Luttrell, Gratzer and Doughty were joined by Gregg Philbin on the Bass guitar and prolific songwriter Gary Richrath on guitar. These were to plague the band for their entire existence as a band but it was in 1970 that the band settled on a line up that was going to see them skyrocket in popularity. Something still wasn’t quite working however, and the band would go on to have significant line up issues for the next couple of years, with only Doughty and Gratzer remaining as the sole founding members of the group.

They started playing concerts around their campus bars, university events and frat parties, as a matter of fact their first concert was at a frat party that turned into giant food fight after they came of stage.

This proved to be a good move, as they had formed the first incarnation of REO Speedwagon, taking the name from a car that Doughty studied in one of his engineering classes. Coincidently, their frontman was also their keyboardist, and come the end of their university’s spring semester the bands guitarist Joe Matt, told the frontman that he, bassist Mike Blair and Gratzer were leaving the band to start a new one with Doughty. As is the case with a lot of student bands, Gratzer’s bandmates weren’t happy with the way that the frontman of the band treated them. On his very first night he met drummer Alan Gratzer, they hit it off and Doughty became a fan of Gratzer’s band soon afterwards. The seeds of the band were sewn with keyboardist Neal Doughty enrolling in an electric engineering program at the University of Illinois.

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