Terry Luttrell has been injured after getting into a car accident, which occurred after the REO Speedwagon singer fell asleep at the wheel.
The 78-year-old musician was candid about the incident while speaking to the News-Gazette Tuesday (June 17), explaining that he’d been driving to St. Louis for business reasons when he crashed on Interstate 57. He says that he’d been up until about 4:30 a.m. the night prior following a Speedwagon concert at State Farm Center in Champaign, Ill., staying up late to attend an afterparty and sign autographs for fans.
“It just happened,” Luttrell told the publication. “I nodded off. I rolled the car over, and I woke up, and I was in a cocoon. Unfortunately, it totaled the car.”
By “cocoon,” the rock star was referring to his car’s airbags, which deployed on impact and cracked his sternum. He is now recovering from his injuries at Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana, where he expects to stay for the next few days.
“I was able to get up and get out of the car,” Luttrell recalled. “I have a little back pain and neck pain. It’s nothing that can’t be overcome.”
Upon being transported to the hospital, Luttrell learned that some of the nurses were fans who had attended the concert the night prior. The performance at State Farm Arena in the band’s home city marked a special one-off reunion show punctuating REO Speedwagon’s decision to cease touring after 2024 due to “irreconcilable differences” between members. Luttrell — who left the group and was replaced by Kevin Cronin in 1972 — stepped back into his former role as frontman only for the night.
“It was exactly what we thought it was going to be,” he told the Gazette. “It was a one-off concert that will never happen again. To say that you were there was a pretty big thing.”
Luttrell joined Speedwagon in 1968, departing after four years with the band reportedly due to personal issues with guitarist Gary Richrath. Cronin was then brought in to fill his shoes, and — after being briefly replaced with Mike Murphy — helped the group score some of its biggest hits, including Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 singles “Keep On Loving You” and “Can’t Fight This Feeling.”
Despite his success with the group, Cronin was not at the reunion show Saturday (June 14). On Facebook, he recently said that he would have wanted to attend, but that organizers chose “a date where it was public knowledge” that he had prior engagements with his own Kevin Cronin Band in Oregon.
Cronin was also the only remaining REO bandmate who wanted to continue touring, but he says he was outvoted by bassist Bruce Hall and keyboardist Neal Doughty when it came to calling it quits. The men announced last September that they would stop touring by the end of the year and dissolve the band due to conflicts between Hall and Cronin.
