20/20 Power Pop Icons

Nathan Hale High to Hollywood

Steve Allen and Ron Flynt met at Nathan Hale High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and both went on to Oklahoma State University, where Flynt took a degree in music. They played together around Tulsa through the mid-1970s without much to show for it. What moved them was the example of two other Tulsans: once Dwight Twilley and Phil Seymour started having success out of Los Angeles, Allen followed them west in 1977.

In Los Angeles, Allen met Mike Gallo, a singer, songwriter, keyboard player and drummer who had already arrived at both the idea and the name for a band called 20/20. Gallo auditioned Allen's friend from home, Ron Flynt, and the three of them became the group. Keyboard player Chris Silagyi joined before the first album was made. They signed with Greg Shaw's Bomp! Records in 1978, which at the time was the clearing house for the American power pop underground, and the CBS subsidiary Portrait picked them up from there.

The Portrait records

The self-titled debut was cut at Sound City with Earle Mankey producing and came out on Portrait in 1979. Gallo departed during the sessions and Phil Seymour ended up drumming on most of the tracks. Twelve songs, written largely by Allen and Flynt, yielded two singles: "Tell Me Why" backed with "Yellow Pills", and "Cheri" backed with "Backyard Guys".

The reviews were strong and the sales were not. Robert Christgau gave it a B+ and wrote that the dense, cleverly constructed tunes would sound great on the radio, before adding the line that turned out to be the band's epitaph: when CBS breaks a few hits off this, we'll remember it as a classic, but CBS won't. Trouser Press rated it among the best power pop albums of its period; AllMusic later gave it four and a half stars.

Joel Turrisi took the drum stool for Look Out! in 1981 and Dean Korth for Sex Trap, which came out through Mainway and Enigma rather than a major. The band stopped working in the early 1980s, roughly six years after Allen had driven out of Tulsa.

Twenty years of other work

The members scattered into the trades around the music rather than out of it. Flynt set up a recording studio in Austin. Allen moved to Nashville and carried on songwriting. Silagyi worked as a record and video producer. Gallo formed RadioMusic and later Two Moons. All of them ended up running or working in studios in different cities, which is part of why the band proved so difficult to reassemble.

The records kept circulating without them. "Yellow Pills" gave its name to a compilation and fanzine series that effectively catalogued the genre for a generation of collectors, and "Remember the Lightning", the opening track of the debut, now titles S.W. Lauden's power pop newsletter. A mid-1990s reunion produced two albums for Oglio, 4 Day Tornado in 1995 and Interstate in 1998. After that the band went quiet again. Their last live performance before the current run was in Japan in 2008.

The 2020 conversation and Back to California

The reunion started as a joke about the calendar. Talking to Crazy on Classic Rock in December 2024, Allen and Flynt described realising that 2020 had finally caught up with them, and a plan formed to play the Roxy in Hollywood in April 2020. The pandemic cancelled the show and handed them something they had not had in decades: time. What began as an EP's worth of material, written in sessions in Austin, grew into a full album.

They recorded as a three-piece, with Flynt's son Ray on drums and percussion. Flynt has talked about the method in plain terms — vintage guitars, vintage amplifiers, and a deliberate attempt to build a soundscape in which the players occupy a specific physical space. He has also been clear that it is not a concept record; each song is its own narrative.

The title track arrived as a single on 25 October 2024, followed by "Laurel Canyon" in December. The album, eleven original songs, came out on 17 January 2025 through the Texas label SpyderPop in partnership with Big Stir, on vinyl, CD and streaming. It was their first new album in 27 years.

How it landed

The notices were better than a comeback record usually gets. Writing at Faster and Louder in January 2025, Lord Rutledge called it arguably their finest and most consistently strong release since the debut, and made a point of what it is not: rather than reaching for 1979, the band sounds a little mellower and more sophisticated, closer to timeless American pop-rock than to power pop as such. The hooks, he wrote, are undeniable; the growth is the kind that only comes from the decades in between.

That reading matches how Allen and Flynt describe themselves now — two songwriters with long separate careers rather than a heritage act working a back catalogue. The album does not avoid the old songs' company so much as sit beside them without apology, which is a harder trick than a straight retread.

Back on a stage, as a trio

On 12 April 2025 the band played Zebulon in Los Angeles, their first show in over 15 years. Danny Wilkerson and Lannie Flowers opened with an acoustic set, with Chris Price on keyboards. 20/20 came on as a power trio: Allen on guitar and vocals, Flynt on bass and vocals, Ray Flynt on drums.

The absence of a keyboard player shaped the set. Songs built around synths and keys were largely left out, and what remained leaned heavily on the 1979 debut — the show opened with "Remember the Lightning" and took in "Jet Lag", "Yellow Pills", "Cheri", "Tell Me Why", "Nuclear Boy" and "The Night I Heard a Scream", alongside material from Back to California and a cover of the Flamin' Groovies' "Shake Some Action". Stephen Schnee, who was there, wrote that the new songs hit harder live than on record and that three instruments filled the room, and described an audience that reacted to every song.

Speaking to Remember the Lightning on 19 April 2025, Allen said that playing with Flynt and doing their songs live works every time they play, and that the night felt like déjà vu, like playing to friends and family. Flynt said performing with his son had brought them closer. Both said they would do more: Flynt named Austin, Nashville, New York and Spain as places he would like to play; Allen said he wanted to come back to Los Angeles and to Zebulon. Beyond that, no run of dates has been announced, and the band's recent live work has consisted of individual, carefully rehearsed one-offs rather than a tour.