REO Speedwagon always sang about feelings too big to fight — love that would not quit, hearts that would not heal, engines that would not stop rolling. But the most powerful story the band ever lived was not in any lyric. It was the story of two men who made magic together, broke apart, and found their way back to friendship just in time. It was the story of a frontman who turned down MTV, married for keeps, and never forgot where he came from.
This is the heart behind the heartland anthems: Gary Richrath and Kevin Cronin, the guitar and the voice, and everything that happened when the music stopped.
The Guitar and the Voice
Every great rock band has a creative engine — a partnership at its center that generates the spark. For REO Speedwagon, the engine was Kevin Cronin and Gary Richrath: the singer and the guitarist, the balladeer and the rocker, the tender heart and the electric nerve.
Cronin was the voice and the pen. He wrote the ballads that made the band famous — “Keep On Loving You,” “Can’t Fight This Feeling,” songs of almost unbearable sincerity, sung in a tenor that could crack with emotion at exactly the right moment. Richrath was the fire. His guitar playing gave REO its muscle and its danger — the searing leads, the barroom swagger, the sense that beneath the pretty melodies there was a band that could blow the roof off any arena in America. He wrote “Take It on the Run,” the band’s hardest-rocking Top 10 hit, and his solos were the exclamation points on Cronin’s love letters.
Together, they were perfect. Cronin’s vulnerability needed Richrath’s strength; Richrath’s edge needed Cronin’s heart. It was the classic rock-and-roll alchemy — the dreamer and the doer, the poet and the gunslinger — and for more than a decade, it produced some of the most beloved music of the era.
But partnerships that burn that bright rarely burn forever. And by the late 1980s, the engine was starting to smoke.
The Break
Success, as it so often does, became the problem. After “Hi Infidelity” made REO Speedwagon one of the biggest bands on earth, the pressure to repeat it — album after album, tour after tour — strained every relationship in the band. And the central relationship, the one between Cronin and Richrath, strained the most.
The two men were pulling in different directions. Cronin, the songwriter, wanted to keep refining the band’s melodic, ballad-driven sound — the sound that had conquered the charts. Richrath, the guitarist, wanted to rock harder, to get back to the lean, hungry band they had been before the fame. It was the oldest story in rock: the artist versus the hitmaker, the soul versus the formula. And because both men were right, neither man would yield.
In 1989, after tensions between the two had boiled over, Gary Richrath parted ways with REO Speedwagon. Just like that, the engine came apart. The guitarist who had defined the band’s sound for nearly two decades was gone. The band carried on — Cronin leading a new lineup through the nineties and beyond — but something essential had left the building. Fans knew it. The band knew it. And, in his quieter moments, Kevin Cronin surely knew it most of all.
What followed were the lost years — for Richrath, a life out of the spotlight, playing music on a smaller scale, far from the arenas he had once commanded. For Cronin, the long work of keeping REO Speedwagon alive through changing fashions, carrying the catalog and the name forward with professionalism and pride. The two men went their separate ways. The music world assumed they would never share a stage again.
The music world was wrong.
Bloomington, 2013
In November 2013, a tornado tore through central Illinois — REO Speedwagon’s home turf, the place where the band had been born in Champaign in 1967. The devastation was severe, and the band did what heartland bands do: they organized a benefit concert for the tornado victims in Bloomington, Illinois.
And Gary Richrath came home.
For one night, the guitarist walked back onto an REO Speedwagon stage and played with his old band — the first time in nearly a quarter century. The crowd that night witnessed something beyond a concert. They witnessed a reconciliation made audible: Cronin’s voice and Richrath’s guitar, together again, playing for people who had lost everything. It was not about the past. It was not about old grievances. It was about showing up for your neighbors.
No one in that audience knew it, but they were watching the last chapter being written. Richrath would never play with REO Speedwagon again. The Bloomington benefit was his farewell — not a farewell tour, not a press release, just a man picking up his guitar one more time, for the right reason, with the right people.
Goodbye, Gary
On September 13, 2015, Gary Richrath died at the age of 65, from complications of a stomach ailment. The news landed like a punch in the gut for every fan who had ever air-guitared his solos in a car or an arena. The fire of REO Speedwagon — the man who had given “Take It on the Run” its snarl and “Keep On Loving You” its sting — was gone.
