Revitalized Styx on a Mission to impress new fans, excited to play PNE
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2019 12:00:17 +0000
When: Sunday, Aug. 25, 8:30 p.m.
Where: PNE Rogers Amphitheatre, PNE Fairgrounds
Tickets and info: pne.ca
Few bands from the classic rock era managed to straddle prog pomp, arena whomp and pretty power ballads with as much style as Styx.
The Chicago quintet’s singles such as Babe, Too Much Time on My Hands and Come Sail Away are fixtures on radio. Along with a few ’70s era contemporaries such as Journey, the band regularly makes year-end Top 10 grossing tours lists. And with the release of its new album, titled the Mission, Styx received some of the best reviews of its career.
Pretty good for a group whose platinum period pretty much came to an abrupt halt in the early 1980s amid acrimony with the members, up and down solo projects, career-compromising illness and the 1996 death of founding drummer John Panozzo.
Lead singer/keyboardist Lawrence Gowan was enlisted by guitarist/singer Tommy Shaw to replace Dennis DeYoung in 2000. The Canadian musician says the past 20 years have been a fantastic time to be in the band. The Mission displays a group with a renewed sense of purpose at a time when most would be just content to run through the hits in front of aging fans. The singer is excited to perform at the PNE Summer Nights Concerts series.
“It’s a multiple answer as to why that is,” says Gowan. “About a decade ago, we started to notice that an increasing number of the audience was 30 and under, which means that they weren’t even born when the biggest Styx records were made.
“They’ve clearly discovered classic rock and feel as drawn to it as we were in the day, as well as the fact that the new record has been embraced to the degree by that audience and the one long connected to the band that we could perform the Mission in its entirety at a sold-out show in Las Vegas earlier this year.”
For any band to play a new release front to back is rare. The growth market is for a group to offer up its breakout debut at a festival appearance or do something akin to U2 playing The Joshua Tree for the 20th anniversary.
If anything, the trend is for bands who aren’t even that long in the tooth to follow this formula, so you get ’90s and 2000 period players reviving the Brit Pop or Grunge heyday for 30-something fans.
Gowan says Styx went into the Mission with, well, a mission. The multiplatinum period — Crystal Ball (1976), The Grand Illusion (1977), Pieces of Eight (1978), Cornerstone (1979), Paradise Theatre (1981) — was in the members’ minds.
“Four triple-platinum records in a row that had one thing in common, they were all critically panned but hit big with music lovers,” said Gowan. “So when we went into the studio to do the Mission, we wanted to get that 1979 sound happening because that was what the fans loved.
“We went into Blackbird Studios in Nashville, which is loaded with all the old gear in tip-top shape and young engineers who know how to use it, and wound up with a result that got the best reviews the band has ever had.”
From its opening overture to the hard rocking Gone Gone Gone and Yes-like bass and organ runs in Locomotive or classically derived Khedive, the 14-track recording fits easily with Styx’s finest work.
That the album arrived at a time when bands like Kansas, Journey and others from the period when progressive and arena rock combined are experiencing revivals is a bonus. Gowan says that staying power contributed to that success and when they head out on the road with Kansas, REO Speedwagon or Def Leppard it amounts to a “ticket sales magnet” that can’t be ignored.
“We’re a band that plays 100-plus dates a year and so are some of those others you mention, so they are out there,” he said. “Add in the fact that I’m fortunate enough to be in a band with guys who still try to figure out — on their own — how they can improve night upon night even at levels of one per cent and the cumulative effect of that over time, and you’ve got something very special. We still really love doing this.”
Gowan also loves that he gets to pull out the “Styx versions” of such solo hits from his past as Strange Animal, Criminal Mind and others. He says that when the band asked him to join, they wanted him to personalize the material rather then be compelled to sound like the original recordings.
“That I was a fan of the originals and, in a seamless way, could keep the things that I learned from my solo years and incorporate them into this band has really worked out,” he said. “You can really hear what we’ve come to know about each other come across on the Mission, too.”
Of course, adding a few songs from the new album to the set list at shows such as the coming PNE performance doesn’t mean the band won’t be playing Miss America, Crystal Ball, The Grand Illusion or Rockin’ the Paradise. Styx will always honour its past. This tour also marks the first time that Mr. Roboto finds its way back into the set list.
Taken from the problematic concept album Kilroy Was Here — which is credited with leading to guitarist Tommy Shaw leaving the band — the top 3 hit has been absent because of the tensions it raised.
Dennis DeYoung, who tours the Music of Styx with his own band, issued a Facebook post about the song returning to the set list where he queried whether it would wind up being the most enduring tune of the group’s history noting the song is “a bad penny or a wooden nickel or simply a damn catchy tune; your choice.”
“It’s so funny that the song has survived decades being regarded as a clear line between the ’70s Styx and the short-lived ’80s band, and being part of the tour when the band disintegrated,” said Gowan.
“I have none of that baggage and always felt the song had gone from a kitschy tune by the band getting ”80s-ized’ to a cultural reference that turns up whenever robots are discussed from news to skit shows. Touring with Joan Jett last year, Tommy and JY decided we should polish it off and add it to the list and had to learn it from scratch.”
The band members had never performed the song because it was sung to track with DeYoung only before the rest of the band came on stage. Now Gowan says the song is “revved up like Styx plays now.”
Styx plays the PNE Summer Night Concerts lineup this year which features an impressive list of hitmakers from the ’60s to the ’90s such as Smokey Robinson (Aug. 23), the I Love the 90s bill with Vanilla Ice, Montell Jordan, Biz Markie and Rob Base (Aug. 29), Billy Idol (Aug. 31) and more. ZZ Top has cancelled because of illness and a replacement is to be announced.
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