I played basketball with those guys, on this great 8-foot goal. It's a long story. It happened in the summer of 1982, the same year I met Imelda Marcos, Peter Max, Walter Cronkite, Red Skelton, and Dave "Please come to Boston" Loggins.
I did not tell them that I hated their "new" singer (he had turned them into hits, and had been in the band, I would think, 3 or 4 years at that point.) They were really great guys, though. The thing that impressed me most about them was that they were these big family guys, and what all of them wanted most was to use the phone to call home.
For the record, they probably were closer to the Deep Purple model before pretty boy joined and turned them into MTV stars.