Chapter Three: Crystal Ball
(A Time of Change: 1975-1976)
“These guys had money, they had a plan, they had a deal . . . all totally foreign to me.”
Tommy Shaw
By early 1975 Styx had scored its first hit single and Gold album and broken its ties with Wooden Nickel Records, the label that had signed the group to its first recording contract. Styx was now on its own, scrambling to salvage the momentum from its recent career upswing. Beset with lawsuits, the musicians pulled together and quickly educated themselves in the ways of the music business outside of the group's familiar local parameters. There were important decisions to make, sorting through label offers and hiring a manager. The window of opportunity wouldn't stay open long, and if Styx didn't want to be just another one-hit wonder, the group couldn't afford any more mistakes.
Jim Vose (Road Manager, 1974-1979): At that time I all of a sudden had a national act. I'm out there alone trying to coordinate everything. They were going out interviewing managers, interviewing record companies, and I'm trying to keep everything floating.
I'm sitting there and I don't know what to do, so I picked up the phone and called an old buddy of mine named Greg McCutcheon, who used to be a booking agent out of Michigan. He was now in New York with ATI. We were playing in some little movie theater; we did a job in the South, worked our way down into Florida and were playing in some theater on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard in Miami, and I called Greg and got him to come down. I took him to this gig, and I said, “Don't be surprised, but we're playing a movie theater.” We played a forty-five minute set opening for Night of the Living Dead. We opened for the movie. (Laughs). They got a couple of encores, they rocked and kicked ass, so he went back to New York City and convinced his people that we've got a hot property here, and before you know it we're headed out opening for the likes of Uriah Heep, Kiss, ZZ Top, and we signed with ATI.
At the time I was stupid. I should have been pushier and worked my way into a full percentage management position, but I've always been the kind of guy that sees things that need to be done, sits back and does them. That was probably the biggest mistake of my life. (Laughs). Well, the second-biggest. The biggest was not signing Tommy Shaw to a personal management contract before I brought him to Chicago.
It was really the three of us at that point. JY and Dennis took over on handling the record company. I made my suggestions on what company to go with, I made my suggestions on what manager to go with, and they went with my suggestions. They asked me what I thought about the different record companies, and the Ides of March had been with both A&M and RCA, and they just didn't get the coverage and promotion they needed at RCA, whereas A&M would work a product more. With A&M, if the first one didn't work, you had a shot at the second one. Luckily, our first one took off quite well.
“We got wooed by CBS, Warner Brothers and A&M to sign,” Dennis said. “CBS and Warner Brothers offered us more money, better deals in terms of royalty points, but I convinced the band to go to A&M, because I believed that our recordings wouldn't be a one-off album to them, that they would try to allow us to have a career. Those were the golden days of the Seventies to be at A&M Records, because Jerry Moss and Herb Alpert really believed in the artists. It wasn't just bullshit, it was real.”
Styx began working on a new album, its fifth. The musicians recorded at Paragon Studios and did some overdubs at A&M Studios in Los Angeles. For the new record the band was producing itself for the first time. “We wanted to go for a name producer because we thought that would draw more attention to us,” JY said. “We talked to Glyn Johns, George Martin and people like that, but when it finally came down to it none of them could fit us into their schedule in the time frame that we wanted to do an album. We had always felt strongly about our ability to produce ourselves, so with the technical expertise of our engineer Barry Mraz and our own feel for what our music should sound like, we began to produce ourselves.”
The result was Equinox, by far the strongest album Styx had yet recorded. The musicians had finally captured their potential on record, balancing the hard rock, progressive rock and melodic elements of the group's songwriting into a cohesive whole. The sound quality was crisp and clean, with a clear balance between instruments and Styx' trademark blaring vocals.
The album's opening track, “Light Up”, was a reggae-flavored piece of progressive pop rock that had started out as a lyrical ode to the Beatles (“I remember it was sixty-five/When I saw the band”). When Styx was hired to play a pot festival, they re-wrote the lyrics to extol the virtues of smoking marijuana. “Lorelei”, written by JY and Dennis, was an up-tempo rocker with such a strong chorus that it seemed the natural choice for the single. JC's “Mother Dear”, written with Dennis, was a long progressive tune with extended instrumental sections, while Dennis' “Lonely Child” married a melodic ballad verse with a hard rock chorus.
JY brought in “Midnight Ride”, a flat-out hard rocker that featured his fleet-fingered electric guitar leads and screaming-to-be-heard vocals. “Born For Adventure” showcased JY and JC in unison and harmony twin lead guitars a la Wishbone Ash, while JC also contributed “Prelude 12”, an acoustic twelve-string solo guitar instrumental.
The centerpiece of the album was DeYoung's “Suite Madame Blue”, an epic track inspired by the coming Bicentennial. Its soaring melodies, heavy guitar riffs, and flashy guitar and synthesizer solos crystallized all of the important elements of Styx music. “That's a long song. In 1975, when you recorded it, if you made a mistake, you had to start the whole song over again,” Chuck recalled. “There was no mercy. We laid that track in one take. That's pretty amazing, because a lot of times when there's a song that's six-and-a-half minutes long, there's a lot of chances that you could play it for six minutes and twenty-nine seconds, and that last second, if you ruin the take, you had to start from the beginning, and what you always try to avoid in the studio is take three or four, because the best material is right in the beginning.”
Jim Vose: There was a lot less pressure. It was a bigger company. They went into the same studio and used the same engineer, but they were actually getting paid to do this. They were making some money and the pressure was off, and they could be more creative.
I spent some time late at night; after all my work was done and they were still in the studio I would show up, listen to what they had done, give them some words of encouragement. You know, maybe make an inhaling sound on “Light Up”, maybe some clapping in a few other places. Then we would go to the bars. (Laughs). Johnny and Chuck and JY and me, we used to hang at this bar across the street from Paragon. Some of the Blackhawks would come in. I always used to make sure that I would get downtown and see what they had done that day. They always need to know that you care.
JC was good, but he was weaker. The joke was they named “Prelude 12”, that little 12-string intro, they named it that because it was the square root of how many takes it took him to get it. (Laughs). I'm being somewhat facetious, but he was in there for hours. It turned out well, but it took forever.
Steven A. Jones (JY's friend/collaborator): JY used to play me everything they did, and there was one demo that was like a Moody Blues type of thing, and when it got to the end, there was this little synth line, and I said, “This is really neat. You really should make a song out of this.” I would never know when he was taking me to heart, but a few months later he said, “Listen to this,” and he played me “Lorelei”. So that main theme from “Lorelei” came from that end of that song going out. They took that melody and wrote a song based around it. They put it out and it made a lot of money, and then they got sued. (Laughs). Because they had recorded that demo for somebody else, and that guy did not participate in the profits from “Lorelei”. So I said to JY, “Don't blame me!” (Laughs). I think there's that kind of thing in the career of every big band, when there's that kind of money being thrown around.
When they did “Suite Madame Blue”, JY played it for me, and I said, “JY, that solo that you played on this demo, you're fucked, because you'll never do a better solo than that, ever. It's impossible.” In my mind, I was so moved by it, it's one of the greatest solos he ever played, and I said, “Now you've screwed up, because you've got to go re-record it.”
Then years later I was listening to the record and I heard this weird keyboard glitch. I mentioned it, and he said, “Look, man, we pressed the demo, because you told me how great my solo was.” (Laughs). Years later he'll tell you something like that. He said, “You never heard that keyboard glitch before?” It's just a little bumping of the key on the organ, just for a second. I'd heard that song a million times and didn't notice, but it's the demo.
The musicians were pleased with the way recording was coming along, but if the record was going to succeed, they needed to establish a working relationship with their new label. Styx also needed a manager with some industry clout.
Bob Garcia (A&M Records): Part of my job as artist development, artist relations, publicity, was working with bands that were reasonably new and that needed imaging. Styx was probably the first major A&M rock group that I became associated with, going out on the road with the band and trying to get an idea of what the band was about, and trying to re-translate a lot of that from live performance back into the record company.
