|
By Joe Brown Go ahead, check the pop charts: They're back, all the late, great, overweight Dinos of Rock, like a K-Tel Explosive Hits record come to lurid life. Go ahead, check the pop charts: Aerosmith. Queen. Yes. Bad Company. The Doobie Brothers. Lynyrd Skynyrd. (ZZ Top and Rod Stewart never had the good graces to to away.) Now comes news that Uriah Heep has reformed! And here comes Styx, perhaps the epitome of the '70s band, bundled back together after snapping apart eight years ago, and rumbling into Merriweather Post Pavilion this Friday. Can it be true, what the fashion magazines have been trying to warn us? Are the '70s really back? "Well, I hope not," says Dennis DeYoung, Styx's singer/songwriter/keyboardist, calling from a phone booth at the Raliegh-Durham airport. Funny and candid, he's a born-and-bred Chicago Southside boy. In fact, he sounds exactly like those macho guys on "Saturday Night Live" rooting for "da Bears." "I don't want to see anything come back," DeYoung says. "I want to see the '70s guys, if they're gonna do something, stay valid in the '90s. Then they belong. If they're trapped in the '70s, then its nostalgia. You're not getting me in those platform shoes again." And Styx had all the rock band cliches of the '70s working - the high shoes and higher hair, concept albums, overblown production, band members quitting to do solo albums… you name it. "Yeah, okay, we were pretty pompous," DeYoung says, laughing. "If you want overblown, I'll raise my hand." But hey, it was the '70s - you had to look like that. I bet you have a few incriminating snapshots from that time that you'll never show to your friends. And unhip as it may be to admit to liking Styx, there were some good, even prescient moments, in those concept albums and songs. If "The Grand Illusion" was pretentious, lyrically it was an earnest attempt to warn kids not to idolize pop stars. On "Mr. Roboto," Styx predicted an American obsession with Japanese technology. After the band was accused of incorporating backward-masked Satanic messages into "Snowblind" on the "Paradise Theatre" album (itself about the decline of America as a world power), 1983's "Kilroy Was Here" album was an early warning about the coming censorship mood in America - Styx even plastered the cover with a joke warning sticker from the "Majority for Musical Morality," two years before Tipper Gore cooked up the PMRC. (And admit it: "Babe" was a great prom-type slow-dancer.) So Dennis, does this mean we should be combing the new album, "Edge of the Century," for clues about what the '90s have in store? "There's not a brain cell working on this one," DeYoung laughs. "You know what the new Styx album is about? The song 'Show Me the Way.' There's a guy going, 'I don't know what to think!'" DeYoung says the reason for the band's bust-up is closely linked to the decision to pick up Styx again. "We stopped because (lead singer/guitarist) Tommy Shaw quit the band during the 'Kilroy' tour and said he wanted to be a star in his own right and pursue a solo career," DeYoung says. "And I thought that rather than replace him, we'd just wait it out until he got it out of his system. And he eventually did. But when he called me in '88, to tell me he wanted to come back to the band, I had just begun working on my third solo album. And I said 'As soon as this is over with, we'll sit down and talk about it.' But unfortunately, it took about a year and a half. "In the interim Tommy called me and said 'Look, I need to work, and I've got an offer to put something together with [guitarist] Ted Nugent.' And I told him to go do it, and it turned out to be [the band] Damn Yankees. But because Tommy had called and said he was interested, the other four members of the band actually sat down for the first time in six years and discussed the idea." So Shaw was quickly replaced by guitarist/singer Glen Burtnik, and Styx set about recording "Edge of the Century." Apparently there's an audience for Styx's slightly updated Sound of the '70s. "Honestly, we weren't sure who was going to show up, if anybody, and the reaction by the fans has been pretty overwhelming, more than we expected," DeYoung says. "The crowds seem to be a lot of young fans who've picked up on the new album. And classic radio has kept us out there, too. "Anyway, it was amazing - they were singing along with anything that was old, and 'Show Me the Way' and 'Love Is the Ritual.' I'm telling you, they were louder than our monitors. Maybe we'll stay away another eight years and see what happens." |