Kansas, Frampton anticlimactic finale

by Steve Webb, The Knickerbocker News, September 8, 1981

When Kansas left the stage Sunday night at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center amid the strains of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” it ended what will probably end up one of the two most successful seasons the center has had, in attendance terms.

Approximately 9,700 attended the rock show, and 2,700 attended one the night before featuring Peter Frampton. Both artists did credible shows; they played the hits, a little something in between, and did their best to communicate with the crowd.

Still, the two acts were an anticlimactic end for a season with a half dozen downright excellent concerts.

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Robby Steinhardt of Kansas doesn’t pronounce that word, “quality,” in the same nasal way as Ramone, but he sounded just as earnest when he explained “We’re going to give you quality, rather than quantity” to the crowd three songs into the Kansas set.

The band hasn’t lost a bit of its tightness, its harmony or its stage presence during the last three years. But the violinist’s statement and various other elements of the band are disturbing because of the attitude they imply.

For his lecture “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a passage that makes a good deal of sense as popular music criticism. “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.”

I like too many rock bands inspired by European classical music to knock someone for playing it. But Kansas is one of those American groups who see something inferior in the American influences for rock’n’roll. Its attitude goes further than its music to suggest that a musician like B.B. King, who is far more original than Kansas and offers much more emotion in his playing, must be discounted as non-quality.

Perhaps the band should note the words of one “courtly muse of Europe,” Dave Edmunds: “Without Elvis, there couldn’t have been any Kansas.”

The Albany rock band Visitor offered a strong opening set — certainly one more congruous than the Ramones was for Peter Frampton — before Kansas. The quartet got a nice reception from the Kansas fans, and probably should have been allowed to play an encore.

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