A Conversation with Seventh Key’s Billy Greer – HuffPost 3.5.14

Mike Ragogna: Billy, it looks like you’ve got a new project by your group Seventh Key. First off, how did Seventh Key come together?

Billy Greer: Well it started back in 2000. I’ve been playing and singing with Steve Walsh since 1980 when I first joined him in a band called Streets, when he had left Kansas. Before that in all my career, I had always been a lead singer, and I was kind of delegated for the most part to being a backing singer in Streets, and then Steve and I went on to join Kansas together, he went back and I went with him. So it was kind of just my way of getting out of the shadow of Steve and showing the world what I could do, so I was able to secure a record deal with Frontiers records in Italy and started recording with my old guitar player from the band Streets, Mike Slamer. We started this project together and this is our third album, actually, fourth if you count our live CD and DVD that we recorded back in 2006. It’s just my way of getting my musical stuff off–showing the world my talent as a singer and songwriter. Showing the world what I can do.

MR: How has the progress been in your mind?

BG: Well we’ve actually played a couple of gigs, and we did our live DVD. Again, Kansas is my bread and butter so I haven’t put a lot of the effort in to where we can actually tour. We did one other live show in Stuttgart for the record company, we put together a band and took it over to a record company function to showcase a bunch of the bands that are on Frontiers records. So we have done a couple of live gigs, it’s something I can look forward to if Kansas decides to stop touring at some point. I don’t know if that’s going to happen but I’m just looking out for down the road or if I can somehow work in a Seventh Key touring schedule around Kansas’ schedule somehow. So there’s a lot of logistics that will have to be worked out for this to be a touring situation with Seventh Key, but it’s a great studio project and I’m very proud of the record and the music and I’ve gotten a lot of good response, especially from the Europeans and Scandinavians who are into this melodic rock music that Seventh Key tends to move toward.

MR: In addition to Mike and Chet [Wynd], you also have other guests on this project, Terry Brock and David Manion.

BG: Yeah, Terry’s sang backing vocals on all three projects that I’ve done and was actually on the live DVD and was part of the live performances we did. Terry and I have been friends since the early eighties, so he and I have played together and sang together since I lived in Atlanta. He’s sang backing vocals on Kansas records, too. I’ve known him for a lot of years. I also have David Manion who’s been a consistent member of Seventh Key, he’s done all of the live stuff and played on all three records as well. I’ve got a lot of my good friends who are in the business, Bobby Capps from 38 Special, who’s the their keyboard player and backing vocalist to sing backing vocals, Billy Trudel who worked for Elton John for years and years as a backing vocalist, he’s on there as well. We have a really good blend of some great voices in the harmonies and stuff. I’m really proud of it.

MR: The album is titled I Will Survive and the title track, to my ears, sounds pretty close to Kansas material.

BG: Yeah, we’ve branched out a little bit, though. Mike came from a 1970s band called City Boy, they were an English band out of Birmingham and they had a Top 100 Billboard hit here in the states and came over and actually opened for Styx and they recorded several albums. Mike got his production experience working with City Boy’s producer Mutt Lange, a young Mutt Lange who came to England and did three albums with Mike. Of course Mutt’s one of the most famous producers and Mike learned a lot of his studio techniques from Mutt. We did these on a pretty cheap budget so we basically met at a small studio in California in Mike’s house. He turned his garage into a studio so that’s where the lion’s share of the work is done, and I have a small studio in my house here in Savannah, Georgia so we have the possibility of swapping files via the internet which is great these days instead of having to travel all the way to California to sing a line or two or play a bass part or something like that. That’s just the state of music these days; you don’t have to travel all over the world to work on a record with somebody.

MR: No. But touring, you do have to go around the world. What’s the dynamic like when you guys go out on stage?

