2000 Great Songs #1293: Ridin' The Storm Out

Of all the Guilty Pleasures I've shamelessly included on this list to date, this may be the Guiltiest. Because, c'mon, it's REO Speedwagon... not exactly the band to name-check if you're trying to establish your hipster cred.

But...

This one takes me back to the summers I spent at Camp North Star in lovely Hayward, Wisconsin. (Also the name of the camp in Bill Murray's Meatballs... sadly, not the same camp.) The place where the suburban Chicago families would ship their kids for eight weeks each summer. Being the late 70s and early 80s, most of us arrived at our cabins with a small boombox and a case of cassettes, and spent a lot of our downtime between activities taking turns cranking up our personal faves.

One of my camp friends had a copy of REO's You Get What You Play For, one of those obligatory 70s double-live albums from a classic rock artist whose studio work didn't get a ton of attention but whose live releases some traction. (Frampton Comes Alive was the obvious champion in this category.) REO was just starting to break through on the radio, but YGWYPF, from 1977, captured their pre-fame work. "Ridin' The Storm Out" was the big anthem, right up there with Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird as the fist-pumping show-closer, and my bunkmate would blast it from his boombox whenever he got the chance. 

Personally, I was much more into the Kinks' double-live One For The Road, but, still, it was one of those cabin anthems we all had to salute. And frankly, as piece of bland corporate rock, it wasn't bad as performed live, from the siren blast that opens the number through the crowd-pleasing chorus (and a riff that may've been nicked from the Moody Blues' "Story In Your Eyes"). (The studio version, from the 1973 LP of the same name, is pretty terrible, at least in part because frontman Kevin Cronin had briefly left the band and they swapped out his vocals with those of a particularly unengaging replacement; the original Cronin-sung studio version eventually saw release on a reissue and is less terrible, but still rather lifeless compared to the live version.)

Do I listen to a lot of REO Speedwagon these days? Of course not. But I still have a copy of this and don't mind giving it a spin every few years for the sake of childhood nostalgia.

Live 1981:

Original studio version with Cronin vocal: