Styx “Brave New World”
Today, there are two versions of Styx. One is actually called “Styx” and features Tommy Shaw and James Young performing the band’s most beloved songs, with the notable exception of “Mr. Roboto.” The other version is referred to as “Dennis DeYoung and the Music of Styx” and features just one original member — the aforementioned, once permed, accordion playing Mr. DeYoung, who sang and wrote most of their highest charting hits, including “Mr. Roboto.” As bizarre as it sounds — there being two versions of Styx — it actually makes sense. It’s literally everything else about them that confounds me.
Styx were a study in extremes — their bombast, their ballads, their range, their hair — all of it. And though their music was a staple of Classic Rock radio during my coming of age, I could never quite place them. I never understood how the shrill swirl of the Oberheim 4 Voice Synthesizer was considered listenable, much less cool. Moreover, I could not discern whether they were a Classic Rock band or a Prog Rock band or if they were even an actual band at all.
Before 1982, it seemed distinctly possible to me that Styx and Journey were the same thing. The former had a lead singer with tightly knit perm and a lead guitarist with a feathery mullet and who also sang. In Journey, the inverse was true. One was from Chicago but sounded nothing like Chicago. The other was from San Francisco but sang about South Detroit, which also was not really a place but sounded like it was close to Chicago. To my young ears, “Lady,” “Babe” and “The Best of Times” sure sounded a lot like “Lights,” “Faithfully” and “Don’t Stop Believin’.” So, as much as the radio DJs and record store clerks asserted that Styx was indeed a band, before I saw them MTV, I suspected that “Styx” was just a cool nom de plume for Journey. Or vice versa.
Eventually, I figured the difference between the two. But around that same time, Dennis DeYoung dressed up his band as C3PO Buddhas and dropped them in a short post-apocalyptic film about the repression of art and free speech and wherein cyborgs rule the planet until one of those C3PO Buddhas removes his mask and reveals himself to be a human being in a lavender jumpsuit with a permed mullet who looks distinctly similar to Barry Manilow or Richard Simmons but who was in fact (you won’t believe it) Dennis DeYoung! Granted, it was the early Eighties. But, also trust me when I say that “Mr. Roboto” was bewildering.
It was also exhilerating. More unfathomable than the video for “Mr. