You Kansas boys, the de-progging will continue until morale improves!

Time for round two of our popular (?!?) deprogging program, letting good ol' Kansas go of their prog pretenions a little earlier than they did for real. If you have checked the de-progged verion of Leftoverture and its accompanying write-up, then you know that I feel that Kansas always was a bit of wolf in sheep's clothing, finally bursting out of their woolly disguise to be the AOR/mainstream rock band they always wanted to be at the turn of the decade. You'll also know that I find their prog ambitions to often be misguided, especially with their often dreadfully timed and obviously only-there-for-credit instrumental solos. So, round two does the same thing that round one did: A grating solo? An ill-advised prog section? Gone and gone! Admittedly, they were already on their way to more conventional pop songs, generally going for shorter songs than previously, yet still with some grafted on prog sections that in this version have gone the way of the dodo. 

All in all, five of the tracks have been edited: "Paradox", "The Spider" (which admittedly only leaves a snatch of this already short song), "Closet Chronicle", "Nobody's Home" and "Helplessly Hoping". As with Leftoverture, what's left is more of an art pop album than the Yes imitation these good ol' boys from Topeka were trying to be. To be fair, Point of Know Return doesn't only have the acoustic guitar by the campfire classic "Dust In The Wind" that ultimately turned off a lot of their old prog fans from the band for 'selling out'. It also had what is maybe not their best song from their prog era - that one might still be "Carry On Wayward Son" - but the one song that showed how they could best align their pop and their prog instincts. The title song is somewhat of an ideal Kansas song: it has a great big pop hook, some thankfully short prog sections, the usual tempo changes etc., but finally does all of this and gets out in less than three and a half minutes! Well played, Kansas! If only you had been so disciplined more often!

There are still enough traces of prog if you're a fan, and definitely more than a shot of rock'n'roll, things that then started to drift into more of an AOR sound on follow-up Monolith. So, this is the last - and possibly best - of the classic Kansas era, in a leaner, meaner version. So, get ready for some heartland proggers slightly de-progged...but still laying some kick ass music...

The Sunflower State's Proggiest...De-Progged!

During my recent write-up accompanying *shels I enquired about the readership's tips concerning lesser-known outfits in the genre, which quickly led to the rebuke that Pink Floyd weren't prog, and neither were Kansas. And while I leave the former question for some other time, some other place and probably someone else, I can definitely concur with the second idea. Kansas never really were a progressive rock band. They were a bar boogie band with delusions of grandeur. Which isn't as bad as it sounds! Where would mankind be without the occasional bout of delusions of grandeur? Not very far along, that is certain. But yeah, Kansas, inspired by their idols from the other side of the big pond, they deperately tried to look the part, garnishing their songs with the required solos and extending them into long, self-important song structures like they've seen their British idols do. 

But here's the thing: It still is ersatz Prog, if your investment into the sound and signifiers of prog rock are mostly cosmetic. You can take any random track by, say, Yes and then debate whether that other long-winded solo is really necessary, but you can always see how the band came to it, how the song is constructed so that it would lead into that solo at that moment. With Kansas, you simply can't. You merely get the impression that there is now a keyboard solo because there hasn't been one for a minute and a half and it wouldn't sound proggish enough if there weren't. Seriously, Kansas has some of the worst-integrated solos I've ever heard. A good number of their songs aren't so much built to launch from one section to another, they are being interrupted by what the members no doubt felt was a signature solo to ensure maximum progressiveness. 

Here's Kansas' dirty little secret, though it didn't stay very secret for very long: At the heart, they always were an AOR rock band, it just took them a good long while to admit it, before they finally relented at the beginning of the 80s and fully embraced the power ballad/arena rock associated with that. But the inklings that they were always closer to Boston or Styx rather than Genesis or Yes were always there, only somewhat obscured by the pretentiousness of the titles, lyrics and arrangements. I mean, what do you get when a bunch of country boys from the sunflower state try to be as prog as possible? A wannabe epic humbly (or falsely humorously) titled "Magnum Opus" that features section titles like 'Father Padilla Meets The Perfect Gnat' because Peter Gabriel would come up with shit like that. 

There's no shame in being demasked as fraudsters despite all good intentions. And I'm not as cruel as Allmusic's big boss Stephen Thomas Erlewine, who denounces the double whopper of their "crippling ambition" and "lack of skills" for this album. They weren't completely useless boobs either, now, STE! But let's make the whole 'Kansas really was a pop band all along' more clear by getting rid of some of the excesses, shall we? So, to cut to the chase, I cut out all the superfluous stuff - the misshapen solos and, in the case of "Magnum Opus" whole sections that got on my nerves and I didn't want to hear again. Is this a major overstepping of the One Buck Guy in terms of Kansas' intentions? Of course it is! But it's for their and our own good! Leftoverture should have been the big beginning of their pop phase, with only minor prog touches. This version comes closer to that, though really I wasn't as radical as this write-up makes it sound. 

At the end of the day, only four of the tracks here have been edited: "What's On My Mind" "Miracles Out Of Nowhere", "Cheyenne Anthem" and "Magnum Opus", and apart from the latter most cuts were minor, usually a solo or two. We're easing people into the de-progging project. If, however, some of you think this is a worthwhile endeavor, know that follow-up Point Of Know Return has also been de-progged for my own personal listenng pleasure and may follow on these pages if there is interest. 

So, Leftoverture deprogged. Hope y'all check this out...and if anyone has an opinion on whether this worked for you or not, let me know in the comments...