Robby Steinhardt
We pay tribute to the late Kansas violinist, who died in July.
As one of the original members of Kansas, Robby Steinhardt helped craft the band’s distinctive sound from their 1974 debut onwards. Also known for his work with Stormbringer and Jon Anderson, the violinist and singer was working on a new solo album before his untimely death in July 2021. Prog remembers the virtuoso musician.
Robby Steinhardt once blamed being a member of Kansas for encouraging bad habits in his violin playing. “It wasn’t the band’s fault,” he insisted in 1981. “But I naturally tended to hold my violin onstage so I could hear what the rest of the boys were doing. That meant I was touching the instrument in a way that meant I couldn’t be anywhere near my best.” Steinhardt was a virtuoso musician. Born in Chicago on May 25, 1950, he was classically trained and began violin lessons when he was eight. “I was lucky that my adopted dad, Milton, was a significant musical figure at the University Of Kansas [he was the head of the music history department]. And he encouraged me to play with the best musicians around, including orchestras.”
In 1972, Steinhardt joined a fledgling band in the city of Topeka called White Clover, who a year later became Kansas. He shared vocals with keyboard player Steve Walsh. But it was his violin playing which helped to establish them as one of the most dynamic progressively inclined acts in the States at the time.
Steinhardt’s importance to the Kansas style was obvious on their self-titled debut album, released in 1974. It gave them a more classical sound that was individual and refreshing. And he was a major figure on their breakthrough album, 1976’s Leftoverture, which sold more than five million copies in the US and featured the immortal hit single Carry On Wayward Son. A year later, they had their biggest charting album in the US as Point Of Know Return peaked at No.4, with Dust In The Wind becoming their only Top 10 single there. And on March 25, 1978, Kansas made their live debut in the UK, playing a sold-out date at the Hammersmith Odeon, where Steinhardt was very much the centre of attention. His colourful persona and erudite yet occasionally manic manner of playing the violin held the crowd spellbound. He overshadowed everyone else on the stage with his charisma and ease. This was the man who had become the face of Kansas.
“I love being in front of people,” he once said. “While I enjoy the process of creating new music in the studio, I just become a different person on stage. I seem to grow in stature several inches and my hair just explodes. I don’t set out to be the one everyone looks at, but it’s the way things seem to happen, and I believe the fact that people are watching me means the others can just get on with playing, away from the pressure. That suits them.”
Steinhardt was never a prolific writer. In fact, he co-wrote just four songs on the eight Kansas studio albums he played on between 1974 and 1982. However, this wasn’t something that bothered him.
“Kerry [Livgren, guitar] is better at this side of things than I am,” he said. “I just don’t feel motivated to get involved as a writer. I contribute in the studio in the way I help to bring his compositions to life. Why should I try and do something that I am just not very good at? It’s better for the band that I stick to my strengths.”
Steinhardt left Kansas for personal reasons at the conclusion of the tour to promote the Vinyl Confessions album in 1982, and teamed up with guitarist/vocalist Rick Moon on the project Steinhardt-Moon, who released a self-titled mini album in 1995. And for six years from 1990 he was a member of a band known as Steinhardt-Moon/Stormbringer, as the aforementioned duo teamed up with Florida’s Stormbringer. This collaboration released two albums. Then in 1996, he was one of the performers on the Jethro Tull tribute album To Cry You A Song – A Collection Of Tull Tales, contributing vocals and violin on A New Day Yesterday.
In 1997, the violinist came back home and returned to the Kansas fold. Over the next decade he brought his inimitable talents on such albums as 2000’s Somewhere To Elsewhere, which featured all five original members of the band. However in March 2006, Steinhardt again quit, saying that he no longer wanted to be a member of the band. Seven years later he suffered a heart attack, which necessitated having a quadruple bypass operation. There were doubts as to whether he would ever be able to play again, but Stormbringer got the musician to do the occasional live guest appearance with them, as he successfully got back on his artistic feet. He also played violin on the track Activate, featured on Jon Anderson’s 2019 solo album 1000 Hands: Chapter One.
More recently Steinhardt was in the throes of planning a solo venture. He’d just finished recording an album with producer Michael Franklin, and was due to go out on tour later this year when complications brought on by acute pancreatitis led to his death on July 17 at the age of 71. It has robbed the prog world of one of the most important Americans in the history of progressive music.
Livgren summed up how much Steinhardt meant to the success of Kansas: “Robby was the link between the band on the stage and the audience.”
The man himself said that it was the fan reaction to the classic songs that inspired him. “When I play Carry on Wayward Son or Dust In The Wind and see what these mean to people, then that’s what moves me to perform them to the best of my ability. I need that feedback, which is why I come into my own onstage.” An undoubted master craftsman, what made Steinhardt arguably the Kansas member most in touch with the fans was that he was their man of the people.
“The fact that Kansas have sold millions of records is a meaningless figure,” he claimed in 1981. “But when I see the faces of those who’ve bought our albums and singles, then it adds flesh to the bone. Then the reason we do this makes sense.”
See www.robbysteinhardt.com for more information.
“ROBBY WAS THE LINK BETWEEN THE BAND ON THE STAGE AND THE AUDIENCE.”
Kerry Livgren