BG: Oh, well, that’s the most fun time of every day that we have in Kansas. The work part is actually the travel. You know what it’s like traveling, dealing with airport security and sitting in airports and dealing with early lobby calls after very little sleep and renting cars and driving for miles and miles and when you finally get on the stage and your adrenaline gets up and you’re watching people have fun and then you have to get back off the stage and go try to grab some sleep before you have to get up again at seven thirty in the morning to get to the airport and catch another flight to another city. We don’t do the tour bus thing anymore. We found by flying commercial and renting cars and driving and just doing weekends, we get more downtime at home and more time with our families that way, which makes it more liveable for us.

MR: What is it that you’re able to do in Seventh Key that’s really fulfilling?

BG: Well, to be honest with you the writing situation in Kansas was kind of a closed shop after I got into the band. I’m not any original member so there was a hierarchy of writers, Kerry [Livgren] and Steve being the main writers. Anything that I presented had to go through Steve, so I found it very difficult for any of the songs or ideas that I had to be presented on a Kansas record. The last record that Kansas recorded in a studio was back in 1999, so there really isn’t an outlet anymore through Kansas for me to present ideas. I needed that creative path to present my ideas and get them recorded. Mike, of course, is my writing partner and he and I together make a great team. We both are in tune to the same type of music. City Boy was kind of a progressive band, so this album in particular became our progressive side goal. Being around Kerry and being around Steve and playing the progressive music of Kansas over the years obviously has had an effect on me and what comes out creatively in my songwriting.

MR: Let me ask you about that. When you look at Seventh Key’s future, what would your ultimate goal be? What’s the fantasy of what you’ll be doing five years from now?

BG: Well for the present it would be nice to go out and open up for Kansas and then take a fifteen minute break and come back out playing bass with Kansas. To be honest, the keyboard player David Manion is our lighting director from Kansas, the drummer that I used on the video for the song “I Will Survive”–which you can check out on my website http://www.billygreer.com–is Eric Holmquist, and Eric just happens to be our drum tech in Kansas. So three of the members of Seventh Key would be covered by Kansas’ nickel. That would be the ideal situation. Other than that I’d love to go over and do the festival tours in Europe and in Scandinavia. That seems to be where our largest fan base is for our music. They still really like the melodic rock type of music that was recorded by bands like Journey and Foreigner and even Kansas and REO Speedwagon and that kind of thing, they like that sound still. There’s still a market for that kind of sound over there.

MR: It gets labelled under the name “prog rock.” Where do you think that genre is at right now?

BG: Well strangely enough it seems to be thriving. If it’s not mainstream, at least there’s some kind of cult of prog rock followers out there that are still way into prog rock. We recently had this band, District 97, that opened for us on tour–just to give them an opportunity to break, because they’re young but they are awesome musicians. It’s unique music, it’s not simple at all. But prog is still thriving. Dream Theater is still out there doing it, there are all kinds of bands that are still thriving like that. I guess ours has a progressive edge to it, but it also has a melodic edge as well. Our choruses have big, thick harmonies and big choruses that pay off. It’s not so much that we play ten-minute songs or anything like that and go off instrumentally for minutes at a time.

MR: So what do you think is the future for prog rock?

BG: I think there will probably be a future. I don’t know what it is. With the internet as it is, anything is possible now except for an artist to make a good living my selling their music. I guess some artists can but the way that the system is set up now with all of the different websites where you can stream music for a certain monthly fee and the amount of money that’s being paid to the artist just doesn’t seem quite fair to me. I have issues with that. My songs have been played hundreds and hundreds of times and I get a statement that I made three or four bucks. Something ain’t quite right there.

MR: Yeah, internet rates haven’t really caught up yet, have they.

BG: They have not in my opinion, no.

MR: I think that’s one of the priorities. I can remember when CDs came out, record companies were trying to keep the same royalty rates for $19.98 CDs as $5.98 vinyl.

BG: Right. The thing is, it’s been about seven or eight years since my last studio record had come out. I didn’t realize that CDs are on the brink of being extinct, to be honest with you. They’re just not selling that many CDs, most people download their music through iTunes or Amazon or other download websites. Again, for the record company–and I had to fight really hard for them to get a decent royalty split on digital downloads, because it doesn’t cost them anything, all they’ve got to do is upload it to a site and the site takes a percentage and the record company takes a percentage. I fought as well as I could to get as large of a percentage as possible because there’s no cost in digital downloads. Of course they’ve got the advertising and stuff like that, but the record company I’ve been dealing with has been pretty fair with me and I think they’ve done a really good job helping me promote this record and helping me get interviews like this one and radio and stuff like that to let people know about it.