Kevin Cronin’s tribute was immediate and heartfelt. He remembered Richrath as his longtime friend and collaborator — not just a bandmate, but a brother-in-arms from the years when they had conquered the world together. And those who knew the full story took comfort in one crucial detail: by the end, the two men were on good terms. The tensions of 1989 had softened with time. The Bloomington reunion had been genuine. Whatever had broken between them had, in the ways that matter most, been mended.
That is the part of the story worth holding onto. Rock history is full of partnerships that ended in permanent bitterness — lawsuits, silence, graveside regrets. Cronin and Richrath got something rarer: a second chance. A benefit concert in a tornado-damaged town. A final night of music together. A friendship restored before it was too late.
When Cronin plays those songs now — and he still plays them, night after night — Richrath’s guitar parts are still there, note for note, in the arrangements. The engine still runs. Half of it is memory now. But it runs.
The Man Who Said No to MTV
If Gary Richrath was the band’s fire, Kevin Cronin was its anchor — and his personal story is as grounded as his ballads are soaring.
Long before he was a rock star, Cronin was a kid whose life was shaped by generosity. When he was seven years old, his parents adopted three children — expanding their family in an act of love that Cronin has cited as formative. His mother was a social worker; his father worked in newspapers. Service and storytelling: it is not hard to see where the frontman got his values, or his way with words.
Cronin’s commitment to his own path showed itself early in his fame. When MTV launched in 1981 and needed video jockeys — the original VJs who would become some of the most famous faces in America — the network offered Cronin the very first VJ slot. He turned it down. He was a musician, not a television personality, and he knew the difference. In an industry where everyone chases every spotlight, Cronin’s refusal was a quiet declaration of identity: the songs come first.
His personal life has been equally steady. After an earlier marriage to a woman named Denise, with whom he had one child, Cronin married Lisa Marie Wells on April 25, 1992. They have three children together. In the soap opera of rock-and-roll relationships, the Cronin marriage is almost defiantly unremarkable — no scandals, no tabloid chapters, just a family, kept mostly private, sustained across more than three decades. For a man who writes songs about love that will not quit, it helps that he has lived one. Those who have interviewed him over the years describe a man genuinely grounded — more likely to talk about his kids than his chart positions, more comfortable at a family dinner than an industry party.
Kevin Cronin Was Here
And then, in the spring of 2020, something wonderful and absurd happened — the kind of thing that could only happen to a band as sincere as REO Speedwagon.
The hit television drama “Ozark” aired a third-season episode titled “Kevin Cronin Was Here.” In the episode, a character becomes obsessed with the band, and REO’s music features prominently. The result was instantaneous: REO Speedwagon’s catalog surged back onto the charts in April 2020, with a new generation discovering the ballads their parents had slow-danced to. A prestige crime drama about money laundering had given the most earnest band in rock an ironic, affectionate, utterly delightful second act.
Cronin, to his credit, loved it. He has always understood something essential about his band’s appeal: sincerity is not the opposite of cool. It is the foundation of it. The kids discovering REO through “Ozark” were not laughing at the songs. They were feeling them — the same way their parents had.
That sincerity has always extended beyond the stage. REO Speedwagon has played benefit concerts for years — for tornado victims in Bloomington, for countless causes in countless towns. Cronin’s philosophy of performing is disarmingly simple: “We play for free, but get paid for the traveling.” The music, in other words, is a gift. The road is the job.
It is a fitting creed for a band that never forgot it was named after a fire truck — a working vehicle, built for service. REO Speedwagon played its final show on December 21, 2024, at the Venetian Theatre in Las Vegas, closing, as Cronin had always known they would, with “Can’t Fight This Feeling” and “Roll With the Changes,” the families and crew joining for the last chorus. Fifty-seven years after a group of college kids in Champaign chose their name, the truck finally pulled into the station.
But the heart behind the anthems keeps beating. In every wedding where “Can’t Fight This Feeling” plays. In every car where a teenager discovers “Take It on the Run.” In every benefit concert where a band shows up because showing up is what you do. Kevin Cronin and Gary Richrath — the voice and the guitar — built something out of sincerity in a cynical business, broke it, mended it, and left it behind for the rest of us. The feeling, it turns out, was never something to fight. It was something to keep.
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