Sometime in the late 1970s, a young factory worker from outside Chicago joined his first bar band. They named it Lazy, after the Deep Purple song. The guitar player, a child prodigy, was named Steve Walsh.
Not the Steve Walsh. A Steve Walsh, from Western Springs, Illinois.
Decades later, Ronnie Platt would replace the actual Steve Walsh as the voice of Kansas. And on August 17th, he walks into Place Bell singing Carry On Wayward Son on a bill with Deep Purple, the band his first band was named after.
“How crazy can this get?” Ronnie asks. “And it gets crazier through the years.”
Pool or Piano
Ronnie grew up surrounded by music. Both sets of grandparents played piano. His grandmother on his mother’s side could play anything you asked for, ragtime included, without being able to name a single note. In the basement of his grandparents’ house sat a beautiful hightop piano the kids banged on constantly.
“It was either go downstairs and play pool or play piano,” he says. “That was your choice back then. There was no internet.”
In grade school, while everyone else fought over the drums, Ronnie picked the trombone. His older sister was deep into Chicago albums, and that brass section sounded cool to him. Then one day she brought home an acoustic guitar. He confiscated it about a week later and never gave it back, teaching himself open chords from an easy Beatles songbook.
“A friend of my sister’s one time, he’s watching me play guitar and he goes, you would be a good bass player,” Ronnie says. “A week later, I had a bass guitar. I always considered myself like a closet bass player, because at home I have just as many basses as I have guitars.” He started singing in high school bands by default, because nobody else would.
His ears were being shaped by Chicago AM radio, stations like WLS and WCFL, long before the satellite era carved music into narrow genre lanes.
“I remember hanging out in my backyard in Bellwood and having the radio playing,” he says. “They would play a Deep Purple song, and then the next song would be the Jackson 5.”
That wide-open radio dial eventually narrowed into an obsession. Roundabout by Yes grabbed him. Then Wayward Son was suddenly everywhere, and he bought Leftoverture, “played it to death,” and went back for every previous Kansas album. Point of Know Return landed in 1977, right in his high school years, and Rush sealed the deal for a kid who loved the bass guitar. While the 80s went hairband, he stayed home with Kansas, Yes, Genesis and Rush.
“I kind of missed the boat with all the hairbands, the Bon Jovi and the Motley Crue. I had no attraction to that. I was such a hardcore progressive.”
That music never went away.
“You think about that music from the 70s, of how that music is just sustained through the years,” he says. “And I see it myself. It’s so heartwarming to me to see teenage kids in the audience getting into Kansas music. They’re not just sitting there going, gee, when are they going to play Wayward Son. They’re actually into the whole show.”
Winning the Lottery Three Times
Ronnie paid his dues in the Chicago scene, including a stint in prog cult favourites Yezda Urfa and later fronting Shooting Star, before getting the call to join Kansas in 2014. Getting the gig was one thing. What came next, he never saw coming.
“This is where I say I’ve won the lottery three times in a row,” he says. “Not only getting the job as lead singer of Kansas, but then finding out that I’m going to be singing on a studio album. That’s award number two. But then to be asked to write lyrics was beyond my wildest dreams.”
When work began on The Prelude Implicit, Phil Ehart asked him if he wrote. He did. He’d always written. The first song he submitted to Phil and Rich Williams was With This Heart, and he braced himself for the polite rejection he was sure was coming. He figured they’d thank him for the effort and hand the job to a professional writer from Nashville.
“When I submitted that song, Rich and Phil are like, oh my God, this is great. Write the next one. I’m shell-shocked. I’m like, really?”
One song led to another. He ended up writing six songs on The Prelude Implicit, co-writing two more with Billy Greer, then contributing again on The Absence of Presence. He points to Circus of Illusion and Unsung Heroes as the ones he’s proudest of.
“When you think I’m grouped with Kerry Livgren as a lyricist, it’s beyond my wildest dreams.”
“Well, You’re a Six”
Last year, the lottery luck got tested. Ronnie was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and the way he found out is the kind of scene that stays with you. His ENT took a needle biopsy of a nodule, and a week later handed him a printout he could barely read, faded like the printer was running out of ink. Six categories, one being benign, six being fully malignant. He asked the doctor to explain what he was looking at.
