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Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon sings "Can't Fight This Feeling" during a concert in Tinley Park on June 4.
Styx performs "Lady" at Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre in Tinley Park on June 4.
CHICAGO — Dear Illinois, I can’t fight this feeling anymore. It’s time to bring this ship into the shore, and throw away the oars. We sailed on together. We drifted apart. But I know, if the world turned upside down, I know you’d always be around. Your hands build me up when I’m sinking. The search is over. You were with me all the while. After all the rain, I will be the flame. I did it all for the glory of love. Now my life has meaning.
But Illinois, you have an image problem. On paper your chief exports include machine parts, medication, corn, pumpkins and dump trucks. In the nation’s imagination, your exports are dysfunction, casserole as pizza, Blues Brothers cover bands, Cubs hats and Kanye West.
The main export of Illinois is — the power ballad. Soaring. Emotive. Majestically corny. Songs named “Right Here Waiting for You” and “The Search is Over” and “The Glory of Love” and “You’re the Inspiration.” Songs by homegrown cornerstones such as Styx, REO Speedwagon, Chicago, Richard Marx and Earth, Wind & Fire. Even Cheap Trick and The Smashing Pumpkins have dabbled.
Many of those performers are on tour this summer.
Around the onset of Nirvana in the 1990s, the power ballad became a source of irony, cliches tucked into cornballs. Or perhaps we accepted its inevitability. The power ballad never died. Next time a Disney princess lets it go from an ice castle, remember: Styx was there first.
They are Dear John letters to us, our hearts stripped bare. They are insufferable and unexpectedly poignant.
As a 50-year-old woman explained to me at a Chicago concert in Moline this spring — yes, I drove to Moline to see Chicago — “The best power ballad not only reminds you of some specific time in your life, they remind you of you.”
I visited several acts that got their start in Illinois and are known for power ballads. Turns out, they have complicated feelings, too.
“The first true power ballad we had was ‘Keep on Loving You,’” said Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon. “I worked on it the night before I brought it into the studio and started playing it at rehearsal and our guitarist, the late Gary Richrath, was not quite sure about it.
"We were a rock band. He plugged his Les Paul into a Marshall stack and, seriously, he started to drown out me, and this song I kept playing," Cronin said. "But the guitar sounded great! And when it was over, we looked at each other. It felt special.
"‘Keep on Loving You’ went No. 1, so I brought in ‘Can’t Fight This Feeling.’ That was not warmly greeted but, by then, they figured, ‘If we have to play this (expletive) song, at least it’ll be a hit.’”
When you think “power ballad,” you hear a predictable structure: Whispery tinkling piano keys or acoustic guitar strums that erupt into mounting vocals and crunching guitars, singers with eyes screwed shut, unleashing their guts.
Dennis DeYoung, former frontman of Styx, said: “They can’t just be soft and loud; they have to be about love. They should have a power chord lurking in the background. Rock was for the groin, Dylan was for the head and the power ballad is for the heart.”
Journey’s “Lights” is about a romance with San Francisco. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is a power ballad to a Great Lakes shipping disaster. “We Are the World” was a charity power ballad urging social activism. Later, Eminem created power ballads about obsessions.
For a lot of performers, the power ballad is a bond with their audience and a conundrum.
“When I play ‘Right Here Waiting for You,’ be it Detroit or Sri Lanka, the audience goes nuts,” said Richard Marx, who grew up in Highland Park. "But (that kind of song) is also a small part of what I’ve done. Yet they define you, and that’s true of a lot of us who got our start playing more upbeat stuff on rock radio.”
James Young, who formed Styx in 1970, said that when DeYoung introduced the power ballad to Styx there was no doubt a tension existed.
"I was very much against it," he said. "My taste was badass hard-rocking guitar, and Dennis kind of became the ballad guy.”
Jonathan Cain of Journey, who grew up sparring with “the greasers” of his West Side high school, said his goal of injecting an element of romance and unashamed vulnerability in rock was a reaction to the traditional image of Chicago tough guys.
“But if anyone thinks there’s some calculated formula with these songs, please send me that formula,” DeYoung said. “That and the formula for a smaller prostate; I could use.”
DeYoung jokes so much about his power ballads it’s hard to say when he’s serious. He wrote “Babe” for his wife’s birthday “in an attempt to not buy another piece of jewelry.” “Come Sail Away” was written at a piano in Frankfort, Illinois, “during a terrible winter. When he introduced “Lady” in 1973 the record company “complained we sound like The Hollies then end like Zeppelin. They doubted that radio would play it.”
Yet “Lady” is the only real power ballad that Styx performs these days.
Cronin said some of the songs linger for decades because they’re less about a girl or a boy but more about the act of feeling.
“We’re corny in the Midwest,” said Jim Peterik who grew up in Oak Lawn. “I doubt any of this is coincidence. I doubt there’s a good reason why. Turns out, we’re not afraid to put sentiment in a song, declare our love, then rhyme the whole thing.”
As a member of Berwyn's Ides of March, his first power ballad was “L.A. Goodbye” in 1971. Then as co-founder and co-songwriter of Survivor — “Eye of the Tiger” — his biggest power ballad became the 1980s staple, “The Search is Over.”
“I knew it would be a big prom song,” he said. "So there was a risk; it couldn’t get too soppy. But by then it was a bit calculated. It was good business. Each (Survivor) album needed at least one (power ballad) or we cut ourselves off from radio play."
The golden age of the power ballad was the 1980s and early 1990s. David Metzer, a professor of music history at the University of British Columbia, calls the genre “a reminder of how much people value sincerity in pop music, which can seem so mass-produced.”
Seventies weepies like “Without You” and “All By Myself” helped establish the cresting of big feelings on Top 40 that defined power ballads for decades. In the ‘70s, Chicago’s Earth, Wind & Fire — on tunes like “That’s the Way of the World” and “After the Love Has Gone” — created power ballads minus power chords. Decades later that grew into the orchestral bombast of The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Disarm” and the mournful self-examination in Kanye’s “808s & Heartbreak.”
Backstage in Moline, Robert Lamm, with Chicago co-founders Lee Loughnane and James Pankow, ticked off a dizzying array of influences: avant-garde composers like John Cage and jazz heroes like Miles Davis and Art Blakey.
Early on, Chicago was closer to progressive rock than its power ballad years in the ‘80s. When bassist Peter Cetera brought them “If You Leave Me Now,” the rest of the group “were looking at each other like, ‘What do we do with this?’” Lamm remembers.
“If You Leave Me Now” went No. 1 in 1976 and the band became more associated with ballads. Cetera wrote many of them before leaving for a power-ballad-heavy solo career (“The Glory of Love").
The best power ballad is Journey’s “Faithfully.” My 16-year-old self would have beat up my 51-year-old self for claiming that, but it's got everything: highways, trucks, circus lights, longing, loving, wishing, clowns, restless hearts, space, time. It lasts four minutes and 24 seconds, yet in that time it’s epic. The guitar soars. Steve Perry’s voice begins soft then sails above Neal Schon’s guitar. A closing whoa-oh-oh-oh, whoa-oh-oh-oh brings together a sold-out arena of 15,000.
Songwriter Jonathan Cain said it's really a country song he wrote on a napkin while the band’s bus drove to a show.