It opens with the most famous chain of whispers in rock: a man repeating, secondhand and thirdhand, the worst news of his life. Heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another you’ve been messin’ around. “Take It on the Run” does not begin with a declaration or a confession. It begins with gossip — information the singer does not want, from sources he cannot check, about the person he loves most. By the time the guitar solo arrives, the rumor has done what rumors do. It has become the truth he acts on.
The song was REO Speedwagon’s second great single of 1981, the follow-up to the No. 1 ballad “Keep On Loving You,” and in almost every way it was that record’s opposite. The ballad was written by singer Kevin Cronin, at a piano, about deciding to stay with an unfaithful partner. “Take It on the Run” was written by guitarist Gary Richrath, the band’s hard-rock engine, about deciding to leave. One man heard the rumors and chose forgiveness; the other heard them and chose the door. Both songs sat side by side on Hi Infidelity, and together they turned a decade of Midwestern bar-band labor into the biggest album of 1981.
Half Asleep in Front of the Television
Gary Richrath did not write the song at a piano in a moment of romantic agony. He wrote it, by his own account, half asleep on a couch. “When I wrote that, I woke up one night, half asleep, and sat down in front of the TV,” he recalled years later. “There was a soap opera on it. I was just sitting there, strumming a guitar, thinking, ‘God, these guys’ relationships are worse than mine.’ I just sat there and sang vocals about the effects of gossip and relationships breaking up, which was what was on the tube and all that was similar to what was going on in my life.”
The circumstances matter, because the song is built exactly like the thing it describes. Its first line is a rumor in transit, passed from friend to friend to friend before it reaches the narrator third-hand, and the arrangement moves the same way — a quiet acoustic strum that gathers voices and volume until the whole band seems to be shouting the accusation back at him. Richrath had joined REO Speedwagon in 1970, an Illinois guitarist who gave a folk-leaning college band its electric spine; a decade later, he remained its least sentimental songwriter. Where Cronin wrote ballads, Richrath wrote the sound of a man who had already made up his mind.
A Song Called “Don’t Let Me Down”
Richrath’s first title for it was a shrug: “Don’t Let Me Down.” When he played the song for Cronin, the singer heard past the placeholder immediately. “As soon as I heard it, I knew it could be awesome,” Cronin said. “This really grabbed me.” The two men — whose creative friction powered the band, the folkie and the rocker — developed the song together. They retitled it “Take It on the Run,” after the threat buried in its closing lines, and Cronin contributed the refrain’s clinching couplet: “You’re under the gun, so you take it on the run” — a line he admitted was a spur-of-the-moment thing that simply sang well and rhymed. The official writing credit went to Richrath alone, though the album’s liner notes quietly acknowledged Cronin’s “lyrical assistance.”
That division of labor was the band in miniature. Richrath supplied the hurt and the horsepower; Cronin, a Beatles obsessive who knew Rubber Soul inside out, supplied the pop instinct that could turn a late-night grumble into a chorus a stadium could sing. When Cronin heard that opening line — the friend who heard it from a friend — he recognized what songwriters chase for years: a first sentence that grabs the listener by the collar and refuses to let go.
The Album of Infidelity
Hi Infidelity was recorded between June and October 1980 at Crystal Studios in Hollywood and Kendun Recorders in Burbank, produced by the band with engineer Kevin Beamish. The title was a pun — high fidelity, infidelity — and the material earned it: song after song about cheating, suspicion, and the wreckage of trust, written by men whose own relationships were in various stages of collapse. “Take It on the Run” closed side one, the hardest-rocking of the album’s four hit singles: Cronin’s acoustic guitar strumming beneath Richrath’s electric lines, Neal Doughty’s synthesizers widening the choruses, session singer Tom Kelly stacking harmonies behind Cronin’s lead vocal.
The lyric’s genius is its unreliability. The narrator insists he does not believe the rumor — “not for a minute” — even as he delivers his ultimatum in the same breath: if it is true, he does not want her around. He is a man arguing with himself in real time, and Richrath’s guitar argues back, the solo less a decoration than a cross-examination. Record World, reviewing the single, called it a “power ballad” and a “blockbuster” — a tidy summary of the REO formula at its peak: tenderness and muscle in the same four minutes.
The Follow-Up Epic Didn’t Want
Following a No. 1 single is its own special pressure, and Epic Records had a plan: the label wanted “In Your Letter,” another Richrath song, released as the follow-up to “Keep On Loving You.” The band disagreed — Cronin later said he put his foot down — and Epic relented. “Take It on the Run” was released on March 27, 1981, with bassist Bruce Hall’s “Someone Tonight” on the B-side, and it climbed to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 4 in Cash Box, No. 3 in Record World, and No. 2 on Canada’s CHUM chart. It reached No. 19 in Britain and finished 1981 as America’s No. 32 single of the year, while Hi Infidelity spent fifteen weeks atop the Billboard 200, became the biggest-selling album of 1981, and was eventually certified diamond for ten million American sales.
The fight with the label has a pleasing symmetry: the defining sound of REO Speedwagon’s career was built from songs that people in offices had wanted to bury or bypass. The band’s instincts, honed over thirteen years of one-nighters, proved better than the professionals’. A rumor nobody at Epic believed in became the guitarist’s biggest songwriting hit.
Twelve Seconds of MTV
On August 1, 1981, MTV signed on for the first time, and “Take It on the Run” was the ninth video the channel ever played. It was not a glamorous debut. Twelve seconds in, technical difficulties struck: the picture cut to black, the song stopped, and the video never finished. A song about a message garbled as it passes from person to person had itself been garbled in transmission by the newest medium in America.
It hardly mattered. The song’s opening line entered the permanent vocabulary of American pop, and Ultimate Classic Rock would later rank “Take It on the Run” second among all REO Speedwagon songs, behind only “Keep On Loving You” — the ballad it had answered, the other side of the same broken heart.
The Guitarist’s Song
The single was certified gold on April 17, 1989 — a date with an edge to it, because 1989 was also the year Richrath’s nineteen-year run in REO Speedwagon came to an end. The friction that had made the band great finally unmade his place in it, and he receded from the spotlight he had helped create. Then, in December 2013, he walked onstage with REO Speedwagon in Bloomington, Illinois, at a benefit concert for tornado victims — his last performance with the band he had joined in 1970.
Richrath died on September 13, 2015, at sixty-five, from complications of a stomach ailment, and it was Cronin — the other half of the friction — who confirmed the news and led the tributes, remembering a guitarist who could hold an arena with nothing but a Les Paul, a coil cord, and a Marshall stack. The song he left behind has kept traveling the way its first line promised it would: from friend to friend. Pitbull and Enrique Iglesias interpolated it in “Messin’ Around,” and Cronin still sings it on stage, performing the work of the partner he argued with, learned from, and outlived. Heard it from a friend who. The rumor Richrath sang half asleep in front of a television set is still going around. It always will be.
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