Interview with STYX

“I’ve been in Hooters two or three times. Actually, it’s my wife’s brother who’s brought me there more than anybody. I think it is a charming place for men of all ages to go and have some fun, good, clean American fun.”

“That’s my PPTLC acronym/formula for success, which is modified from what some other people told me you had to have for success. You do make your own luck, to an extent, but I have been given certain gifts as a musician and as a human being that I do believe come from a higher place, not to go all spiritual on you here. So I was blessed with a certain amount of talent and I did go out and work very hard, but I was also very much in the right place at the right time, and some of that was just being born when I was born,” continues Young, who was born and raised in Chicago and still lives there now. “Some of it is because I was willing to go way, way out of my comfort zone to just knock on doors and try to make something happen for this band and for my career. It’s all turned out, 42 years later, to be something that’s incredibly amazing.”

Incredibly amazing really only begins to scratch the surface when it comes to describing the Styx phenomenon. They’ve sold tens of millions of records, played concerts all over the world, mastered the art of the concept album and rode the charts with such hit singles as “Come Sail Away,” “Lady,” “Mr. Roboto,” “Too Much Time On My Hands,” “Blue Collar Man,” “Babe,” “The Best of Times,” “Borrowed Time,” “Blue Collar Man,” “Renegade” and “Don’t Let It End,” among others. They’ve survived diminished record sales, a subsequent lack of new material and a couple of extended break-ups, as well as the acrimonious departure of longtime lead singer Dennis DeYoung, by recruiting a new singer, releasing live and greatest-hits records and performing their classic songs at roughly 120 shows a year.

The band currently consists of Young, Tommy Shaw (guitar and vocals), Lawrence Gowan (who replaced DeYoung as lead vocalist in 1998), Todd Sucherman (drums), Ricky Phillips (bass) and, occasionally, original bassist and band co-founder Chuck Panozzo. They still seem to be on a neverending tour and, lately, they’ve branched out with Styx-branded stuff of all kinds, from coffee – yes, coffee — to DVDs/Blu-rays and from hoodies to jewelry. For example, they just released The Grand Illusion & Pieces of Eight – Live, a DVD/2-CD package that captures a killer show performed at the Orpheum Theatre in Memphis, Tennessee, last winter. And that coffee? It’s called Styx Special Brew.

Over the course of a half-hour conversation, Young addresses much of the above, starting with the band’s extensive musical history and how to craft a set list that flows organically given a repertoire of songs that span several decades, various styles and a couple of lead singers. “We’ve sort of narrowed what we do to a point, but we certainly have the ability to reflect some certain situations,” Young says. “Sometimes we’ll get hired to do private shows where maybe we need to be a little less edgy. Last year we went and did a month of shows with YES, a band that was an influence on us at the very beginning. So we added some progressive stuff that we rarely played anymore, just to spice it up and resonate with some of their fans, to maybe capture their audience along with the people we drew. But it’s really not that hard to put together a set list for a tour. We know the home runs and we know the other ones that help round out the set and that helps balance out the stage performance.

“From time to time we’ll change it up,” Young adds. “There’s a song called ‘Rockin’ the Paradise,’ which we hadn’t done in about 12 or 13 years. All of a sudden it was being used on a television show (Up All Night), the show with Will Arnett and the blond (Christina Applegate) from Married with Children. Tommy said, ‘Why don’t we do that song again?’ Tommy was the one who’d kind of soured on it 12 or years ago. I thought, ‘OK,” I love the song, personally. It’s a co-write between myself, Tommy and Dennis DeYoung, so it’s something that we legitimately have in our set. So we’ve been having a blast doing it. We always do ‘Renegade’ at the end of a show, but now we do ‘Rockin’ the Paradise’ for the first of two encores.”

As for Styx more or less becoming Styx, Inc. over the past few years, Young takes that with a grain of salt. It’s good for business and good business is good for the band, its members and their futures. “Well, there’s no great risk,” Young explains. “We have a solid, basic business with our concerts and our concert (merchandise), and the guys who were part of the original lineup still have a nice royalty stream from the original albums. That’s nice lifestyle money. It’s not get-rich money. But I think we’re always looking for ways to reinvent things. Gene Simmons and KISS do it; everything you can possibly think of, if you want to buy it, there’s a KISS logo on it. I’m not the driving force for that in our band, but we’ve dabbled in it. T-shirts are really our second biggest form of revenue behind concert fees. People always want to buy the t-shirts, so the rest of it is an offshoot of that t-shirt merchandise thing. We have a young woman in our office, who’s 25 years old, who’s working all the Facebook and Myspace pages and the, this, that and the other e-networking kinds of things, which I try to stay as far away from I can.” But, we gotta ask: Styx coffee? Really? Is that pushing it?

“Well, you’ll be the judge of that,” Young replies. “It’s actually pretty good stuff. Tommy Shaw became really good buddies with Billy Bob Thornton about 10 years ago. Somebody approached Billy about it. Billy makes records and he goes out (playing). He actually did a few little bits on a record of original music (Cyclorama) that we did back in 2003. Billy had this thing and the guy that sold Billy on it saw Tommy hanging around with Billy and just sort of pitched Tommy on it. Tommy said he wanted to do it and I said, ‘I don’t see any harm in it.’ This branding of who you are and what you do… others are much more involved in it than I am. To me, I was very interested in doing a lot of things back 30 years ago, but now I like maintaining the mysterious nature of who I am and what I do. I can’t imagine Pink Floyd doing things like this, but Styx has always been a democratic organization with majority rule. There’s no harm in Styx coffee. It’s actually pretty good. I
don’t think it’s toxic in any way, shape or form.”

Styx hasn’t recorded new material in several years and there’s none planned at the moment, though Young won’t rule out creating fresh material somewhere down the road. Right now, truth be told, he’s just happy doing what he’s doing, which is rocking fans old and new night after night after night for as long as people are willing to show up. Only 62 years old, the aptly named Young plans to follow in the footsteps of guys like Bo Diddley, James Brown, Hubert Sumlin, B.B. King, who played or are still playing deep into their 70s and 80’s.

“Bo Diddley was somebody I’d always wanted to meet, and I met him just in the last couple of months of his life,” Young says. “Bo passed from a stroke and a heart attack back in 2008, and he played pretty much until the stroke took him off the stage. That’s my goal, too, to just keep going until I can do it anymore.”