken more time with it; we would have done a better job.”

In retrospect, there were numerous reasons for waiting. “All of us were in transition,” he said, referring to pianist Neil Doughty, drummer Alan Gratzer, bassist Bruce Hall and guitarist Gary Richrath. “It was a confusing time for us. We were catching up on our personal lives, taking care of things that had been left by the wayside during all those years of working hard to get to the top. It wasn’t a great time to do a record.

“I did have a feeling then that the album wasn’t quite up to par. I wish I had listened to my feelings. If it wasn’t right, we didn’t have to put it out. But we were feeling our oats. We thought we could do anything .”

The “Good Trouble” disaster confirmed the predictions of those who’d insisted that “Hi Infidelity” was just a fluke. Certainly nothing in REO’s history indicated that it had supergroup potential. Before “Hi Infidelity” there had been no blockbusters, though some of its 10 Epic Records albums had reached gold (500,000 copies sold) and platinum (1 million copies sold).

Formed in the late ‘60s on the University of Illinois campus, REO didn’t start its slow climb to stardom until 1971, when Cronin joined just after the first Epic album. Playing rowdy, unpretentious, melodic rock ‘n’ roll, REO became the pride of the Midwest. But most East and West Coast critics considered it a lowbrow outfit, denouncing its music as pedestrian noise fueled by minimal talent and imagination.

While “Hi Infidelity” didn’t convert many critics, it did establish that REO was capable of creating appealing, commercial pop rock. But thanks to “Good Trouble,” that reputation didn’t last very long.

Kevin Cronin, superstar. That sounded great to him. After “Hi Infidelity,” he was swimming in success. At first he expected utopia, like in his fantasies about life on top. But the reality was less than he expected, much less.

“We had worked so hard for so many years to get on top,” he said. “Our lives were supposed to be fulfilled. I thought things would change, like magic--I thought the whole world would be a great place to be. But it wasn’t. Being on top didn’t solve anything, it just created new and different problems. It was a big letdown . . . very depressing. It took me a while to put success into sensible perspective.”

Inevitably, an avalanche of hype accompanies enormous success. The wise artists ignore it. Cronin didn’t.

“People build you up and you start believing all the press releases and the stories,” he said. “You can take it all too seriously. You can start to think you’re Superman. Your ego gets distorted, your world gets pushed out of shape. But then you crash and come back down to earth. That hurts.

“You always see stories where celebrities are saying it’s bad to take fame and success too seriously, that it’s dumb to believe all the hype. I never understood what they meant. But after I went through it and did it wrong, I finally understood exactly what they were talking about.”

After the “Good Trouble” tour, Cronin made a big mistake. He went into his studio and tried to write.

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever did,” he recalled. “I was still feeling the pressure from the tour. I was confused and depressed. How could I write in that state? I came out of the studio frustrated.”

The solution, he said, was clear: “We needed a long vacation, to get away from the pressure and rejuvenate ourselves. Then we needed to work on an album slowly and carefully.”

So REO didn’t rush into the next album. Following the “Good Trouble” tour, which ended in April, 1983, the band took a long break. Also, no deadlines were set for the next album.

“If we needed five years, we would have taken five years for that album,” Cronin said.

The leisurely approach worked. The catchy, well-crafted material on the “Wheels Are Turning” album proves that.

REO seems to be back in a commercial groove. It’s not likely that the band will achieve the stratospheric high of “Hi Infidelity” again. But it’s also not likely to revert to “Good Trouble” form again either.