The first time that I saw the band was in Detroit, where they were opening for Roxy Music, headlining; second-billed, Angel; third-billed, Styx. The first time was basically the promoter saying to me, “Styx has a very short set. We don't know whether we can get or rent keyboards for Dennis DeYoung, so can Dennis perform a set with the group, as an opening act, without keyboards?” So that was my first fight.
I was most impressed with the feistiness of their being an opening act for, number one a group that, Angel was not exactly big stuff, but on the concert circuit in particular quarters it was a reasonably big band. This was a group that came out of coffins in angel garb. (Laughs). So there's that. So the first time I saw Styx it was a pretty straightforward rock and roll set without too many embellishments. All they had to work with was their music and their stage craft, but no production values, and at the mercy of a house engineer. They performed amazingly well.
Incredibly together, fighting lots of lawsuits. (Laughs). Vis a vis Bill Traut. A band that, one of the times I saw them in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sheriffs showed up at the gig and tried to confiscate their instruments. These guys were amazingly schooled in the laws of repossession and everything else. Very smart along those lines. Don't forget, there were lawsuits pending about management and other things. They were not kowtowing to that. I always thought that they were very, very much their own people in terms of not only being able to handle an evening on stage, but also being able to handle all the various and sundry impediments to that. If you're standing naked in a dressing room, and you have the sheriff showing up, it's kind of interesting to maintain your cool and then to go on stage and give an absolutely smashing performance.
They did not have Derek Sutton. At that time they had no management. I told them I knew this wonderful man because of connections from Chrysalis; Procol Harum, Blodwyn Pig, and a bunch of other acts that A&M signed from an English label. This is a great guy. He understands rock and roll, he could be very interesting for you. It was the first introduction of his name to the band, in Detroit, the night that they were playing Cobo Hall as an opening act.
Jim Vose: I knew what my limitations were. Like I said, maybe I should have pushed for more power, but I didn't, because I knew what my limitations were and I did not want to hold back the band. It was just after Equinox had been released, and we realized we needed help. So we got after all these managers like Bill Aucoin from Kiss, Bill Ham from ZZ Top. Kip Cohen from A&M Records knew this guy, Derek Sutton.
Derek came to town and he was just comfortable and quiet. I really liked the guy. We had been managed by a couple of guys that are in movies now. They managed us for about six weeks. They didn't work out, we didn't like them. Once I met Derek, I knew he was the guy, and when they asked me my opinion I said, “Look, Aucoin has Kiss, you're not going to get his full attention. Bill Ham has ZZ Top, that's the same. If you start to get successful they're going to get pissed at him and there will be problems there. Derek has nobody else, and the record company recommended him.”
He had experience. If you go out and find the old Procol Harum live album, you'll read in the liner notes, “Derek will be coming to take us to the stage very soon.” He was Procol Harum's road manager. He worked with Terry Ellis from Chrysalis, who was Jethro Tull's manager. He knew all of those guys, he came up with them in the ranks in England. He seemed like the logical choice. Plus he did not intimidate me. I knew I'd have a job with them, because he was a fair guy. He wouldn't just say, “Okay, thanks, now get the fuck out of here.”
Derek Sutton (Manager, 1975-1982): I had started as a contract road manager for Chrysalis. I had been the person who came in from the UK and set up tours, and then interfaced with the record company, the publishing company and all the rest of it. So I had been doing management on groups under the tutelage of two of the greatest managers in the world, Terry Ellis and Chris Wright, since 1969. I had been involved with a lot of bands. A lot of the Second British Invasion. Jethro Tull, Black Sabbath, Ten Years After, Procol Harum and Yes were the most successful ones, and then a lot of bands that weren't quite so successful, headed up by Savoy Brown, Family, Clouds, Blodwyn Pig, Wild Turkey . . . all kinds of other bands that were not quite so successful. I had got a lot of experience while working for two absentee owners of the company, and I had really been educated in all aspects of the business, because they had allowed me to run the entire Chrysalis organization as it grew from a management company up through publishing and into its own record company. I had run the entire company, and therefore knew the inner workings of all phases of the industry.
I was in the middle of parting company with Chrysalis, and I had given them three months' notice. I was running the company. At the same time they said, “Okay, you can do your own projects while you are closing out for us.”
I put out on the street that I was looking. That was in the beginning of October of 1975, and Kip Cohen, who at that point was Head of A&R at A&M Records, sent me over the white label of Equinox. I put the record on, and I knew it immediately, because my ex-wife is from Chicago. She was my girlfriend at that point, and I was in Chicago a lot. I had heard “Lady” until it drove me crazy. So I recognized the band, and loved the Equinox album. I absolutely loved it.
Kip put me in touch with the band. I went to see them in early November, and spent a weekend talking to them, and then left. About three or four weeks later, they agreed to let me manage them.
I wasn't managing just one group. I did have other groups as well. It was not just Styx at that point, but increasingly what Styx was doing became more interesting to me, because they were very straightforward about what they were doing. They weren't kids with stars in their eyes who thought that they were going to sign a record deal and instantly be transported to limousine and silk jacket heaven. They knew that this was a hard work situation, they were prepared to work hard and had proven it from their track record. They understood that the fans were more important to them in the long term than anybody else.
We basically worked out a plan of attack, which was that we were going to be self-sufficient and we were going to build from the ground up. My job really was to spread their acclaim from live performance out of what had been a fairly narrow Midwestern area into, first nationally, and then supernationally.
Bob Garcia: Derek was probably the greatest thing that ever happened to that band. He came out of a certain British sensitivity to artistry and to knowing how to market and process a band in the best way possible. He was incredibly respected by everyone at A&M. He was a fighter. He was very honest. He still is. He was very honest about everything that was going on with this band at that time.
A&M released Equinox in November, and the single “Lorelei” began to climb the charts, peaking at #27. Though it was a decent chart hit, it was still a disappointment, failing to follow “Lady” into the Top Ten. Equinox would peak at #58, earning Styx its second Gold album.
As Styx began touring to promote the new record, the band's strained relationship with John Curulewski finally reached the breaking point. JC had a son at home now, and he felt the pain of being away more than ever.
“The Equinox album came out in November, and we were out on the road,” JY said, “and it became increasingly clear with every tour stop that JC was becoming less and less happy with his life and what was going on around him, and I don't exactly know why. He was extremely negative for that whole month, and ultimately he wound up quitting right around Pearl Harbor Day in 1975.”
Charlie Piper (Former Styx crew member, JC's friend): I remember JC being really happy with that album, and then saying, “You know, the same shit is going on with A&M as went on with Wooden Nickel. We're not getting pushed, we're not getting promo, we're not getting the good tour spots.” He had just had it. I remember Dennis telling me that JC was always quitting the band, and they didn't believe it when he did that time. But he finally did. Dennis said, “It was heart attack city at first.” (Laughs).
I just remember him saying, “The same shit is happening. I thought it would be different.” I think Frampton Comes Alive was just starting to happen at that point, and JC, that was one of his things, is that Frampton was getting the label's attention and not Styx.
Jim Vose: He was always dissatisfied with everything. He just was not a positive person, always unhappy, and why? He had a beautiful wife, a baby boy . . .
Everyone got along with everybody except JC. He was the rebel. He was probably the weakest of the musicians, but he was still good, he was still capable. But he was the rebel. If there was a five-way vote, it was usually four to one and he would always take the losing position. He was a little more radical, was a very creative person but had some different ideas. Nobody got along with him, so like I said earlier, we were sharing hotel rooms, and I always made sure that I got in with him to try to be a peacemaker and middle man. I had wonderful times with him. He would have his acoustic guitar, and we'd sit up and sing Beatles songs. He might set up his synthesizer and work on getting some sounds.
There were times when I'd come back to the room and he'd done some things that pissed me off, but he was an artist, and I just learned to live with it. One time we had an argument and I walked out and went down to Johnny and Chuck's room to have a couple of beers to cool down. I came back, and the light outside the hotel room door was missing. I opened the door and I hit the light switch and nothing goes on, everything was pitch black. I walk in and there was a chair laying sideways right in front of me. (Laughs). I slowly step over that to find a desk pulled out in front of me. I step over four or five obstacles and basically I laugh and say, “Ha ha, fuck you, you didn't get me.” Pull up the covers and jump in the bed, and my bed is full of ice. (Laughs). That was JC.
To this day, I've got a pair of Bose speakers that I bought from him back in those days, and I just cherish those things.
But he was a rebel. He would argue, “No, no, I don't want to do the song that way, I want to do it this way.” He wasn't a real team player. I don't know if he felt he had to do it that way because he wasn't as strong musically. That's one of my theories. Then the Dennis thing happened.
I was running sound at the time. One day the sound man got in my face really bad, so I fired him. I went back to the dressing room, and they said, “Well, who's gonna run sound?” I said, “I will”, because I used to do it with the Ides of March. Then the wives came back and said it was the best mix ever, so then I had that job, too. (Laughs). Along with booking, coordinating and managing, traveling and driving the station wagon.
I had this little trick to pretty much guarantee an encore. As soon as the band left the stage I would pull all of the microphones down. I don't even know if the band knows I did this. They would always leave to a good, strong ovation. Just as the sound was starting to die down, I would pump the vocal mics up as far as possible so that you would get that swell of applause coming through the PA. People would think the band was coming back, and boom, instant encore. As soon as it starts getting louder, everyone thinks the band is coming back, so they start applauding and it's an instant encore all the time.
We were playing the last of nine Kiss dates in a row, and it was the big round coliseum in Jacksonville. JC was sick, he had laryngitis and he wanted to cancel the show. Dennis came up to me before and asked what I thought, and I said, “You can't cancel the show, it's full, there's ten or twelve thousand people. It's a hall with a lot of echo anyway, so don't worry about the sound too much. I'll just boost all of the other vocals. If he can sing, fine; if he's singing off, then I'll pull him down.” In those days Dennis would listen to me, and he said, “Okay, good.”
I came into the dressing room after the set and Dennis asked me, “Well, how was it?” I said, “Well, did you get that encore?” He said, “Yeah, we sure did.” I said, “They loved you out there.” He turned around and walked up to JC and said, “I never want to go on stage with you again.” Then JC, being the stubborn guy that he was, went, “Okay, then I quit.” That was it.
I always feel bad about that. I knew what had to be done, but I didn't know it was going to happen that way. Dennis basically asked me what I thought, then turned around and said, “Get out of here”, and the others backed him. They didn't have a choice in those days. Dennis always had the power.
Then we had nine days before we started our own little headline tour.
Derek Sutton: One of the clinching factors for JC leaving was the fact that I insisted on being a partner in the enterprise. He was not interested in having a partner. He wanted a hired gun as a manager. He just wanted to pay someone a salary. There came to be a severe difference of opinion between the band and him, and at the point where they were talking to me about signing papers, they finally said, “Look, JC's not going to be in the band anymore. Is that going to change your mind?” I said, “No. We'll replace him.”
They were very, very surprised at what they saw as a very flippant attitude, because replacing a major songwriter was not something that they thought was going to be easy. They did not understand that from my point of view, they had not had any real success. The fact that they were making a sensible living was not indicative of where we could go, and I didn't think we had anything to lose. Fresh blood at this stage was a really good idea.
Twenty-three-year-old Tommy Shaw had already been playing professionally for almost a decade when the opportunity to join Styx presented itself. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, by his mid-teens Shaw was playing in a band performing songs by the Beatles, Crosby, Stills and Nash and other popular acts of the day.
At the end of high school Shaw packed up his few belongings in his pickup truck and headed for Nashville to join a band called Smoke Ring. That never panned out into a single gig, and Smoke Ring wound up changing its name to MS Funk, hitting the road with a stolen (or, as Shaw preferred, “indefinitely borrowed”) U-Haul full of gear.
MS Funk struggled for several years, living together, working together, partying together, the musicians' entire lives concerned with the band. The group wound up in Chicago, finding that if they billed themselves as a Chicago band they could get more respect and more money from club owners in neighboring markets.
Tommy married Cuppy Enders, a Michigan girl he met at a gig, and they continued to live and work in total poverty, in a parallel to the challenges a young Chicago band called Styx was facing.
Tommy Shaw (Guitar/vocals, Styx): [MS Funk] was a totally self-contained band. Lots of singers and lots of players. Our manager was Jerry Lee Lewis' agent. His name was Roy Dean, out of Memphis. Jerry Lee decided he wanted to see what he sounded like with a big horn band and that's what we were, an eight-piece rock horn band. So we went with everyone but our drummer and our bass player, he flew us out on his private plane all the way to Anaheim, California and then Fresno, California. We played two shows, then we dropped him off in Memphis and he gave us his plane to fly back to Atlanta with. It was pretty awesome.
Believe it or not, I have had The Sons of the Pioneers open for me. That was with Jerry Lee Lewis, the Sons of the Pioneers opened. Talk about jumping across the generation gap. I remember when I was a little kid seeing old reruns of Roy Rogers, but Sons of the Pioneers . . . I never thought they'd be going on before me.
When the recession hit in 1974 I guess, all the clubs that we had managed to get a relationship with around the Midwest and on the East Coast and the South, all of a sudden it dried up, because they didn't have the money to keep paying bands, and they wanted dance music because of Saturday Night Fever. All of a sudden everyone wanted to dance and be like John Travolta and we wouldn't play, you know, we had our standards and we were going to play our songs, and that was it. So a lot of the bands like us had to break up, because there was no more work.
I left the band and moved back to Montgomery and started playing, I got an offer from my friend Eddie Wohlford in Montgomery. Eddie offered me two hundred a week, cash, to come down there and play, and that was about four times what I was making with MS Funk. I said, "Hell, yes!" So I left the band and went down there, and I was able to buy a house and a car and a phone. All my bills were paid. Working in the yard, I thought that was it.
About six months later Kiss came to town, and their opening act's truck had broken down, and the local promoter liked our band and said, "Will you guys come open for Kiss?" And we were like, "Hell, yeah." We went over there and they even gave us a sound check, and there I was on Kiss' stage playing acoustic guitar, doing Eagles and Dan Fogleberg songs, and the audience was looking at us like, "You've gotta be kidding me." (Laughs). We had our local fans, but the rest of them were like, "Where's Kiss?" I got a taste of what it felt like to be on a big stage like that, and it changed my life, and that's what I wanted to be doing.
Tommy and Cuppy were now living back in Montgomery and he was playing with his new band, Harvest, in a bowling alley lounge called Kegglar's Kove, performing mainly acoustic rock covers. Shaw also used the band as a laboratory to develop his own original songs.
Eddie Wohlford (Musician, Harvest): He was always more ambitious than the rest of us. He would always push for doing more originals, and that's the one thing that will get you noticed.
Tommy Shaw: Well, I always wrote. I had just piles and piles of songs when I was in high school. The first one I wrote was when I was five years old. “India Was the Town That I Was Born In”. That was before I learned geography. (Laughs). I didn't know if it was a country or a town. Alabama, that was the world to me. When I was a teenager I would write these . . . as soon as my hormones started kicking in, I was writing about all these feelings I had, I guess the precursors to “Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)” and all that. I really got into the introspective, almost poetic things, and though I wasn't really good at setting them to music at that point, I wrote a lot of prose and lyrics and things like that. They kinda amounted to a journal. For me it felt safe to write about things like that. I never kept a journal, but it was easy for me to write songs.
There seems to be an artistic license that exempts you from responsibility when you write things in a song. If you were to call somebody up and say things to them on the telephone, you would be etching them in stone in a lot of ways. You'd be committing yourself to those feelings. But when you put them in a song, they're more metaphoric, symbolic and hopefully universal, I guess is what I'm looking for. I guess it's just one way of being slippery. It's only in my late thirties that I've thought this through so much. I'm a man, I'm a guy, you know. I think girls are a lot better at thinking those things through. Not me. I just did stuff.
This was just pure instinct and love of it. I'd be doing it if I was having to do a paper route, because it's the one thing I do automatically. I had this fear when I was a little younger that eventually I would have to get a real job, and I had no idea how to go about it, what I would do. It's just been in the last couple of years that I've accepted the fact that this is what I do, and chances are I won't ever have to do anything else. But you never know. How the hell was I to know?
To get a job and be an employee, I wouldn't know how. I'm totally confident in doing what I do as a musician, but I have no experience to base any kind of confidence on to do anything else. So I would go from being this cocky guy who walks on stage totally relaxed, to being this totally lacking in confidence guy who's going in to get the lowest job on the totem pole. In my mind that's what it would be like, but in reality I doubt it. If I really had to go do that, I'm sure I would rise to the occasion. But I've never been in that position.
One time when I was married to Cuppy, I went out and worked as a surveyor and just happened to take my guitar with me. I wound up getting fired that same day because I had a great idea for a song, and literally got in the truck and was trying to remember what it was, and the guy came out and saw me doing that and fired me.
[Cuppy] was gorgeous, sexy, and she was the type of woman that I wind up being with because she was very assertive and outgoing. She approached me.
Her father gave me every opportunity to get out of the marriage the day of the wedding (laughs), but I was so young and eager to please, I didn't want anybody to be mad at me. Really, we weren't that hot for each other the day we got married. It went downhill from there, I think. I think our best years were the two years before we got married.
We both drank a lot during that time. I was playing in bars, and a lot of drunken disagreements and just silly stuff. We were just young and partying. It wasn't like old geezers in a trailer somewhere living in a pile of beer cans. We were the young version of that. (Laughs). We hadn't bottomed out, but we just didn't have a clue. We were partying most of the time. Looking back, I don't think we knew each other at all. Our days were numbered to begin with.
I had no business being married. I got married when I turned twenty-one, and for a musician it should be like the opposite of dog years. (Laughs). You know, one year should equal half a year for musicians, because musicians are given the opportunity not to be mature, and so we jump at it.
Jim Vose: In between Ides of March and Styx, I was managing a local band in Chicago called Lightwood. I booked them into a place in Printer's Alley in Nashville called Circus. They came back from Nashville saying “Man, we played with this band in Nashville called MS Funk, they were great. They've got a guitar player that's the most phenomenal guy we've ever seen.” Before you know it MS Funk was in Chicago, and I went out to see them, and they were kick ass. I asked them if I could and started getting them some local dates. They were used to playing clubs, and I would get them little concerts and teen clubs and just expand their horizons.
I put them together with the old management of Ides of March, who took them into the studio and did some demo tapes with them. Then their drummer quit, and the Ides of March drummer joined MS Funk. So there was a brotherhood long before Tommy was in the bowling alley down in Alabama. I used to watch them in all the clubs that they would play and just marvel at the talent of this kid. I'll never forget, there was this club called Rush Up down on Rush Street. The band was in a balcony over the dance floor, and he just got so wound up that he just threw himself at the railing . . . he's swinging and playing guitar, screaming and yelling, his feet are flying, he's rolling. He would get that into it and he was just great.
There was some band in Chicago that the name escapes me, but they were pretty much hard rock, and Styx was going to take their guitar player, and I said, “No, you've got to give me time. I've got the guy.” This was out of desperation. “I've got the guy, just let me get him here.” Finally I called the manager of the Ides of March, and he said, “I think he was from Montgomery, Alabama.” I called Directory Assistance for Montgomery and asked for Thomas Shaw, and the girl goes, “Well, there is no Thomas Shaw, but I've got a Tommy,” and sure enough, that was him. I called and convinced him to come to Chicago.
He had to get back to play that night. He had a gig and he did not want to screw over his band. I said, “You've got to come up here, they're going to take someone else if you don't.”
I picked him up at the airport and took him to Dennis' house way out on the South Side, and he sat down at the piano and they sang “Lady” together, with him singing that high note perfectly. Dennis just turned to him and said, “We want you in the band.”
Tommy Shaw: I got a call from Jim Vose, and he said, "Styx is looking for a guy to take John Curulewski's place." In my mind Styx was just a local band that all the other bands hated, because they never schmoozed or hung out; they just had better gigs and made a lot more money, and nobody knew them. They had a record deal with Wooden Nickel Records, and everyone kinda looked down their nose at them. Even though we had never met them, we all hated them. I'd never seen them, but I hated them anyway.
So I figured well, what the heck. They told me about their record deal with A&M, and they had a record that was just about to come out called Equinox. They flew me up there, I made the trip to Chicago. Jim Vose picked me up and took me out to Dennis' house, and I was all nervous. I brought my demo tapes and my guitar with me, and JY said, "Here's kinda where we're going," and played "Midnight Ride" from Equinox. I was speechless, stunned, because all I had heard was "Lady" and "You Need Love", and those were kinda nice pop songs, but not heavy songs. I was literally speechless. I was trying to be cool, but I forgot Vose's name! (Laughs).
So we sat down at the piano and they gave me the highest part to sing. I'd been used to singing quietly with Harvest, and these guys were belting out like fog horns. I just blasted out a little bit myself, and the rest was history, because it sounded like what it sounded like.
Driving back to the airport I asked Vose, "What do you think?" Because I just thought of them as a Chicago band, but he said no, these guys are big all over the world right now. I just hadn't gotten out very much and been all over the world, so I didn't know. I thought they were just a local, regionally successful band. So he said, "You should really do it, you're gonna regret it if you don't."
So I took his advice and called Eddie from the airport and told him. They even offered, which I think they came through on, they wanted to get going immediately; Styx didn't want me to give Harvest two weeks' notice, they wanted me to go pack my bags and come back, since they had a tour booked and they were ready to hit the road. So they paid my band a week's salary so that they could take a week off to replace me and work someone else in. My old band actually made money on me leaving, because they didn't take a week off, they just had somebody come in and fake it for a few nights. It turned out to be Beth Nielsen Chapman, who is also now signed to Warner Brothers in Nashville. She took my place. So that was how that started.
Jim Vose: We got in the car and headed back to the airport, and he said, “I'm not going to join.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “They didn't ask me to play, they didn't ask to hear my music. I'm not going to join.” I said, “Tom, just come to Chicago and give it a try.” He got on the plane, and I remember going directly to a pay phone, calling his house, getting his wife Cuppy on the phone and saying, “Cuppy, whatever you do, you convince him to get his ass up here to Chicago. Even if it doesn't work out, it's a shot that he's never going to be offered again.” So she convinced him and he came up.
Tommy left Harvest to join Styx, but he was still unsure of his decision. Though he had some influences in common with them, like the Beatles and CSN, Styx' sound was basically a modified pop response to British progressive rock, while Shaw's tastes leaned more toward folk, country rock, blues, soul and R&B. Styx' marriage of classical music, rock and pop was nothing that was going to find much acceptance among Shaw's peer group.
Eddie Wohlford: He kinda had that feeling, when he brought those Styx albums to the Kove that day, told us he was joining them and that he was quitting, that's the way he was acting. Almost embarrassed, like, “I'm gonna go make the big time. . . but look who it is.” (Laughs). He was trying to be professional, because he is. Even at that age he was.
Jim Vose: When Tommy went to his first rehearsal, he was staying with me and driving my car to rehearse there, and when he left to come back home, JY picked up the phone and called me and said, “Fuck, Vose, I've gotta start practicing!” (Laughs). I said, “I told you I had the guy.”
The members of Styx had gotten more than they had bargained for. Tommy Shaw would prove to be no short-term fill-in for John Curulewski. Tommy was an excellent guitarist, equally at home with electric rock guitar leads or folk acoustic fingerpicking. He was also a versatile lead and harmony vocalist, and on top of all that, Shaw was a young, blonde-haired, blue-eyed performing dynamo. Styx finally had its poster boy.
Derek Sutton: I saw him on stage and said, “This is it. This kid is going to make the difference between a successful band and a mega band.” He would not stand still, and therefore JY, who had always been the guitarist - because JC had always stayed back - was being forced to compete for spotlight, and Dennis was having to actually do more than just sit at the piano. So it sparked the entire band to be more performance-oriented. Prior to that they were much more of a pompous, static, English Pink Floyd type band.
They had a lot of delusions of grandeur. They were the first of the Midwestern bands to use taped music for intros. They were using the “William Tell Overture” to bring them onstage at that point. The swelling smoke, the fog and all of that. They had all of these theatrical ideas, but they were very cheesy, because they were being done on the cheap and without anybody out front that would really give them a critique of what they were doing.
One of the first things I did was to ask them not to play the “William Tell Overture” anymore, which they had been doing for two years. That got them into some real conniptions, because that was the safe intro. But they began to think differently, and working with Dennis, Dennis had a really good sense of the theatrical, but he was also very inflexible, very unwilling to make changes. Once he got an idea in his head, he was very tenacious about it and extremely good at expressing that idea, but getting him to actually accept changes was very difficult. Early on he was much more malleable than he was later on.
Tommy could certainly hold his own musically and on stage, but there was an undeniable age, educational and cultural gap between him and the other members of Styx. Living in Chicago, cut off from friends and family and thrust very suddenly into a number of new situations, Shaw felt like a fish out of water.
Tommy Shaw: They were very impressive. Very articulate, educated, thoughtful, serious. Exactly the opposite of the band I'd just come from. (Laughs). Although those guys were educated, we were rock and roll dudes, we were a band, you know, we drove around the country and we paid dues. These guys had money, they had a plan, they had a deal . . . all totally foreign to me. It was their fifth album. So I was quite a few years younger than them, and I was the new kid. They took me in and I knew nothing, other than I knew how to kick ass on stage, and I knew how to write songs, and that's what I did. I was this insanely energetic new guy in the band.
I never felt totally comfortable amongst the other guys. I felt totally comfortable on stage, always, but never really was made to feel like an equal member. I still don't understand that one. But you know, they all grew up together, pretty much, and I don't think they related to my lifestyle or my upbringing, or just because I was younger than them, my approach to things.
I was intimidated by their intelligence, their education. I was a high school graduate, and you know how some people can make you feel "less than" by their education. Some people like to hold it over your head, and it may have just been my own insecurity, but I always felt like they were a little bit ashamed at having someone in the band who wasn't a college graduate, because in interviews JY would say, "We're all college graduates." I would think, 'I never went to college,' but I just kept my mouth shut about that. That tended to hurt my feelings a little bit, but I was not ashamed of the fact. I already knew what I wanted to do, and I was educated in the streets and the clubs and on the road, and I've done well for myself. But that part obviously baffled me.
Jim Vose: That was JY. He read this book called Winning Through Intimidation. He introduced Tommy to it. We all read it, but he lived his life through that. I would show up with travel arrangements, and he would read the OAG - the Official Airline Guide that he'd gotten a copy of - and he'd ask me why we're not on this flight or this flight or that flight, and I'd have to have answers for him. It was grueling. “Oh, that one goes through Atlanta with a two-hour layover,” or , “That one cancelled, that's an old OAG you've got.”
I mean, he is intelligent, but he has the need to show it. Not so much anymore. Of course I don't hang out with them anymore, so I don't know, but when I did get together with them a while back, he was the first one that came up to me and said that he had heard about my heart attack and asked how I was doing. He showed some actual concern.
Tommy had his insecurities because he was a little country boy. A country boy that could play his ass off and sing like an angel. You've got the aerospace engineer JY, whose favorite reading material was the dictionary, and you've got John and Chuck Panozzo, the mafia, with that close-minded Italian conservatism that if you're not part of the family, you're nowhere.
Tommy's first weekend, we were headed out in the Midwest someplace in Ohio. By this time we had graduated from the station wagon to two rental cars, and we had John and Chuck, Tommy and me in one, and JY and Dennis in the other. Tommy's in the front seat next to me. We would meet at John and Chuck's house on the South Side, and we're just pulling away, and John and Chuck were having a disagreement. Before you know it Chuck kicked John in the face, and John is smashing Chuck in the side of the head with his fist, and Tommy's sitting there going, “What the fuck did I get myself into?” (Laughs).
Derek Sutton: At the time I think Tommy thought of himself as a sort of unattractive, unintelligent hanger-on to the band. He told me once that he was a guy that couldn't get a date for the prom. It was sometime in the 1980 tour. He had three or four absolutely spectacular-looking young women just all over him, and he said no to all of them and climbed into the back of the limo with me and said, “Not bad for a guy who couldn't get a date for the prom.” I think that was the way he thought of himself at that point.
I knew the first time he hit the stage that he had the appeal. Not only did he have the appeal, but because he had the appeal, that energy was then reflected by Dennis and JY, and that turned the entire volume up on stage. There was in fact an occasion when one band member came to me and said, “Can't we do something about this guy? He's stealing the spotlight even when I'm singing.” That would be Dennis. But Tommy did not see himself as the person who, really he was the catalyst. For the stage performance he was the catalyst.
Before he came along they were very stationary. They played very well and they sang very well, but then he came along and not only could he play very well, he was running around the stage working the audience. JY had to follow, JY had to develop the ability to do it. Then they started doing the double jumps, and it just developed from there until showmanship became important to everybody.
Part of that came from them taking direction. I had been exposed to Jethro Tull, I had been on the road with them and I had been with Ten Years After, and I had seen the difference between Jethro Tull doing production and Ten Years After not, or Procol Harum refusing to do production and insisting on being musical purists.
When Tommy came along and stared doing that, it opened them up to it, and I started offering more suggestions, which they continued to take and magnify. The band grew to an entirely new level. They always had it in them.
It changed things because Dennis was not so much in control. Up until then everybody had so much to lose if they went against Dennis, whereas Tommy had nothing to lose, because as far as he was concerned he was younger than everybody else, and he was the best thing they had going for them. To an extent he was right.
Tommy pandered to the young females, which is something that neither Dennis nor JY knew how to do. Tommy is an absolute showman, and he created the showmanship of Styx on his own back. I was mediating between various people. I was getting phone calls like, “This guy's trying to steal my spotlight while I'm taking a solo.” “This guy's running around the stage while I'm singing a song.” I would go in there and explain to everybody how best to use the energy and the showmanship that Tommy had to offer to the best benefit of everybody, and when Tommy finished off getting all of the applause and the reaction from the audience, Dennis and JY began to do similar things. That's what created all the theatricality.
Tommy Shaw: I showed up every night and gave it my best. I was always kind of shy in person, but on stage, that was my terrain and still is. I take on a totally different personality when I get on stage, because that's my territory and I rule there. That's not the way it is in real life. You may think it is, but it's a lot different. At least it is for me.
Jim Vose: In the early days we would leave the gig we were at, and he'd take his guitar and we'd go find a club where he could get up onstage and jam with the band. It was great. I'd sit there and score chicks and drink free, and he was up there on stage kicking ass. He would hang around with the crew more than he would hang around with the guys in the band. He's quite a bit younger.
Styx was still playing opening act slots, but they were climbing rapidly now, spurred on by the success of both “Lady” and “Lorelei”. The group warmed up for a number of more successful acts and continued to earn the reputation as an opening act that could blow the headliner off the stage.
“We cut our teeth being a live band, we were very enthusiastic. I still think we were the most entertaining Seventies rock band in person,” Dennis said. “We got dumped a couple of times. Seals and Croft dumped us. That may have been because we were big and loud. But bands didn't really want us. They'd turn the volume down on the sound and turn the lights on too soon, all that stuff.”
“One band that we worked with an awful lot was Kiss,” JY recalled, “and even with all their theatrics, they eventually began to think that Styx was just a little too good. While our strengths were different than theirs, our show tended to point out some of their weaknesses. After a while they didn't want to have a group as strong as we were both musically and vocally opening up a show for them.” Styx opened for the likes of the Doobie Brothers, ZZ Top, Three Dog Night, Blue Oyster Cult, and Bad Company, taking on all contenders and leaving them in its wake.
“The vocals were there when we sang live, it was not manufactured in the studio,” JY said. “Particularly after Tommy got in the band, there was enough energy and there was a hit song in our repertoire with “Lady” and “Lorelei”, we could go out and give the big guys a run for their money. Aerosmith put us on the bill opening for them in the Northeast, which is their stronghold, but they were arguing with each other on stage during their set, and when we went on there, we were loaded for bear and we killed every night. There's no experience like that, there's no boot camp for the big-time rock stage that would whip you into shape better than that.”
Steven A. Jones: When they toured with Kiss, that was one of the most insane things I've ever seen in my life. It was the very first or second tour of Kiss. They might as well have come from Mars, they were so unique. I was really, truly amazed. We all just stood there by the side of the stage, me and JY and Dennis and everybody, and watched those flames bounce off the ceiling, and watched Gene Simmons spit blood, and no one could believe it. They were at that point, Kiss was a bunch of performance artists working. Later on they became pop stars, but in those days it was performance art. It just happened to be a rock and roll situation.
Jim Vose: We would be in really hot shows with Kansas, like Styx, Kansas and Queen. Or just Styx and Kansas. Those were rocking shows. When you really listen to it, the music really wasn't the same. Everyone rocked in the end, but Kansas I felt was a little more technical. They didn't do the “rock and roll will make you feel good” kind of stuff.
Head East. (Laughs). Roger Boyd, their keyboard player, he tried to be Dennis DeYoung, I guess you could say. Kind of an egotistical prick. (Laughs). He would always get mad at me because I wouldn't call him Roger Boyd, I'd call him Roger Bone. (Laughs). We did a lot of shows with them, and there was a rivalry. We took off before they did, and then we kept going and they didn't. They would always open for us, and Roger would always want to borrow Dennis' keyboards, and I would say no. I remember coming to a show early in Montana, and he had told my keyboard roadie that Dennis said he could use his Oberheim synthesizer. I come walking in and here's the Oberheim up on stage on Roger's setup. So I called [keyboard tech] Pat Hinchey over and said, “Get that off of there, and don't tell him.” So he gets up onstage and there's no synthesizer. (Laughs). I was on the side of the stage going, “Naughty, naughty.” (Laughs). I never screwed anyone over, I just got back at them when they tried to take advantage of me.
Another one was Blue Oyster Cult. Their tour manager was very un-together. We supported them in Portland, Maine, and they refused to let us use our grand piano to do “Lady”. They said we couldn't set it up on stage, so Dennis had to do it with his Fender Rhodes. Okay, big deal, but it pissed me off, and I figured I would get them some day. The chance came at my biggest show with Styx. They may have done bigger ones after I left the road. It was St. Louis, Bush Stadium. Five acts on the bill. Pat Travers, Eddie Money . . . anyway, Blue Oyster Cult was set to go on just as the sun was going down. It was timed so that it would be totally dark by the time Styx hit the stage, and the light show looked great. Well, this guy was an idiot, he didn't pay attention to how things were done. He just bullied his way through.
The sun's going down, and he's got no lights. This was a union hall; you've got to put your call in before the show, how many spot operators you want so you'll have people working, so that people can see your band. (Laughs). Those guys are all three feet tall anyway. So he calls me and says, “I've gotta have lights!” I said, “Did you put in your call for stage hands?” He said, “No.” “Well, sorry, I can't help you.” (Laughs).
Ironically, after all the years of hard touring Styx had done in America, Canada became the first market to fully embrace the group as a superstar act. Opening for Bad Company in Montreal, Styx performed “Suite Madame Blue”. The musicians were stunned when the audience held up lighters and sang along with every word. The song had never even been officially released as a single.
Derek Sutton: I got my biggest break when the Canadian A&M company, that I had a lot of good relationships with previously, particularly when I was road managing Procol Harum, they told me that they were getting tremendous response to Equinox in Montreal. So I went up there, and we worked out a plan for how we were going to break the band in Canada, and finished off getting them both a Gold and a Platinum album, when people on the lot at A&M in Los Angeles were sort of very ambivalent about the band. The band wasn't hip enough to be the kind of band that A&R people and people at labels wanted to brag about.
The music wasn't unique enough. Styx' music was always an amalgam of the best music of the Sixties and Seventies, and it wasn't unique. It was unique in that it was Styx, but it wasn't new and it was not on the cutting edge of music.
They were very bread and butter, they were very journeyman. There was nobody that had a star attitude. There was nobody in the band that could be fingered as a new sexy star. It wasn't a Jethro Tull situation, where you had a complete lunatic out front. It wasn't even a Ten Years After situation, where you had a guy with the best cheekbones in the business. You're talking about a band that worked for its money and played music that the audience liked, but the critics did not like, and in consequence, LA being what it is, the label was almost a bit uncomfortable with having this band on the label. My job was to get people to understand that we would all do very well, and the record company would make money, from working with a band like this.
It took me quite a long time to get it together, but once we actually got the method of packaging and selling down right, we actually turned it all around.
Bob Garcia: I think even before they were officially signed, those of the A&M staff that were acquainted with their Wooden Nickel stuff knew there was something there. But I think the first time that A&M saw this band in a good light was at the Starwood, run by the guy, Eddie Nash, that was involved in the Wonderland murders. Those dope murders, John Holmes and all of that. Eddie Nash was running that club, and the band played a midnight performance. Since it was a midnight performance, and they were still kind of in the youth of being a newly signed band, not all of the facets of A&M showed up. But several months later they headlined the Santa Monica Civic Center with complete production values; lights, staging and everything else. It was at that show that everybody's mouths fell open, and they realized they had a monster act on their hands.
As the intense touring continued, Dennis DeYoung was struggling with the new demands of the situation. In addition to contending with ongoing litigation, a new label, new management, and a member change in the band, Dennis was also beset with a growing homesickness for his wife and his four-year-old daughter Carrie Ann.
“I would cry when it was time for him to leave, he would cry, our daughter would cry,” Suzanne DeYoung recalled. “We were all missing each other.”
It was all too much for Dennis. He plunged into an episode of deep depression that led to a complete nervous breakdown, and he voluntarily committed himself to a psychiatric care facility for evaluation. For a brief time it was unclear whether DeYoung would be able to continue with Styx.
Jim Vose: We were out on the road and he would call home to talk to his daughter, and his wife would say, “She doesn't remember who her daddy is.” She wouldn't let her daughter get on the phone. She did not think things were going to go anywhere. He had been a teacher, and he quit that. They were living in utter poverty, and he was gone seventy-five percent of the time, and she worked it.
He was afraid he was losing power because Tommy was so good. He was intimidated. His wife was working on him, and he's a wacky guy anyway.
You have to figure that he was in the middle of everything. The rest of the guys could say, “All right, let's go for the throat.” He was in the process of hanging his wife's cousin out to dry. He had that family pressure, and family is important to him. I'm sure they would go to some of the family get-togethers, Christmas and everything, when they used to be together, and now, “If he's coming, I'm not coming” is going on. Plus he had the pressure with being away from his daughter, and nobody else had kids in those days. Also his wife really wanted to dominate him, and he just cracked.
I remember we were doing some sort of benefit. It was “Win Styx for a concert at your high school.” We're at O'Hare Airport; Dennis showed up late, we're sitting there, and they called the flight, and I said, “Well, let's go.” Dennis said to me, “I can't get on the plane.” I said, “What do you mean, you can't get on the plane?” He told me, “My wife made some marijuana brownies last night, and I ate them and I got too high, and I just can't get on the plane.” I said, “Yeah, okay, let's go.” (Laughs). But that was it. He just would not get on the plane. I took him home, and the next day Derek called me and said Dennis was in a hospital called River's Edge.
