REO Speedwagon’s legendary guitarist Gary Richrath, a native of my hometown of Peoria, passed away on September 13 at age 65, which is a ripe old age for a rock star. His death marks an end to a musical era—I encourage you to skip the schlocky ballads of the band’s latter years and listen to the high-intensity, guitar-jamming madness of “157 Riverside Avenue” to get a true measure of his prodigious talent. His passing, and his band’s demise, is emblematic of a larger societal change as well: the increasing irrelevance of flyover country to the cultural world at large, and the growing chasm between red and blue America.
Forty years ago a talented band could be based in central Illinois, tour regularly along the Interstate 74 corridor—with an occasional foray into Chicago or St. Louis—and have a real chance of being discovered by a major label. This was precisely the path REO Speedwagon followed, and they weren’t the only 1970s band to go from Peoria to stardom: Rockford band Cheap Trick and Head East, hailing from south-central Illinois, also rode the central Illinois circuit to stardom, and several other bands from that milieu secured major label contracts.
However, the path from Peoria to rock stardom has become much more vertiginous in the ensuing decades. Bands don’t simply leap from central Illinois into the limelight: Despite the social democratization the Internet revolution was supposed to engender, music and the other powerful, high-paying occupations have become more geographically concentrated than ever before. These days, the route for anyone in Peoria hoping to make the big time entails buying a one-way ticket for New York, Los Angeles, or some other metropolis along the coasts.
REO’s own journey from Peoria to stardom was helped by the fact that in the 1970s the Champaign-Bloomington-Peoria corridor boasted a surfeit of college-aged, relatively homogeneous men, nearly all of whom liked live guitar-based rock music and could (and did) frequent bars with a dizzying regularity, thanks to the drinking age being 18 at the time. Students listened almost exclusively to the lone album-oriented radio station in each town, which featured REO songs in heavy rotation from the time of the band’s first album almost until the format’s demise.
The local attention REO received not only generated enough money and chutzpah to tour outside of their central Illinois base, it helped get them the attention of major record labels.
Alas, the music world doesn’t work this way anymore—a local band could never get its music played on a Peoria radio station these days, since they are all programmed elsewhere, and given the sheer number of stations in the region it’s not clear it would help much anyway. There are still live music venues in each town, but they are fewer in number and have smaller crowds: My brother, who plays in a band that regularly appears in these venues, reports that few non-cover bands perform these days, and hardly any of them are from the area. The idea that a band could use the Peoria scene as a launching pad to fame and fortune now seems slightly absurd.
The last central Illinois band to achieve some measure of renown is called Augustana, named after my Rock Island, Ill., alma mater because they thought that cool kids went to college there—a preposterous notion but one I’m too fond of to otherwise dispute. The band fled for Los Angeles a decade ago, not long after it formed, and worked the Southern California scene to get a recording contract. It first gained notoriety when the TV show Scrubs used one of its songs over the closing credits. It is hard to fathom the band making the big time had it remained in Illinois.
But it’s not just the music industry that’s become more concentrated: These days, a college student who wants to do finance has to move to New York; if he wants to do policy he has to skip the state capital and move to Washington; and if he aspires to be a writer or actor it behooves him to get to New York or Los Angeles. To some degree this has always been true, of course, but there used to be more opportunity for someone with talent and perseverance to leapfrog into the big leagues based on some modicum of success at the minor league level. It’s not clear that path exists anymore: It certainly doesn’t in music, and I’m not sure it does anywhere else, either.
For instance, while established investors can afford to reside in the backwaters of Peoria and still make money—my Catholic high school was kept open for years by the munificence of a wealthy financier who did precisely that—these people are few and far between, and entry-level jobs with such entities are rare. A former student who proved herself to be an adept bond trader for an insurance concern in rural Wisconsin remarked that while she loved her job, actually moving to Wall Street was foreclosed to her. And without such an option, despite her career success, she had no leverage to get a raise or a promotion.
Not only is it more important than ever to relocate to the capital of the finance/entertainment/political world to have a chance to succeed in these industries, but breaking into those worlds from the hinterland is more difficult than ever. The New Yorker may be full of stories of talented writers who left the farm to succeed in the Big Apple (such as William Maxwell, born and raised in central Illinois) but talent is never enough: It takes perseverance and a dose of luck to get that first break. And people in New York or L.A. are much more likely to get lucky than someone emailing their stories or demo tapes from Peoria.
A college student from Long Island wanting a job on Wall Street has myriad advantages over an Augustana student: It’s more likely that he’ll have some sort of passing acquaintance to someone who can get him an internship via his parents, neighbors, or maybe his professors. What’s more, he can survive on an intern’s salary indefinitely by sponging off his parents. The same is true for the scion of a Beverly Hills doctor wanting to break into entertainment, or a precocious college kid in Bethesda looking for a congressional internship.
College students in the Midwest are less likely to know anyone in L.A., New York, or Washington, have little idea how to go about getting a job in any of these professions, and find the prospect of moving there without an identifiable contact daunting or, for many, logistically impossible.
One summer a few years ago I found myself in charge of procuring interns for a think tank, and I took it upon myself to send our job announcement to the economics departments and career services offices of several schools in central Illinois. Not a single one garnered a reply, let alone an applicant. On the other hand, Harvard flew someone to D.C. to talk to me about the positions and hand-deliver résumés.
Thomas Piketty is little more than a shyster, and his notion that income inequality has dramatically increased the last few decades wildly overstates reality. However, the increasing agglomeration in entertainment, finance, and politics over the last few decades has exacerbated certain differences—but those differences have more to do with blue state denizens finding it easier to move up the greasy ladder in the key professions in this country than anything else. Most red state college graduates simply don’t have the contacts, financial resources, or know-how to succeed in the occupations where success brings the greatest rewards.
People can and do have happy, successful lives without working in these industries, of course, but the fact that they are becoming the sole province of blue America is disturbing. There’s no easy solution other than for those of us who did leave our red state hometowns to extend a helping hand to others who might want to follow. A former classmate of mine who’s now a film producer with an Oscar on his CV has helped a number of our townspeople break into the business. Bradley University hired a professor in the music business in L.A. who comes to Peoria four weeks a year and spends the rest of his time back in California scrounging internships for students. Multiply that by 1,000 and we are getting somewhere.
It’s a shame that the path to stardom that Gary Richrath and REO Speed-wagon followed—which involved a combination of immense talent, hard work, and dedication to a craft—doesn’t always succeed. That it’s almost sure to fail these days unless our gifted and talented people head to the big cities to get their start is an even bigger shame.
Ike Brannon is a senior fellow at the George W. Bush Institute and president of Capital Policy Analytics, a consulting firm in Washington.
