A Decade of Rock and Roll 1970-1980 (1980)



Disc One
  1. Sophisticated Lady
  2. Music Man
  3. Golden Country
  4. Son of a Poor Man
  5. Lost in a Dream
  6. Reelin'
  7. Keep Pushin'
  8. (I Believe) Our Time is Gonna Come
  9. Breakaway
  9. Lightning
  
Disc Two
  1. Like You Do
  2. Flying Turkey Trot
  3. 157 Riverside Avenue
  4. Ridin' the Storm Out
  5. Roll with the Changes
  6. Time for Me to Fly
  7. Say You Love Me or Say Goodnight
  8. Only the Strong Survive
  9. Back on the Road Again


 

TTiming is everything, and the release of this double album couldn’t have been timed much better. Coming out right before the band’s commercial explosion with Hi Infidelity the following year, A Decade of Rock and Roll ended up being a pretty decent way to catch everyone up on the long road REO had traveled to get where they were about to go. Before the sold-out arenas, platinum records, and love ballads flooding the radio, there was a band that had been grinding it out for years—and this compilation does a respectable job documenting that era.

Like most double albums from the time, this one’s broken into four sides—each with its own vibe. The strongest material here is wisely pulled from their two most recent studio albums at the time, You Can Tune a Piano, But You Can't Tuna Fish and Nine Lives. Those records finally had the band sounding confident, tight, and on the verge of something big. One side is dedicated to those songs alone, and it makes for the most consistent stretch of the whole set.

Side three (or, on the CD version, the first part of disc two) is where things really come alive—literally. It’s a short but effective showcase of the band’s live prowess. Back in the day, these guys built their reputation the hard way, night after night on stage, and it shows. A few of these performances are lifted straight from their live album Live: You Get What You Play For, and they remind you exactly why people started paying attention in the first place. REO was always better with a crowd in front of them.

The rest of the set digs further into the band’s early history—some of which may be a bit of a stretch for casual fans. There’s a generous helping of songs from the Kevin Cronin years (both of them), which makes sense considering how much of the band’s future was tied to his voice and songwriting. The Terry Luttrell and Michael Murphy eras also make brief appearances, but this compilation makes no secret about where it thinks the band really started coming into its own.

To be fair, some of the older cuts haven’t exactly aged well. And in the years since, most of REO’s later greatest hits packages have all but erased this early material, focusing instead on the hit-laden 1980s. That’s probably fine for most fans. But back in 1980, this was the only place where you could get a pretty full picture of REO’s long climb to the top—without having to dig through nine different albums.

Worth noting, though: if you’re looking for something a little more compact, The Essential REO Speedwagon, released in 2004, covers nearly all the same ground and then some—minus the vinyl nostalgia. Still, for fans wanting to hear what the band was all about before the radio fell in love with them, A Decade of Rock and Roll makes for a solid listen.





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