That's something we never talked about. After that he came back, and his wife and daughter came out on the road with us, and they stayed forever. It was probably six weeks. He was in for a couple of weeks and then he went home for a few weeks before he came back.
I was with the Ides of March, so I grew up with Jim Peterik. (Laughs). Jim is one of the most wonderful, sweetest, kindest people, but when he gets a song in his head, just hope he's not driving the van. He'd be driving along and he'd be headed toward a mountain drop off because he's thinking of a riff. It's creativity. They're artists. They're not cutting an ear off like Van Gogh, or drinking themselves to death like some, but they all have their little quirks. I just considered it part of the job and moved on.
Styx began recording its sixth record, its second for A&M and the first since the addition of Tommy Shaw. Dennis was less involved than in the past, participating intermittently while dealing with the aftermath of his breakdown. In his absence the musicians turned to Tommy - now the strongest writer among them - for inspiration. The result was Crystal Ball, titled after a song written and sung by Tommy Shaw and featuring Shaw writing or co-writing six of the album's seven tracks.
The album kicked off with “Put Me On”, a three-way co-write between the principals of the band. Tommy took the opening riff from a song he had written with MS Funk called “Bitter Suite”. “Mademoiselle” was another steal from his recent past; Shaw provided the instrumental hook and the verse, while Dennis grafted on a trademark pop chorus. The song turned out to be such a perfect pop rock confection that it became the single from the record.
DeYoung's “Jennifer” was actually an older song that Styx had played but never recorded back in its Wooden Nickel days, now dusted off and re-worked for the new album. “Shooz” was a straight-ahead guitar-driven rocker written by JY and Tommy, featuring Tommy on sizzling slide guitar. “This Old Man” was Dennis' ode to his father on which Tommy came in as a co-writer. The track was one of Shaw's favorites.
Dennis' father had been a GI in World War II, and while stationed in Holland he had stayed in the home of a Dutch family whose son was a concert pianist. The son would play for the soldiers each night, and “Clair De Lune” became Maurice DeYoung's favorite. Dennis recorded it on solo piano for the new record as an intro to “Ballerina”, a DeYoung/Shaw co-write which started with simple melodic piano and built into a frenzied electric guitar trade-off between Tommy and JY to close out the album.
Bill Traut (President, Wooden Nickel Records): My office was very close to Paragon, where they recorded. In fact I had to pass Paragon to get there. They were recording in the middle of the summer, and John and JY were standing outside smoking on the sidewalk. I went up and greeted and hugged each other and all the usual thing. They said, “Come on upstairs, we're making this great record, you've got to hear it.”
So I said, “Are you sure?” They said, “Yeah, come on up, Dennis won't care.” So I walked into the control room, and John Panozzo wanted to play me back a track. Dennis looked up at me in the control room and said, “Who invited Traut here?! I never want to see him again in my life! Don't you realize he's the enemy?!” He was yelling and screaming at the guys.
I said, “Hey, Dennis, it's all right, I don't need to be here.” I walked back out of the studio, and that's the last time I ever saw them until just recently.
Like many of his songs on the album, Shaw's “Crystal Ball” was a new arrangement of a song from a previous band, in this case Harvest. He was taking bits and pieces of his old songs and learning how to best utilize his musical ideas in the setting of Styx, where strong melodies and pop hooks met with big vocal and instrumental arrangements.
“Tommy's original version of 'Crystal Ball' was more like a Crosby, Stills and Nash song like 'Helplessly Hoping', a completely three part harmony song,” Dennis recalled. “And I told Tommy, 'No, you should sing that song, it should be personal, one person singing it, not three people harmonizing.' It was a beautiful acoustic song. But we Styxified it, put the Marshall guitar on it, told that song to stand up tall now.”
Derek Sutton: I actually think that Tommy learned song structure and how to deliver a written song from being associated with Dennis. Dennis was completely brutal in terms of taking someone else's work and getting it to its full potential. He didn't care whose baby he chopped the hands off of.
It's not a popular position. But it got to the point where any one of the three of them would do that if they thought they could back it up and were willing to put up with the earache that came with actually saying something, and that's why no self-indulgences got through.
If you read the fan mail, some of the songs that reached people were never hits, things like “Crystal Ball” for instance. Somewhere Tommy has a letter from some girl who was rescued from suicide by that song. It was one of those things that make you realize the power of music. I think music has powers that are not measured in terms of popular success. Where Dennis had the absolute touch to make success as we understand it, i.e. radio success, from a song, the rocking edge songs, the “Miss Americas” of this world, the “Blue Collar Mans” of this world, those kinds of songs reached an audience that Dennis' songs did not reach. That's why we had the disparate kinds of audiences that we had. They were not homogenized audiences.
I was the first person to use a computer, a mail merge type computer which was actually set up for billing, to answer fan mail. I spent eight or nine thousand dollars on this blasted thing, which an Apple could do today. (Laughs). We had a hundred different clauses that answered the most commonly asked questions from fan letters. The girls could sit down, read a fan letter, and type in five or six codes which would generate a letter which specifically answered the questions that were asked by the fan. Then we'd set the thing on print, we would print several hundred of them at a time. I would take them out to the band, and each guy would get his share and sign them individually.
Then there were the ones that were very important, like the girl in Kansas City who was drugged out, and took her only solace in the world from the song “Crystal Ball”. Tommy got involved and saved her life. That was something which, again, it's to Tommy's credit that he did it, but it was certainly done because of what we were doing, the kind of care that was being paid by my employees to doing the right thing by our fans.
Tommy Shaw: Oh yeah, I met the parents and everything. She was going to kill herself. She's in Kansas City. I can't remember her name.
It made me feel very peculiar, because at the time I wrote it, it just came to me, and then I re-wrote it in the back seat of a car on the way to some city. Dennis was sitting in the front and I was writing lyrics and handing them over for him to look at. I was just writing another song, and I had no idea of the impact of the lyrics.
Derek Sutton: We also tried to influence radio, and it backfired at one point. I could zip code target, by hand in those days. We had everything set up so that we put everything into state and city piles. We had a problem with a particular programmer in St. Louis, and I sent out a letter to all of the fans in the St. Louis area asking them to please call the station and ask for the song that they weren't playing, but the one that we wanted them to play. That got me into severe trouble, because she pulled every Styx song off the station for a period while she called me up and called me all sorts of rude names for interfering with her research. (Laughs).
But we utilized the fan club, and the band participated in it, they paid for it. They understood the idea that it wasn't going to make us a profit initially, but it was part of the service to the fans that would keep the band alive for a long time. I used the technology and the band's willingness to do the extra work to really create something which you don't get very much with the major bands these days. They turn things over to services, and they really just turn out fluff. It's just a sales tool. For me it was the establishment of a concrete base and being in touch with the fans. The girls always had, I would have maybe ten or fifteen letters a day that I would look at, because they had more in them than just the usual, “Can you send me an autographed picture, I love your songs, what's your favorite color” kind of stuff. Those kinds of things enabled me to stay in touch with what the kids were thinking about the music.
Styx hit the road in support of Crystal Ball. The group was still opening for other acts, as well as headlining some smaller shows, but it was clear to everyone that the band was on the verge of breaking through to arena headliner status in America as it already had in Canada. The group's reputation continued to spread as a band that was simply too hot to follow. Styx' live presentation was more than just music, it was what JY called “rock and roll meets mainstream entertainment”. Every note, every lick, everything that the musicians said between songs was rehearsed until it became second nature. Add to that a slew of colored lights, moving scenery, fog and other visual effects, and it created an entertaining show that was hard to beat. Many of the bands Styx opened for wound up looking like amateurs trying to follow the group's tight, energetic, highly professional performances.