MR: Billy, let’s take a look at Kansas. How big of a mark do you think Kansas is leaving?

BG: Personally, I was a fan of the band before I joined the band. I’ve been with the band for almost twenty nine years now. We celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the band last year, so that was a pretty good mark for the band, four decades of Kansas. They’ve got some songs that have really stood the test of time, “Carry On My Wayward Son,” “Point Of No Return,” “Dust In The Wind,” some of those lyrics are just timeless. Everywhere we’ve gone in the world, if we start playing one of those, people of all ages light up. They just love that song and are aware of that song and know that song. Kerry was presented with an award, he solely wrote “Dust In The Wind” and “Carry On My Wayward Son,” EMI gave him an award for the amount of times those songs were played. If they were played end-to-end it would last a span of five years. Just those two songs. They also gave Steve an award for “Point Of No Return” because if all of its plays were lined up it would be over two years. That speaks volumes about how many times those songs have been played. You hear them every day still on classic rock radio and oldies radio and things like that. They still carry the message. I’m so happy that the lyrics that were written for the Kansas records carry a message that is basically timeless.

MR: And probably universal, too. The show Supernatural uses “Carry On My Wayward Son” like it’s theme song to the series.

BG: Yep, you’ve got it. It’s not embarrassing to be in your sixties and singing these lyrics because they’re about searching for something in your life, and to sing that when you’re sixty is not out of character, like singing about a seventeen year-old girl when you’re a sixty five year-old man.

MR: [laughs] And speaking of Kansas, you have violinist David Ragsdale on four tracks.

BG: Yeah, that kind of made it a lot more Kansas-y as well. I don’t think there will ever be another studio Kansas album, I may be wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be the desire there. The next thing coming up from the band at some point this year: We had a film crew from Sony shadowing us for part of the year this year, filming and doing interview with other people who have been involved with us and things like that. So there will be a documentary coming out about the band and how the band came to be. We were inducted into the Kansas Hall Of Fame and the Georgia Music Hall Of Fame because the band has lived in Atlanta for about the last thirty eight years. We’re starting to get some little nods for the band’s accomplishments.

MR: Right, and for having so much expertise this is a fair question to ask you: What advice do you have for new artists?

BG: All I can say is “Don’t give up on your dreams.” Have in your mind that you’re going to make it and if you don’t, be satisfied with how far you get in life. “Making It” is kind of your point of view. If you can make a living making music, then I consider that “Making it.” It doesn’t necessarily have to be on a huge stage playing to twenty thousand people, but if it’s your passion, it’s your passion. Keep up with it. Put yourself in the right situation. If you have to move to a larger city or a mecca where you might be discovered, then that might be the thing to do. That’s what happened to me, I was born and raised in East Tennessee. It was a small town, so there wasn’t much of a musical scene there at all, so I moved to Atlanta and that’s where I got discovered and met people and put myself in the position to meet Steve Walsh and finally on the pathway into Kansas. So be in the right place at the right time, practice your instrument, and have fun while you do it.

MR: Nice. Is there a song on the album that represents Seventh Key?

BG: “I Will Survive.” That just sums it up for me. Through all the adversity and things that have happened I just think you’ve got to hang on, hang tight and somehow things will work out and you’ll get to it. I just have to keep that positive attitude all the time. At least, I try to, best I can. So far today things have worked out for me. I’ve been able to have a wonderful career playing music and that’s all I’ve had to do. I haven’t had to get a day job to support my musical habit in several years. I’ve been very fortunate in that this is my life. Making music is my life.

MR: That’s a beautiful place to land. This has been really sweet and I appreciate your time.

BG: Thank you so much.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne