Styx occupies a lofty position in the pantheon of classic rock. The group's material, from the majestic "Come Sail Away," to the hard-driving "Too Much Time On My Hands," to the inspirational "Fooling Yourself" to the romantic anthem "Lady," is a mainstay on concert stages and in pop culture (remember the wedding band's delivery of "Lady" in "Old School" or the "Mr. Roboto" gags in both "Arrested Development" and a Volkswagen commercial?).
In July, Styx released "Live At The Orleans Arena Las Vegas," a document of the live shows that still dominate the Chicago-bred band's schedule in its fifth decade of work, with the current lineup of Styx Tommy Shaw (guitar, vocals), James "J.Y." Young (guitar, vocals), Lawrence Gowan (keyboards, vocals), Ricky Phillips (bass), Todd Sucherman (drums), and when he's healthy enough, original bassist Chuck Panozzo, performing more than 100 concerts a year.
Gowan, a Canadian-born musician whose successful solo career included the song "A Criminal Mind," a major hit in his native land, became a Styx lead vocalist and keyboardist in 1999 after the departure of original singer Dennis DeYoung. Gowan says he has seen the makeup of the band's audience gradually morph during his tenure from almost exclusively older Styx die-hards to its current state, which "is equally divided between people who were long-time fans of the band and people who were not even born when some of the biggest Styx records came out and having their first Styx experience live."
"It's an amazing thing to see that the ageism that once existed in the generation that I grew up with has been completely eradicated," Gowan shares. "It's dissolved entirely, and people have embraced classic rock particularly as the great music of the last half of the 20th century, which it now irrefutably is. That's been my little demographic study from the stage, and I absolutely love seeing someone 60 years old next to someone who is 16 years old, and they're both flippin' out to the same degree and have the same emotional involvement on their face that they should have at a great rock show, because it's such a great form of entertainment, and Styx is a band that has strived to do that for decades."
Gowan recently chatted exclusively with Headlines & Global News about Styx's recent tour with Def Leppard and Tesla (the three groups will link up again in January), his recruitment into the Styx ranks, bassist Chuck Panozzo's battle with AIDS and a memorable visit with NASA.
Styx has toured with many different artists recently, from REO Speedwagon to Foreigner to former Eagles guitarist Don Felder. Last summer you toured with Def Leppard and Tesla, and you'll be back out with them again soon. Those two bands are quite a bit different from Styx. How did that tour work out?
It worked out spectacularly well because we were in the top five grossing tours of the summer, which was kind of a lovely surprise to everyone. Night after night there were 18-20,000 people in the audience, so it was quite astounding. But when you look at the amount of entertainment that we were able to put on the stage, pretty much four hours of classic rock music, bands that have crossed from the '70s to the '80s and into the '90s, it kind of ties in with what we were just talking about, that there's this extended statement of rock right now that is embraced by people. I think this was just a magical combination at the right time that worked out so well for us. Now, we toured with Def Leppard in the past about nine years ago and it was also very successful, but this one passed that by quite a margin. Look, I would go out and watch the other two bands, and it was no real shock to me - halfway through the tour I thought, no wonder people are loving this so much, because I'm loving it (laughs). So I'm as much a fan as anyone is, and [Def Leppard frontman] Joe Elliott will say the same thing and put it much more eloquently. He's as much a rock fan as we all are, and that's part of what helps us to elevate our performance.
With all of the touring, has there been time to work on a new Styx album?
Surprisingly yes, there has been just enough time to lay the plans, and they're quite concrete at this point for a new Styx album. We actually did quite a bit of work on it the past year and are preparing to delve deeper into it in 2016, and hopefully that'll be the year that it comes out. But it's the kind of thing where we tour so extensively, there's no need to rush a brand new piece of work out there, so we decided to pace ourselves at the schedule dictates. Hopefully people won't hear too many of our soundchecks, because that's where we flesh out a lot of our new things. We're excited about it, but I can never give a definitive, "It will be done by this date and released by that date," because there's this demand to see the band around the world, and we try to meet the demand.
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There's probably a lot of validity to that statement. First of all I would say in spite of ourselves and the reality of having a wonderful back catalog to draw from, new things will emerge because it's a new day and we're still alive and we express ourselves musically, so we're going to do it anyway. So at some point we'll put it out, and we don't need to necessarily measure its success by the success that it may have had in the past in terms of numbers, but the success of whether or not it's emotionally engaging to people, that's a whole other way of looking at the hurdle of doing new material. I'd say it's vital to a band to keep coming up with new stuff, whether you release it immediately or hang on to it and retool it, that's still part of the life of being in a band, and you just have to decide whether or not you're going to expose it to the public. So there's definitely validity to what he's saying, but I bet there are new things coming out of him all the time and he's going, "Yeah, I think we should actually do something."
What was your impression of Styx as an outsider before you met them vs. what it's like now from the inside?
My first memory of Styx was in the '70s, I was deeply into progressive rock, and they were the first non-U.K. band that was having success with a lot of what I heard as progressive rock leanings. So that impressed me right off the bat, and yet I never got a chance to see them live because I was playing myself with my own solo career, until we actually did a couple shows together in 1997. When I saw their show I saw what a great band they were and what a great wealth of material they had to draw from, and it's funny, because I thought there was a musical simpatico between what I was doing and what this band is doing and this worked out well having me open for them.
There was a curious statement at the end of the second show we did together when Tommy said, "Listen, we're going to do some more work together in the future." That excited me, but I thought it would be me doing my stuff and them doing their stuff. But a couple years went by, and when they called I wasn't surprised because we really did fit well together, but I was extremely surprised when they said "we'd like you to be in the band" (laughs). I thought, well, I think that could work. Not to be immodest, but I did think given the vocal range requirements and the musical palette that we both draw from, there are enough things that are simpatico that this could work out. Luckily it stood up for quite a long time.
Dennis DeYoung was obviously a major part of Styx. What was it like replacing him and was there any trepidation on your part?
Luckily, the intervening year, 1998, I was touring a lot in England and I was doing a tour opening for The Stranglers then I ended up doing an original piece with the London Symphony for the opening of Princess Diana's memorial, which was quite a phenomenal gig for me to get on, and during that period it kind of came to light that there were a lot of bands at that point in their careers that were looking to find a new member or two who could fill a void. And my publicist in England said a band is going to find you, and there are a couple in England here that have been sniffing around, and would you be into joining this band or that band - I won't say who they were - but I thought this was really great to even be considered. But at that time I was kind of firm about it. I thought no, I'm a solo artist, I've got six solo records and my greatest hits record came out that year in Canada where my records are mostly released, and I thought that's kind of a dumb idea.
But when I came home in early 1999 and got a call from James Young, I just thought the universe might be tapping me on the shoulder and telling me this is the reality of what's going on with bands right now, and a lot of great bands have had to undergo member changes because it's a very tough thing for a group of four or five individuals to stay together for decades and not have life take them on another path. So it didn't shock me, because it had kind of started happening in England where I resisted it, and on this phone call from Styx, I thought we seem to fit well together on the bill for those couple of shows and I kind of like these guys and I can see how musically we're kind of heading in the same path. To add to that, when we went to have our first meeting, before we even played a Styx song, Tommy interrupted when I was going to play "Grand Illusion." He said play "A Criminal Mind," and about halfway through the song he joined in and said "OK, we should make that a Styx song." So in the very first 10 minutes together I felt musically embraced by these guys, more so than they were looking for a quote-unqoute "replacement." That word was never raised, and I've always looked at the band as being the culmination of the 10 people who stood on stage as a member of Styx over four decades. The band is as great as it is because it's a culmination of the efforts of all those people, and that would include John Panozzo [who died in 1996] and John Curulewski, and obviously Dennis DeYoung, and Chuck Panozzo, who's still with us, and Glen Burtnik, who was with the band for an era as well. It's a great group of people to be aligned with for sure.
Shortly after you joined Styx, Chuck not only came out as gay but he also announced he had AIDS, coming only a few years after his twin brother John had died. Did you know Chuck's news when you joined the band?
Yeah, I was given a quick education in the entire backstage dramas of Styx (laughs) within the first few weeks of being in the band, so I became aware of that. I spoke to Chuck at that time, and he was happy that I joined the band, but he was in the throes of trying to figure out how to survive. I remember a few months later, we were playing Las Vegas for the first time, and Chuck came out to the show, and he was in a terrible state. His health was really teetering and he was able to come on stage with us for one song, and I remember remarking at the time to him, "I'm just so glad that I got to play with you on stage at least this one time," because we didn't know how things were going to work out in the future. A year later, once he got his medication together, he looked so fit and so unbelievably buff, I couldn't believe what a tremendous recovery he made and it became apparent that he's going to continue to be a part of this thing and has remained that way ever since. What a great thing that is, because what looked so dire in 1999 by 2000, 2001, had completely been overcome.
How is Chuck doing now? He still plays with the band sometimes, right?
He does. He played with us last night, and the night before, and he's with us tonight. Depending on where his health is and whether he has the wherewithal to come out and join us, but this year over the course of 100 shows he must have been at least a quarter of them if not a third, and he comes out and plays two or three songs or whatever his energy level can muster on the day, and Ricky Phillips just moves over to 12-string electric or some other instrument, and he's still very much a part of the makeup for the band.
It couldn't have been better. Funny enough, we started going to NASA just on tours when we had some time off back in like 2000 when the Space Shuttle program was still on. On holiday I went back and got a chance to actually get on one of the Space Shuttles and I've been an aficionado of NASA for a number of years and had gone there multiple times. They knew that about the band, that we had this affinity for NASA, but what a great thing that one of the guys there, the fellow who discovered that extra moon orbiting Pluto that was not seen until the New Horizons spacecraft got close enough to spot it, and he decided to name it Styx. So he thought how appropriate that when the craft after nine and a half years arrived at Pluto and started sending us the greatest pictures of that planet that we'd ever seen on the day of its arrival we were invited to go to NASA and witness that. We were in a room of about 40 of the greatest minds of aeronautics and space travel and flight and witnessed it as we were all watching it on laptop computers as these pictures were coming through one pixel at a time, pictures that were eventually in National Geographic and seen worldwide, but we were seeing them in real time come in, and we're high-fiving with these NASA people. Subsequent to that we've invited them to come out to the shows over the course of the tour of this year, and it's been great and it's something we've been celebrating a little bit and making mention of on stage because it's a great connection to have the band's name now part of our solar system (laughs).
For more information on Styx, including complete tour dates, visit the band's official website.
