Interview by Craig Hunter Ross
In March of 1974 a band from Topeka released their debut album, appropriately self-titled, Kansas. Having caught the eye of the legendary Don Kirshner, they soon caught the eyes and ears of the world.
With their distinct sound, they quickly developed an almost cult like following. Their sound was impossible to label; hard rock, prog rock, complex rock, American boogie rock, it could not be pigeonholed and almost became a blank aural canvas for the individual listener to paint their own sonic picture.
Nearly forty years later, original lead guitarist Rich Williams, who along with drummer Phil Ehart still remain as Kansas continue to please live audiences around the world with iconic songs like “Dust in the wind”, ‘Point of Know Return” and “Carry on Wayward Son”.
A few days after a benefit concert for The American Freedom Foundation just outside Washington DC in Fairfax, Virginia, Rich took some time to chat with Guitar International about the music of Kansas and much more…
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Craig Hunter Ross: Kansas is firmly entrenched as classic rock stalwarts, yet you also get intertwined with the prog-rock genre with your music often employing odd timings and extended interludes. Is that a style you all set out to pursue, or did it just sort of evolve?
Rich Williams: It’s kind of what we did from the get go. Really it was just following our nature, doing things that way. We had played with a lot of copy bands and club bands before, but I think what really drew the original six guys together was the need to do something outside the box. Things like as you said, different time signatures, thinking of early Deep Purple, they were a big influence. While they were a heavy rock band, they had lots of long introductions, long middles; and those were the things that caught our ear a lot more than the boy/girl songs on the radio.
We all cut our teeth on pop radio, but we wanted to do more than that. A lot of people in town wanted to have their weekend gig at the Holiday Inn, but didn’t want to travel. They wanted to keep it all “snappy”, with what club owners wanted; whereas we didn’t give a shit. We wanted to do the things we liked to do.
Even when we’d be playing in clubs, the club owner would come up to us and say “Stop playing all this original stuff”, so we just started saying that they were “b-sides” to songs like “Smoke on the Water” or something like that so we could play it.
Craig: As you really developed pieces with the long intros or jam portions, did any of those end up evolving into their own song?
Rich Williams: Oh sure, several things later turned into something else. There was a piece that became the beginning of “The Pilgrimage” on the first album. It was always just a long jam thing we did, similar to that “Mountain Jam” by The Allman Brothers. It was a very similar type of thing that we wanted to incorporate into something greater. There were plenty of examples of messing around like that and they pop out into a song.
Craig: Did much of that come from impromptu live jams that you then felt the need to get into the studio to record, or did you all come into the studio with your own material and work from there? What was the structure?
Rich Williams: Once we got to the studio, it was pretty structured. Studio time was pretty expensive in those days. We didn’t have much of a budget so it was us having a couple of shots at things and then moving on.
A lot of the songs we did on that first album were pretty complicated, so the producer would be like “well that’s good enough” and we knew what we were in for. We had to have everything pretty fine tuned, because we knew we would not be getting a lot of attempts at them.
Recording today is all copy and paste, repair everything. Back then it was go in and do entire drum and bass tracks and then add on from there. Even so, when adding, you were still doing a lot of start to finish parts. Equipment wasn’t very friendly for just punching in.
Craig: You have so many milestones and anniversaries to celebrate here recently, the Point of Know Return [1970] release, same for “Dust in the Wind”; when you were making this music originally, did you see it becoming such a timeless fixture within the American music lexicon?
Rich Williams: No, I think an estimate of ten years would have been about right, but how long it’s been, no way. None of us had been in a band that long. The cycle of the local music scene was to be in a band for a few months, break up or mutate. Almost going on forty years now, we’d have never guessed.
Craig: So to your point, after almost forty years, playing live night after night, what keeps it fresh for you? Do you ever wake up the day of a gig without that excitement to take the stage, in other words just “not feeling it”, or is it that once you are on the stage adrenaline takes over and you’re glad you’re up there?
Rich Williams: I love what we do. But there are days, and you have no idea why, but you just can’t find it. A lot of times when you listen back to it on those days, say if someone was running a board tape, though maybe you would sound bored and uninspired and as you listen you find “man I was playing right in the pocket”!
