With Device Voice Drum (released late in 2002 by Compendia), a DVD and two-CD audio set, Phil Ehart (drums) Robbie Steinhardt (violin/vocals), Richard Williams (guitar), Billy Greer (bass/vocals) and Steve Walsh (vocals/keyboards) showed once again that they?re still hungry, still eager to prove themselves, nothing less than impressive when you consider all that they?ve already done. The band keeps an exhaustive tour schedule and although they spent most of 2002 on the road, they?re back on the road once more, for a tour that will surely carry them to the brink of 2004.

I caught up with Kansas drummer/manager Phil Ehart during one of the band?s rare stretches of time at home. While Ehart is aware of the band?s past accomplishments, it?s clear he and his bandmates have their eyes firmly fixed on the future.

For more information please visit http://www.kansasband.com/ and http://www.animusic.com/

JB: You?ve been playing live together for 30 years now. Do you still feel the same rush you did in the early days or is it better?

PE: The gigs always have something to do with the audience. It?s hard not to be influenced by them. We were influenced by audience the for the DVD. These were Kansas fans, Wheatheads, who?d come from all over the world and when you?re sitting there, playing for about 1,000 people who?ve come from far away and they?re standing there, screaming and yelling, it affects you. I think that that crowd energized the band and we were able to get a great performance out of that. But we still play for audiences that are dead sometimes but I think that that makes you work even harder sometimes because you take it as a personal challenge that you?re going to convert them. Other times, you just go, ?Oh, heck with it. They?re not going to do anything? [laughs]. You could set them on fire and they wouldn?t move. But I think [those feelings are true] in any artistic endeavor. You like to see people?s feeling and emotions and if there?s no response to what you?re doing, it does affect you as an artist. But, no matter what the audience is like, we try to do a good job every night.

JB: I know you personally spent a long time putting the project together. What made you decide you wanted to do a DVD and, secondly, what were some of the obstacles you never anticipated in putting it together?

PE: I think we all looked at each other and said, ?We need to have a DVD out there in the marketplace. We haven?t had any Kansas video footage to look at in over 10 years.? The last one came out in ?92 or ?93 and technology has changed since then. Of course, deciding that doesn?t mean it?s going to happen. First, you have to find a distributor or a record company that actually cares about Kansas. That?s the biggest part. Most people assume that that?s an easy thing to find but it?s not. Once we found Compendia Music Group, we were set. I put that deal together and then the European and Japanese deals together as well. Then, I had to go find the money to make it happen. It?s very expensive to work with film and you also have to pay all the people who are going to work on the project. Once that?s over, you also have to put the concert together [laughs]. We had the record the deals, the marketing and promotion deal, then we had to do the gig.

At one point, as we were preparing for the shoot, Steve Walsh said, ?What are you doing today?? and I said, ?Actually, I just ordered chicken fingers for the crew that?s going to be doing the shoot.? He said, ?Man, you?re doing a lot of stuff.? That was when I knew I was in all the way up to my neck.

JB: You did this project using film rather than videotape. Film is a real delicate format to work in, even for an experienced crew.

PE: We were about three quarters of the way through the show when the director came down to me and said, ?We may be running out of film.? And you just go, ?Ohhh? [laughs]. I mean, you only order so much of it because you have to pay for it. We had to start one of the songs over for one reason or another, another time I broke a drumstick but you can?t keep doing that because you keep using up film. I think we had four or five minutes worth of it left over when we were done, so it was pretty close.

JB: Were there songs you wanted to put in the DVD but then didn?t play?

PE: It was a delicate balance. When you have a 30-year career, you have so much to choose from that, no matter what you choose, you?re going to disappoint somebody. We decided, ?Let?s go with the five of us believe in.? We felt that it was the best representation. But we also had to think about the consumer, the Wheathead, and that?s where ?Journey From Mariabronn,? ?Cheyenne Anthem,? ?Belexes? and ?The Preacher,? came from. But you still have consider the people who only know us from ?Dust In The Wind? and ?Carry On Wayward Son.? We thought, ?Let?s make ourselves happy and hopefully everyone else will be happy.? Some songs moved in and some out. ?Cheyenne Anthem? was added in the last 48 hours.

We put ?Distant Vision? and ?Icarus II? in there because they?re off our latest recording [Somewhere To Elsewhere], which we?re very proud of. We wanted to do something that?s in this millennium instead of just material from the last one.

JB: How did you find the Animusic people who did the animation for the DVD.

PE: Our [webmistress] found them. We were looking for an artist who was a good at drawing devices. She found the animusic DVD, sent it to me, and I went, ?Whoah, this is serious.? I got in touch with them from there.

JB: Do you have a song that you use as a barometer for how a show will go/is going?

PE: [laughs] That?s a good question. Not really. Anytime you work a new song into the set, one you haven?t been playing that much, that?s one that you concentrate on, because it?s fresh. But there are a certain number of songs we have to play or people will get audibly upset with us because those are the ones they?ve come to hear. But once those are done, we can pretty much go anywhere.

JB: To me, the CD is exactly what I think of when I think of a live album. You can hear the audience and that makes me feel, in some small way, that I?m there. Was it important to you that this was immediately distinguishable as a live album as opposed to, say, an album that was recorded in a concert hall?

