the very early ‘70s,” recalls former Pana resident Chris Durbin. “I don’t remember too much about it. There were a few local bands at that time that everyone used to go see, like Bear Creek Road, who did covers of Cream and Hendrix — their guitar player, Barry Worker, is still kind of a local legend there. REO was really just some out-of-town band then, nobody in the area cared about them very much. I do remember being impressed as a kid because their keyboard player [Neal Doughty] had a Hammond B-3 Organ with a Leslie cabinet and that spinning cone on top of it looked really cool to me as a kid.”

Local songwriter (and IT “Now Playing” columnist) Tom Irwin also encountered REO during their era as a local act.

“I was in [hard rock band] Zeus at the time,” muses Irwin, “which makes it probably ’75 or ’76. I believe REO had already released ‘Riding the Storm Out’ but I could be mistaken about that. They were playing somewhere in downtown Springfield, it might have been the St. Nicholas ballroom. That or the Armory. Anyway, [Zeus guitarist] Dooley and I somehow made it up to their hotel room. We had brought some Wahaqan pot with us, which was reputed to be a very potent Mexican strain, and that was our ticket in. Gary Richrath was kind of a dick to us, I remember him asking if we had brought any girls along and being kind of, very, dismissive. They made us leave before very long and they kept the Wahaqan weed as tribute, but before that I do remember Kevin Cronin getting out an acoustic guitar and playing us a song called ‘Music Man,’ which, if I’m not mistaken, was all about the trials and tribulations of living your life as a... music man.”

Cronin certainly knows a lot about the subject. Like so many other musicians of his generation it all started with the Beatles.

“As a kid, music was my savior,” recalls Cronin, who graduated from Brother Rice High School in Chicago. “I was not a gifted athlete, even though I loved to play. But when I started music and guitar lessons, I discovered it was not just something I could do but that I was actually good at. And when I first saw the Beatles on TV when I was in junior high, it was a done deal. They were doing exactly what I wanted to do. They were writing songs and playing songs and getting this huge reaction from people. After that, I was singularly motivated. Luckily, it was organic: I was very focused and I was getting a very positive response. Playing music became more than something I wanted to do, I actually needed it to survive.”

These days, late-night TV viewers might be most familiar with Kevin Cronin from having seen him hosting the heavy-rotation infomercial advertising Time-Life’s “Ultimate Rock Ballads,” a 9-disc boxed set (“153 Unforgettable Hits!”). But don’t assume that this means Cronin is suspended in the amber of music past.

“I actually know people my age who have kind of shut down and started losing the vibe as time goes by and I think that’s really terrible,” he says. “Music will continue to evolve and I’m always curious about what will come next up the pike. I really like the Foo Fighters, who I feel have kind of continued the tradition we were part of. Also the Kings of Leon have really good songs and have that Midwestern thing that seems really familiar and really fresh at the same time. I also think that John Mayer’s songwriting is really coming to full bloom on his new album.

“Someone told me that there’s a video of Keith Urban doing a version of ‘Keep On

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