One Way Street

You are locked onto The Zoo, the place that still plays the deep cuts the way album rock was meant to be heard, and you can park it for good at thezoorocks.com. Right now the turntable is holding a record a lot of listeners filed under “that Kansas guy’s other band” and then never pulled out again. The song is “One Way Street,” the third cut on 1st, the 1983 Atlantic debut by Streets, and it is one of the better arguments that Steve Walsh did not walk out of Kansas just to sit on a keyboard stool and sulk.

Walsh wrote “One Way Street” himself. On the sleeve it runs four minutes and forty-nine seconds, sitting between “Move On” and the longer “Lonely Woman’s Cry,” and it never got the single push that “If Love Should Go” did. That is part of why it still feels like a secret. The lead single climbed to number 6 on Billboard’s rock airplay chart in early 1984 and scraped number 87 on the Hot 100. The album itself stalled at number 166 on the Billboard 200 and hung around for eleven weeks. Radio played the obvious track. The rest of the record, including this one, was left for the people who actually bought the vinyl and let the needle keep going.

Listen to how the song is built and you hear a man who spent the late seventies inside progressive arrangements deciding to write a straight rock number about a relationship with no exit ramp. The lyric is car talk the whole way through. She looks sweet, she has been getting her own way, and love is traveling the wrong direction on a one-way street. Walsh sits in the driver’s seat and admits he cannot hide the confusion. There is a brand-new car in the second verse and a woman who does not know what she is doing behind the wheel. It is not subtle, and it does not need to be. The chorus is built to be shouted back from a club floor, which is exactly where Streets spent most of their life.

The track was cut with the rest of 1st under producer and engineer Neil Kernon, a name album-rock fans already knew from harder sessions. Basic tracks went down at Axis Studios in Georgia. Overdubs and vocals were finished at Electric Lady in New York, the room Hendrix built, and Ted Jensen mastered the album at Sterling Sound. On the Canadian pressing the mix credits split the record: Kernon handled “If Love Should Go,” “Lonely Woman’s Cry,” and “So Far Away,” and guitarist Mike Slamer mixed “One Way Street” along with “Move On,” “Everything Is Changing,” “Cold Hearted Woman,” “Blue Town,” and “Fire.” That matters. The guitar on this cut has a little more bite than the single, the kind of midrange punch a player gives his own mix when he wants the solo to sit forward. Billy Greer locks the bass under Walsh’s stacked keyboards, and Tim Gehrt plays it like a club drummer who knows the song has to hit before the bartender rings the last-call bell.

Streets came together in Atlanta in 1982, after Walsh left Kansas following Audio-Visions. The split was the usual one: creative differences with Kerry Livgren, a singer who wanted a harder, more direct record than the band was willing to make. Walsh had already tested the water with the 1980 solo album Schemer-Dreamer. Gehrt, who had been working with former Deep Purple bassist Glenn Hughes, played on that record. Walsh had first noticed him years earlier, when one of Gehrt’s bands opened for Kansas, and the two had talked about a group of their own. Greer was a regional bassist out of the Atlanta and Tennessee circuit, previously with a band called QB1, and he brought “Cold Hearted Woman” to the Streets sessions from that earlier life. Marty Conn got the writing credit. Slamer was the outsider. The British guitarist had spent the seventies in City Boy, the cult prog-pop band, and he had never met Walsh until the audition. He later said the music he wanted to play was not happening in England, so he moved.

Their first public show was Charlie Daniels’ Volunteer Jam in January 1983. They borrowed another band’s gear and played four songs. That is a humble way to introduce a singer who had already fronted multi-platinum records. Atlantic signed them, with management from Derek Sutton and Stardust Enterprises, the same orbit that had handled Styx. The album arrived in October 1983 under the plain title 1st, catalog 80117, with art direction by Karen Katz and a cover illustration from the Willardson and White studio. Walsh sang and played the keyboards and synthesizers. Greer played bass and sang. Slamer played guitar. Gehrt played drums and percussion and added vocals. No violin. No suite. Just four guys and a stack of songs about women, distance, and starting over.

They took 1st on the road through clubs, not arenas. On October 28, 1983, they played Entertainment City in Pittsburgh for the King Biscuit Flower Hour. Walsh told the room they were being recorded for a later broadcast and joked about setting a record for the loudest rock and roll group ever assembled in one place. “One Way Street” was in the set, a few songs after the opener. That broadcast sat in the vault until 1997, when King Biscuit put out a live album. It is one of the only widely heard documents of the band on a stage, and it shows they stuck to their own material. No Kansas medley. No safety net.

The second album, Crimes in Mind, followed in 1985. Atlantic dropped them soon after, and the band folded. A year later Kansas reassembled around Walsh, Phil Ehart, and Richard Williams, with Steve Morse on guitar and Greer on bass. “All I Wanted” put Walsh back on the radio. Slamer went on to session work, film and television cues, and later projects with Greer in Seventh Key. Gehrt slipped back into the session and regional world he had come from. Streets left two studio albums, a live radio tape, and a pocket of fans who still argue that 1st rocks harder than the Kansas records on either side of it.

Walsh was born June 15, 1951, in St. Joseph, Missouri, and he is the only longtime Kansas member who did not grow up in the state the band was named for. He came up through Topeka groups, joined the lineup that became the classic Kansas band, and sang the leads on “Carry On Wayward Son,” “Dust in the Wind,” and “Point of Know Return.” He retired from Kansas in 2014 after a last show in Sioux City. The voice on “One Way Street” is that same tenor, a little more urgent, a little less cosmic, pointed at a girl in a new car instead of a wheat-field horizon.

If you want the paper trail, Walsh keeps the band’s story on his own site at stevewalshrocks.com, with a Streets page at stevewalshrocks.com/streets. The Facebook home for that same camp is Steve Walsh Rocks. The people who still trade club stories and old photos gather in the Streets Fan Group. There is no living official Streets account on Instagram or X. The band was gone before those feeds existed, and nobody should pretend otherwise.

So here it is again, side one, cut three. A wrong-way love song from a singer who had already been to the top of the mountain and decided the next record should sound like a bar with the doors open. Streets, “One Way Street,” from 1st. Stay with The Zoo.