“He goes, well, you’re a six. The world stops.”
His first thoughts went where anyone’s would. Three months? Six months? A year? Then came the search for a surgeon, the insurance maze, the waiting. “The stress became almost as bad as the cancer itself,” he says.
Everyone in his circle kept pointing to the same name, a Chicago surgeon named Dr. Angelos, supposedly the best in the country. Getting an appointment was another matter. Then the band started cancelling shows, and Ronnie had to explain why, so he announced his diagnosis on Facebook on a Thursday.
The very next day, his phone rang. It was an old friend and former bandmate, a guitar player, giving him grief for finding out his brother had cancer through Facebook. Ronnie told him the whole story, including the frustration of trying to reach Dr. Angelos. The friend said hold on a second, and called his girlfriend Mary over to the phone.
“Mary goes, Ronnie, I work with Dr. Angelos. I see him every day.”
Out of 13 or 14 million people in the Chicagoland area, his old guitar player’s girlfriend worked alongside the exact surgeon he needed. She had the authority to move him up in the hospital schedule, turning a two-month wait into one week. One month to the day after his surgery, Ronnie was back on stage with Kansas.
There’s a strange footnote to the whole thing. When the ENT delivered the diagnosis, he asked if Ronnie had ever had radiation. It took him a minute. As a baby, he’d been born with a birthmark on the tip of his nose, and around 1964 his mother and grandmother had it removed so he wouldn’t go through life looking like Rudolph. The removal method was radiation, and his doctor traced the cancer directly back to it.
“I’m sure radiation therapy was perfectly safe in 1964,” he deadpans. When I joked that this was back when doctors would chain smoke while doing your exam, Ronnie slipped into his best vintage ad-man voice. “My doctor smokes Marlboros.”
Today, he says he feels fantastic, and the whole ordeal already feels like a bump in the road. “I really scored in the luck department, not only musically, but health-wise. There’s not a day that goes by I don’t thank everyone for it.”
The All-Star Team of Rock and Roll
Ask Ronnie about the current Kansas lineup and he lights up. He calls it the all-star team of rock and roll, and the resumes back him up.
Eric Holmquist, now on drums, was Phil Ehart‘s drum roadie for almost 20 years before stepping in when Phil semi-retired. Ronnie has known him since he was five years old, and once spent three years in a band with Eric‘s father playing Yes music. “He’s a chip off the old block,” Ronnie says.
Zak Rizvi, on guitar, worked behind the scenes with Kansas for years and became the major writer on the last two albums, including Throwing Mountains. Joe Deninzon‘s violin work “will mesmerize you.” Dan McGowan holds down the bass and second lead vocals, and in Ronnie‘s words, “Dan has the voice of an angel.” Tom Brislin played keyboards for Meat Loaf and Debbie Harry and toured with Yes. The newest addition, Scott Bernard, spent 18 years as Kenny Loggins‘ guitar player.
The proof is in the crowd. Wayward Son keeps showing up in front of new generations, from Reacher to Walker to Supernatural, which unofficially adopted it as a theme song. Ronnie now sees the grandkids of original fans in the seats.
“It’s so rewarding to see not only the kids of the original fans, but now the grandkids of the original fans coming to see this band and just absorbing the music and enjoying it and really being fulfilled by the music of Kansas.”
The Show
Kansas plays Place Bell in Laval on August 17th with Deep Purple and Jefferson Starship. These are bands a whole generation grew up hearing back to back on the radio, and now they share one stage.
Even after the interview wrapped, Ronnie kept talking music. He told me friends ask if he ever gets tired of singing Dust in the Wind or Wayward Son night after night.
“No, because every time it’s a new audience. So it keeps it new to me, knowing that there’s new faces listening. And heck, I never get tired of talking music.”
On August 17th, that new audience walks into Place Bell.
Tickets: Evenko
Writer: Randal Wark is a Tech entrepreneur, Managing Partner of MTech Cyber with a focus on cybersecurity along with a passion for live music. You can follow him on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. His Podcast RockStar Today helps musicians quit their day jobs with out-of-the-box advice from Ted Talk Speakers, Best Selling Authors and other interesting Entrepreneurs and Creatives. He created the Rock Star Today Music Business Jam Session for musicians. Randal is a collector of signed vinyl, cassettes and CDs.
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