It’s kind of hard to tell, some may be note for note; but I can have a scattered approach, you know even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while. There’s a format, which sometimes works great and sometimes I just leave a stink behind. But, that’s what keeps it fun.
Craig: Do you ever find its just a subconscious thing taking over and you are playing out of your mind, not in a negative sense, but almost more so muscle memory if not anything else on days like that?
Rich Williams: Well about half of it. I’ll think to myself, “Ok Rich, last night you f’d this up and you are overplaying things”. But, it may have been cold or something and you know temperature is always a killer. If your hands are freezing you have to rethink what you’re doing. A lot of times since I know what I know, it can get boring to me, but I’m still improvising on the spot. I may then go back and listen or watch myself play days later and think “man, that Rich makes it look so easy”! It’s only after the fact like that when I can say something may have been cool, because at the time, I’m just playing it.
Craig: How much analysis do you do like that? It almost sounds analogous to an athlete watching game films and making adjustments. How often to you go over your live playing?
Rich Williams: Not an awful lot, but there is just so much stuff on YouTube. You watch and maybe go to a couple areas to see what you were doing; maybe pick up selection here, slow down the echo there. Change a speed or tempo. Phil [Ehart] will say to slow things down, that it’s not a race. A lot of those kinds of critiques, just broad strokes you tuck away and hope you remember when the time comes again.
Every show is so different though. You get up there and maybe the lights are funky and you’re having trouble with the pedal board or you can’t see the set list or you have to jump on the acoustic, etcetera. All the computations going on in your head adds to things. If it was just playing the notes, it would be easier. But we play so many notes, a half second brain fart and you are in the weeds. The rehashing of it just makes for better preparation the next time you get there.
Craig: You’ve always been the constant in the band amidst personnel and line-up changes. What have been some of the challenges, or benefits to those changes?
Rich Williams: I’m really comfortable in the way it’s been for the last say twenty-five years. When Steve Morse was in the band that was quite different because he was such a monster; he was covering a lot of violin medleys and things like that. Say now on “Wayward Son”, our violinist [David Ragsdale] will do violin and guitar and we are doubling the part. That’s kind of the way it’s always been. I have always played guitar in Kansas. Kerry [Livgren] was playing guitar and some keys too.
It’s never really a difficult transition for me. Some earlier songs I may have had to make a decision on the priority of parts if we were not playing the same thing. I’ll take this line you take this harmony, etcetera. There’s a lot of retooling to make sure you get the correct sound and feel to it.
Craig: Speaking of the personnel changes, you just recently played at the American Freedom Festival and your original bass player, Dave Hope, joined you all filling in for Billy Greer. How did you prepare for that in terms of rehearsals, or did he just step in like old times and off you went?
Rich Williams: That gig was a situation that just fell right into place. Last February a band that we were in, called White Clover, was put in the Kansas Music Hall of Fame. Phil, Dave and I were all in that band. So, we actually played together at that induction. Now, Dave is a minister in a church, but still plays a bit, not so much bass, but strumming an acoustic so he’s still been playing as such through the years.
We got to talking about what we would play at the hall of fame gig and got to practice a bit, but he was still a little edgy about it. He did a fine job though and whets his whistle some I think for playing. Then along came this show.
Billy Greer, our bass player now, well his step-son was getting married that day. Actually another band was supposed to play the show but cancelled so we got a call asking if we were interested in filling the spot. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse, but we had to figure out how we were going to make it work. Phil and I were talking about who we could get and figured we had just played with Dave and he did great, but we’d still need a vocalist, because Billy is a bass player that sings.
Terry Brock came to mind since he’d been on the road with us before and we’ve known him forever. Finally, I told Phil we should just get both of them and when we asked them they both jumped at the chance.
What we did was make board tapes that were heavy on Billy’s bass parts for Dave and the same for Terry, but with Billy’s vocal parts. Both of them had done most of the material in some form over the years anyway, so it was just a matter of doing their homework. While we were on a short tour with Kings X, we brought them in for two days of rehearsals and went through the set.
When the day of the show arrived it was exciting and there was a bit of nerves. We got there early and had a solid sound check, then in the dressing room just went through a few things and tried to keep things light, basically with a lot of bad jokes and bad gas!
We only had to do fifty minutes, so really it was like riding a bike really. The worst part is just the pre-gig stuff. Much like a football player who vomits before the game, then takes that first hit and plays his ass off. It’s really very similar. I get pretty nervous in those situations. I get cranky, don’t sleep well…we hadn’t been out in a few weeks so all the ghosts of every time you hit a clam in any show start to resurface. Any insecurity you might have starts to come to the surface. Even if you have been practicing the set, maybe you have a new pedal board, or it’s something else. But when the lights go on, its show time and you’re fine. It always works, every time, that upset stomach comes with the territory.
Craig: Was there a sense of relief when you all were finished or satisfaction that you’d pulled it off?
Rich Williams: The relief came as soon as we started. From the first note things felt right to me. We’ve been using inner ears for awhile which is a real compromise for me as a guitar player because it’s not a natural sound. Everything you do is heard to the point of being hypersensitive; every pop, click, imperfection. That’s why I do one ear in, one ear out, to kind of compromise between the two.
It gives me a little bit of live feel, but actually made me dizzy at first. It was like having half your head in one room and half in another. It was odd.
Craig: Were you all thinking that there would have to be significant adjustments to the set list without Billy?
Rich Williams: We went through the set list and things we had been playing recently. What we felt might make for the easiest learning curve, maybe leave out a couple of the tricky spots or new things we may have added to a tune. Try to limit the opportunity for the wheels to fall off the wagon, you know? But it didn’t take us long to put the set list together.
Craig: Are there any tunes that you have really wanted to get into a more regular rotation set list wise and what is the dynamic with the band in making those suggestions or changes? You obviously have the standards that will always stay and no one wants them to go anywhere, but take me through the process of adding “Down the Road” or “Sparks of the Tempest” etc…
Rich Williams: Some songs you get tired of after awhile and you need to put them on the shelf so you can mix it up a bit. This year, we put “Can I Tell You” from the first album back in the set, which we haven’t really played since the time of our third album. That was about a three year process of me waiting for the right moment to get it done. Maybe because it was the political season or whatever, but lyrically it’s timeless so it felt right to get it in. We weren’t doing anything that was loose in the middle and it sets up the violin well. Once I got Phil to want to do it, then I knew I could get Steve [Walsh] to. But I finally got it. It’s great to play. The first time we did it, I was like, wow! It brings so much to the table, and was the song that got us our first record deal.
Craig: Is that really what it takes, for someone to bring a song to the table, then build a consensus before it’s really considered?
Rich Williams: I don’t know how it works. A song may be a terrible idea six times and then it’s brilliant the seventh. Like “Fight Fire with Fire”, I was so sick of that song I could have screamed. But, all of the sudden I was like okay, fine. Sometimes, it’s because there may be similar numbers with similar parts and that does it to you, whereas when it’s off on its own you are more into it. Maybe you just at times put something new in for a mood change or a slow down…
Like the symphony stuff, we put in “Nobody’s Home”, which we would never do on its own, but with the symphony it really works and it came out great.
Craig: Just to wrap up here Rich, a last question for you…What about Native Window [members of Kansas without Steve Walsh, playing acoustic new original music]? Are we going to hear anymore from that combination?
Rich Williams: Probably not. That was an itch that needed to be scratched, we’ve done it, we opened for Kansas and that’s kind of it.
Craig: What was that dynamic like, opening for Kansas?
Rich Williams: Part of it was people complaining. But, we felt it made more sense than folks coming to see a local copy band open up that they could go see in some local bar any other night. We didn’t want to sit through that.
So we started thinking what it would be like to have our own opening act. The issue would be what we would play. We were a shitty copy band so we didn’t want to do what they would have done. So we decided to write some stuff. After writing it, we felt we should record it, so we went in the studio, sat in a circle and started throwing shit against the wall. The only rule was it couldn’t be Kansas. The result was an explosion of creativity that was very exciting. If one of us had an idea, we tried it. Whatever it was. There was no competition, nothing like that. No politics.
Craig: That must have been pretty refreshing for you.
Rich Williams: Yes, very much so. We had a lot of fun. We wrote it, recorded it, released it, and then opened for Kansas. Full circle. Done.
Craig: Thanks Rich, much success to you and Kansas and you continue “Down the Road”.
Rich Williams: You bet!
Editor’s note: Al Butkovich contributed to this interview