PE: Very much so. When you sit down and lay out a project, it?s always nice to have a focus. Before I do any project, I try to ask myself, ?Who is the listener going to be?? I think a lot of bands overlook that. We wanted this to be very live and very representative of that night?s show. We?re really happy with the way it turned out. It wasn?t an afterthought. It was supposed to come out at the same time as the DVD the whole time. DVD machines are still only in 50% of the houses out there. So we thought about the people who don?t own DVDs as well. We wanted the audio version to be a stand-alone project: it has different artwork and the bonus track for the enhanced CD.

JB: How do you see this project compared to your other live albums?

PE: We look at is a bookend to the last 30 years with this material. We?re pretty much done [laughs] with this stuff. I looked at Jeff Glixman when we were mixing this and said, ?God, I don?t ever want to do ?Dust In The Wind? again or ?Song For America? again.? I?m sure the fans are just as tired of the repackages as we are. That?s why we?ve tried to do them justice, because there are versions of some of these songs on Two For The Show, The Best Of Kansas, Live At The Whiskey, The Ultimate Kansas, The Remastered Best Of and Always Never The Same, which was a lot of the same material done with an orchestra. We?ve done just about everything we can do with those songs. Yeah, I?ll probably be sitting in front of ?Dust In The Wind,? ?Wayward Son,? and ?Song For America? in some other package but it won?t involve as much of a concentrated effort as on this one. This time we said, ?Fans, this is it. This is the band, this is us playing our asses off, this is us doing what we do, hope you?ve enjoyed the last 30 years.?

JB: Maybe the thing I best appreciate about this record is that I feel like I could put it on for somebody who isn?t a Kansas fan and because of the way it sounds, the energy level and the songs selection, it would serve as a great introduction.

PE: Thanks. You?re right. We had that in mind too. It might have been Robby who said, ?We want this to be for people who might know one or two Kansas songs.? You know, they say [in a voice that sounds like they barely know of the band], ?Oh, yeah, ?Dust In The Wind,?? and you put it on and they say, ?Okay, this is a serious group of guys.?

JB: ?Distant Vision? appears as a bonus track on the CD. Did you know that all along or was it more that it just didn?t fit the DVD and CD running order?

PE: It was meant to be part of the show. It just didn?t work out, for a number of different reasons, for different people. Some felt it didn?t quite have the energy that it needed, others felt that it slowed the show down, that we had too many long songs. It didn?t turn out poorly, it just didn?t fulfill some things we needed it to do. It wasn?t contrived, there was no deep, serious thinking, no marketing ploy. It was just something extra.

JB: You?ve been managing the band for a while now. What led you to that point?

PE: About 1990, our record company, our longtime manager, and our booking agency all said, ?Bye-bye.? Our label dropped us, our booking agency didn?t want to work with us, and our manager decided to move into movie soundtracks. So, there I was, looking at Rich and Steve and I said, ?Tell you what: Why don?t you let me manage things for awhile, day-to-day, until we find a manager and we?ll go from there.? That was 13 years ago. I had no prior training, other than being in the band. It was just something we did to survive. I just kept doing it and got better at it.

I would not recommend it to anybody. It was only out of necessity for me. We had many well-known, talented people who approached us, wanting to manage us, but they couldn?t bring anything with them that we didn?t already have. So we said, ?If already have that, why pay someone a big chunk of our income to bring it to us?? It wasn?t that we were know-it-alls, that?s for sure. We didn?t sit back, put our hands behind our heads and say, ?Yeah, we got this business all figured out. We know what to do.? It came down to me and Steve and Rich trusting ourselves, knowing what we wanted and what we wanted Kansas to be. Our vision was not anything close to what anyone else wanted us to be. Every other manager wanted us to be some other band. ?I?ll make you guys just like so-and-so.? People have always done that with us, except for Don Kirshner. We learned something from that and we said, ?Let?s just be ourselves, run our own show.? And we?ve done all right.

JB: How would you feel if a young progressive rock band approached you about doing a package tour?

PE: Sure. Yes. I don?t know where we?d go out to. We might have to go out into a field somewhere and they play to us and we play to them. I know people put us in the progressive slot and that?s probably the sanest slot for us. You know, it?s like I told a guy the other day, ?I feel like Kansas is a three-legged dog in a world of four-legged dogs.? We really are. We?re hard to package with. I think we are the only American progressive rock band that?s enjoyed any large commercial success unless there?s a group that whizzed by me. So, trying to bring a couple of fledgling bands under our wing? There?s really no place for us to go play because the first thing the promoter will say is, ?These bands have to be able to sell tickets.? We?re open to situations like that but it really comes down to selling tickets. Ultimately, you?ve got to put butts in seats. But we?d love to be able to be on a show like that.

JB: Where do you think Kansas will go next?

PE: We asked ourselves that at 20 years. ?What do we want to do now?? And here we are at 30 years. ?What do you want to do now?? We don't? know. We talk about maybe one day being asked to do a soundtrack. We?ve never been asked to do that. People have used our songs in soundtracks but I think we?d like to do something original for a film. We like to play. We like to go out and do shows every year. We?re a live band, that?s what we like to do. It?s kind of disheartening that our new material isn?t embraced much anymore, other than by the Wheatheads. But there aren?t really any complaints here. We?re happy to be discussing what we?re going to do next. ?Oh, really? There is a next? Great!?