Jim Vose: We blew Marshall Tucker off the stage in his hometown of Oklahoma City, and after the show they threw us off the tour. I mean, Marhsall Tucker was a country band anyway. We went in there, and there were people leaving during his set. At the time we probably had a hit, and there were probably a lot of people that came just to see Styx. Apparently so many people left during his set that he got pissed off.
Eddie Wolford (Musician, Harvest): I met the guys in Styx when Tommy invited me to see a concert or two. John was kinda in his own world, didn't care whether I was there or not. Chuck, you know how people, when they've become stars, the only people who are around them tell them that they are stars, and they treat them like they're not just regular people. They start thinking that they're not regular people. John, Chuck . . . they weren't mean to me, but they weren't particularly nice, either. It was more like, so what? You're not me. (Laughs). That's just the feeling I got. Some of that was my own self-consciousness and envy, probably. I wanted to be rich and famous.
Chuck, I've never had a conversation with. Not more than just a couple of sentences. But he was nicer when they got back together, ten years ago. He was more gracious to me, and he seemed to look outside of himself a little bit more.
JY has always just seemed like he thought he was eight or nine feet tall, and everyone else was four or five feet tall. But he was nicer to me lately and maybe I was easier to be nice to.
Anyway, my impression of Dennis DeYoung was that he was so superior, and what am I doing in his world? And Tommy must have thought that I was really good and pumped me up to his band, so Dennis might not have liked me because of that.
I don't know how good I am. I really don't. I have written some pretty songs, and I have written some pretty awful songs. (Laughs). I have sung well on some good songs. My voice has sounded really good sometimes, on some songs. But Tommy I think has a really good opinion of me and my talents. Right from the beginning we've always been able to sing together. We've been able to lose our own . . . actually it's like finding our own identity by not having to sound like anybody else, but sounding so good together that it's fun, more fun than anything else.
So I think that Tommy had probably spoken highly of me, and also to make himself feel good about his own past he had probably talked us up quite a bit about having this great band. So Dennis DeYoung sees me coming to a concert and he thinks, 'Here's that guy that Tommy's been talking about.' Half of it probably wasn't true, as far as, Tommy pumping me up in everyone else's eyes also pumps him up. So he probably made me sound a lot better than I deserved. So I come in looking like I'm a star - in the bowling alley (laughs), and Dennis was not a guy that could take any attention from himself and give me any attention. That's just the way it seemed to me. Of course, he was working and I was an 'extra' in the scene.
Dennis had seemingly recovered from his breakdown, but it changed the way Styx ran its touring endeavors. For one thing, the group now scheduled its work around his needs. “Everything sort of changed in Dennis from then on,” Jim Vose said. “He actually couldn't be away from home more than four or five days at a time. He had to get back to talk with his doctor. His wife and daughter came out with us right after that, and they came forever.”
Dennis started bringing Suzanne and their daughter Carrie Ann on the road with him full-time, which didn't always sit well with the other band members or the crew. The DeYoungs were a strict Catholic family, and Suzanne looked upon many of the typical sophomoric shenanigans of the road with disdain. She wasn't comfortable with some of what went on, and the others weren't comfortable with her. They resented having to modify their behavior because of her presence.
Tommy Shaw: He was kind of not around as much with the Crystal Ball album. I don't know how it affected things, really. We just accepted that he's a little more fragile than what we had thought, and in a lot of ways I kind of miss the old Doc, the crazy guy with the beard. It was good when he was crazy. He was the crazed-looking, swashbuckling, blackbeard madman singing "Born For Adventure"!
He won't smoke pot anymore. Whatever that did for him, he wasn't doing that anymore. I'd rather have him the way he really is.
Jim Vose: The main part was having his wife along all the time. That's like going on a campout and having the scout master along the whole time. You work hard, and then you want to enjoy the fruits of your labor. You want to maybe step around a little bit, and all of a sudden you've got the den mother down the hall. She was judgmental toward everybody.
He became kinda quiet and reserved. Instead of giving orders, he would just quietly say something. Then he would look at Suzanne, and she would say, “Yep, that's the way it is.” He may wear the pants in the family, but she picks them out.
Derek Sutton: Well, I just think that the two of them live in a mutually supportive other world. It's a very strong marriage, I believe, but exclusive of reality. Suzanne likes to be the Empress, and that really turns a lot of people off. That wasn't really apparent until Dennis had his nervous breakdown. After that it became very apparent.
Dennis by himself can be persuaded, but when he goes home and has to deal with a wife who knows enough about the business to be dangerous, but not enough to be contributive, he is faced with an impossible decision. He can either stand by what he said in the meetings and put up with earache every time he puts his head on the pillow, or he accepts her contribution and comes back to the meeting and says, “I'm sorry, we're going to have to modify what I said before.” He can't do anything else. If you've ever been married, you know that it's impossible to put up with somebody who aggressively goes after you day and night.
Jim Vose: They were all married when I started, except Chuck. The wives always had their influence with their men. Let's face it, I can't suck a dick. (Laughs). So I didn't have as much power.
Steven A. Jones: That's another tale in itself. (Laughs). They just cannot keep their mouths shut. It will always go on. You get home and your husband is reacting to his day, and you only hear one side of it. So your spouse becomes somebody who helps you fight the enemy, and even when you are friends with the enemy, she's only got that one-sided view.
They don't really have that much power in the organization in one sense. Their only real power is the power they hold over their husbands. That and the entourage; they certainly have control over the entourage and whatever people are hanging around. So there's a lot of weird little petty intrigues, a lot of, “How come he's getting this and you're not?” It's just human nature. I know at one point Cuppy was telling Tommy that they were putting the spotlight on JY during his solo. Just petty stuff that most likely was a technical flaw, not a plot against anybody. But when you get up there and your head starts to get big and the money starts rolling in, you come to behave strangely.
Suzanne I don't really know that much about. I haven't had enough contact with her. I know she pulls a lot of weight with her husband, and her husband is the most powerful in the bunch. You add those two together, and she probably has a lot more say than she deserves. I always find it interesting that people who are in no way musical, or artists, or have anything to do with something the guys worked toward for ten years, think they can step right in and open their mouths up to guys who know what they're doing.
Tommy Shaw: She loves Dennis, and she's his wife, and of course she feels protective. I think that would be unfair for me to make a characterization of her, because they've survived two of my marriages, and whatever they're doing works for them. I respect their relationship.
Derek Sutton: I see Dennis' strengths and I see his weaknesses. I see Suzanne's weaknesses and strengths. Her weakness is that she always supports Dennis in whatever craziness he wants to be involved in. I don't think she causes it. I really don't. I really do think that she has his best interest, as she sees it, at heart.
I think she's a very strong woman. I also think she's insecure. She always felt she had to be out on the road, because otherwise one of these young girls was gonna come along and take her husband away. I think she had very little to worry about. He wasn't looking around, and I don't think he cared. There are some men for whom sex is not the driving factor. I don't think it was for Dennis.
Dennis used to laugh. He would say that if there was ever an attractive thirty-five-year-old divorcee that just wanted to talk, he would be the one that she would come to. The thing was, he would never try to dodge her or get out of the way. My concept was that he was not interested in pursuing her. He really considered his vows to be sacrosanct, and he really didn't care.
I don't know why anyone would see him as anything other than human, as having strengths and weaknesses. The strengths are obvious, and the weaknesses are obvious. You can't go on either side of the line. You can't say the man's a devil, and you can't say that he's Jesus Christ. He's an artist, which means that he's a flawed human. All artists have to be flawed in order to want what they want.
Despite Styx' breakthrough in Canada and its ever-increasing live reputation in America, Crystal Ball peaked at #66 and wound up selling slightly less than Equinox had, though it earned Styx its third Gold album. The band was also disappointed that “Mademoiselle”, though it charted at #36 and received substantial airplay, failed to follow “Lady” into the Top Ten.
Styx now had a major label deal and proper management, and was clearly poised to break through to mainstream stardom. It would take the right album at the right time to make that happen.
