Interview: Kansas

Fifty-plus years have seen the band Kansas travel a winding path that has included periods of major success, lulls in the band’s popularity, the arrivals and departures of multiple band members that have introduced different talents into the lineup and stretched the band’s sound into new territories, a long span of time where Kansas didn’t make new music, and since 2014, a return to making new albums and an upswing in the band’s touring business.

The past year-plus has brought new twists and challenges to the Kansas story. On the concerning side, drummer and original member Phil Ehart suffered a serious heart attack in February 2024. Against the odds, he’s recovering, but has stepped away from touring, with his drum tech Eric Holmquist taking over the drummer slot.

“The heart attack that he had they call a widow maker,” singer/keyboardist Ronnie Platt explained in a mid-April interview. “I guess there are two different kinds of widow makers of which what I was told one particular type only 15 percent of people survive and the other one only 25 percent of people survive. So that's pretty scary, but you know, Phil had everything in his corner, living an extremely clean lifestyle for being a rock star.”

Platt reports that Ehart, who remains the manager for Kansas and handles the band’s business, sounds great these days and is full of energy. But whether he’ll return to touring with Kansas is an open question.
“There's no predicting what he wants to do,” Platt said. “Will he return to the band? At this point I know he wants to come out and, not do an entire show, but play songs here and there. So as far as the future and beyond that you never know. It all depends on how he feels."

Platt himself has also had a very recent major health scare. In February he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and underwent surgery. But things worked out exceptionally well for the singer/keyboardist and he was back performing with Kansas a month later.

“Talk about taking the wind out of your sails, you know, to have the doctor say that your cancer is malignant, the first thing that came to my head was how much time do I have?” Platt said. “So to go from wondering if I had three months, six months, a year to live to a clean bill of health a month later, it's pretty spectacular.”
As it turned out, surgeons were able to remove the tumor without having to remove Platt’s thyroid, and his recovery was smooth.

“The amazing thing is after my surgery I spent about an hour and a half in recovery and I didn't even take a wheelchair out of the hospital,” Platt said. “They gave me a prescription for pain and I never even opened the bottle.”

Another positive development for Kansas has been the return of guitarist Zak Rizvi. In a 2023 interview with this writer, guitarist Richard Williams had reported that after finishing the 2020 album “The Absence of Presence,” Rizvi, who produced the album and was a main songwriter on the album (as well as 2016’s “The Prelude Implicit”), had left Kansas and there had been “little to no contact” with him since. Platt shed some light on the saga.

When Kansas got ready to make “The Absence of Presence,” the band planned to take a month away from touring to record the album. But the schedule got much crazier than planned.

“I think what happened with recording that album is we got offers to do shows that we couldn't say no to,” Platt said. “With picking up so many shows and then adding shows and then doing shows in a month where we were originally going to take off it really got to be an overload. And I think Zak, because I remember recording “The Absence of Presence,” we'd be in the studio (for) eight, nine hours, go back to the hotel and he (Rizvi) would do post production every night. And in the time that we were staying in Atlanta recording “The Absence of Presence,” he didn't go out to dinner with me once. He went right back to the hotel room and was doing comping and post production until two o'clock, three o’clock in the morning every single night and then getting up and going back to the studio. It was just, I think the pressure was just too much and he blew a gasket, you know, and needed a break.”

The group, though, reconnected with Rizvi when Williams had to miss a show and the band invited Rizvi to fill in. Platt said he thinks Rizvi realized he missed touring and soon he was welcomed back into Kansas.

“Talk about just an insanely talented guy,” Platt said of Rizvi. “What a phenomenal guitar player, his knowledge of music theory is bottomless and then to be such a great producer and songwriter, I mean anyone would want Zak in their band.”

So things are once again looking up for the band, which formed in Topeka, Kansas, where the original members – Kerry Livgren (guitar/keyboards), Steve Walsh (vocalist/keyboards), Williams, Ehart, Robby Steinhardt (violin) and Dave Hope (bass) – came together after cycling through various local bands.
When Kansas arrived on the national scene with their 1974 self-titled album, the band had already carved out a distinctive sound that blended British progressive rock and heartland hard rock, with violin giving the music a unique instrumental twist.

The band broke through with their fourth album, “Leftoverture.” Featuring the single “Carry On Wayward Son,” the 1976 album went platinum. The next album, “Point of Know Return,” (featuring the hit single “Dust in the Wind”) was another blockbuster and solidified Kansas as one of rock’s most popular bands at the time.
But success came with a cost, Williams explained in 2023, as money issues and other disagreements began to emerge, and in 1983, Kansas essentially broke up. But the time apart proved rather brief, as in 1985 as former Dixie Dregs guitarist Steve Morse and bassist Billy Greer teamed up with Walsh, Williams and Ehart in Kansas.

That violin-less lineup made two albums and lasted until 1990, while the core of Walsh, Williams and Ehart remained. They continued to lead Kansas through various lineup changes (including a reunion with Livgren for the 2000 album “Somewhere to Elsewhere”) right up until 2014, when Walsh retired and Platt, coming off a recent stint as singer in Shooting Star, joined the lineup. The band’s other current members are Williams,
Platt, who had played in various Chicago area bands for some three decades, was a life-long fan of Kansas, but he admitted he worried about whether fans would accept him as the band’s new singer.

“Right before I was about to do my first show with Kansas I saw an episode of “Behind the Music” with Styx and Lawrence Gowan taking Dennis DeYoung's place and he talks about the crowd not being so nice to him,” Platt said. “That’s putting it lightly. And I saw that episode right before my first show and I'm like I'm going to stand where Steve Walsh stood. ‘Jesus, what the heck is wrong with me. I'm throwing myself into the fire.’”
But a backlash didn’t happen, as Platt believes fans recognized his passion for Kansas’ music, and 11 years later he’s still fronting Kansas.

“My time in Shooting Star was only four years,” he said. “I thought to myself Oh my God, if this can go two years, even three years would be a dream. Anything beyond that would just, you know, it was hard to conceive.”