The Arbogast Band Offers Classic Rock Hits Tonight at the Festival of the Little Hills

When The Arbogast Band takes the main stage at 8 p.m. during the Festival of the Little Hills at in St. Charles, listeners will hear the classic rock group’s finest.

"Usually in a bar, it’s a four-hour, standard St. Louis bar grind," said Mark Arbogast, a guitarist-vocalist and the band’s leader. "If I’m not mistaken, I believe the festival show is an hour-and-a-half. So we try to take the best out of (the four-hour show), with not as much emphasis on standard bar dance material, because (the festival) is more of a listening crowd. We try to focus a little bit more on the concert-type material we play."

The band has a repertoire of 60 or so songs, covering the likes of Kansas, Styx, Journey, Queen, INXS, Boston and more. The ‘70s and ‘80s are well represented on the song list. In addition to Arbogast, the five-member group includes bassist-vocalist Chris Black, keyboardist-vocalist Harold Draper, Greg Bishop on drums and percussion plus vocals and lead singer Ron Smith.

"Harold Draper and I have been a team in almost every band together since about 1982. He’s the greatest pure musician I’ve ever worked with, and just a local legend, really," Arbogast said.

Playing for the festival is a big deal, and each member of the band will get a chance to shine.

"Let’s face it, most of us have played locally—we’re little fish," Arbogast said. "A few times during the year, you get to play to a crowd that’s this large, this big of a pond, so it’s your shot. I always try to make sure everybody in the group gets their moment. It’s not about one person—it’s very much a team effort. But I try to make sure everybody gets their little moment in the spotlight."

This group has been playing together about two and a half years, and Arbogast knows everyone’s talents.

"I always looked at a band like a toolbox," he said. "You look at the strength that you have there, and when you’re a local band playing cover music, you try to play to the crowd and play to the strength in your band."

The band performs concert rock, Arbogast said, and it’s popular across the generations.

"I took a lot of ideas from the Guitar Hero game, oddly enough," he said. "Because I started getting my son and other 20-somethings coming to me all the time with all these 30-year-old songs saying, ‘Hey Dad, dude, have you heard of this?’ I think it was a song I knew on guitar before they were born. So I took a lot of that material, and that’s been real successful."

The Guitar Hero connection solidified in 2006, when Arbogast regularly played a club near a college campus.

"It would get a lot of overflow on weekends of college kids just looking to unwind," he said.

"They would come up and ask me, ‘Dude, do you know any Led Zeppelin, do you know any Deep Purple, do you know any Cream?’ The first few times, I thought they were kidding me," he said. "I remember asking one of them, ‘You guys been like raiding your dad’s record collection or something? Where you getting all these song ideas?’ They said, ‘No, man, this is the stuff we listen to.’ I think all music and musical styles are cyclical, and everything sort of goes around in a big circle."

Guitar Hero bridged the generation gap.

"It just popularized all these really cool songs that they never would’ve heard on the radio anymore," Arbogast said.

This full circle applies to the band members too.

"For some of us, at our age, it might very well be the last band we play in—most of these guys are in their 50s," he said. "We sort of get a chance to go out the same door we came in."

Arbogast loves playing live because it’s a chance to share what he does well with other musicians.

"When things really, really go well, you just kind of go into a zone," he said. "You know, a perfect band job, in 25 years of doing this, I can probably count on both hands and have a couple fingers left."

Playing rock in a local band is a labor of love and requires musicians to be multitalented.

"It’s always such a challenge to do things on a shoestring budget," he said. "You know, you wear so many hats. You’re the booking guy, you come in, you’re the equipment guy—you hook up the PA, you run the cables. If there’s something wrong, you dig out your soldering kit and you solder the ends on the wires. If an amplifier blows up, you rewire the other amplifier system and figure out how to get it going."

Fixing anything that goes wrong even led Arbogast to become a singer.

"I just wanted to be a guitar player, but I had singers blow out their voices," he said. "So I started carrying a big book I got in the back of the truck that says, ‘Break glass in case of singer failure.’ It’s got words to every cheesy rock song in the world you could ever think of."

Frontier Park is located at 500 South Riverside Dr. in St. Charles. The concert is free. For more information, see the festival website.