REO Speedwagon released their 9th studio album, Hi Infidelity on November 21, 1980. The album produced two of their greatest hits of all time, Keep on Loving You (#1 on the Hot 100) and Take It on the Run (#5 on the Hot100), but two other songs from the album are two of our favorite songs from the band. Don’t Let Him Go peaked at #11 on the Rock charts and #24 on the Hot 100 charts, and Tough Guys peaked at #25 on the Rock charts.
Enjoy this look back at REO Speedwagon in concert back in the day performing Don’t Let Him Go and Tough Guys!
Tough Guys That was an important song to me, and it still is. That song has found its way back into our set list. It disappeared for a long time. I m not exactly sure why, but it s back. It was a pretty vulnerable statement. It was a reaction to having been bullied when I was a kid. So it came from a very, very vulnerable place. I don t know if you were ever bullied, but especially, because I grew up in the and , there wasn t the kind of consciousness as there is today, about bullying. Now there is zero tolerance for bullying, which is frikkin great. No kid should have to endure some of the shit that I endured myself, and I saw other kids who got way worse than me. Let s face it, someone that s bullying someone, they re just kids too. They don t know any better. It s probably a learned behavior from their home life. They re probably the same kids whose parents are beating on them at home and they come out and act it out on some other vulnerable kid. It s something that there s a lot of shame involved in it, so when I wrote that song, I think it was slightly veiled, I guess, but I think that anyone, maybe, anyone who has been bullied, would hear that song and it would touch a chord in them.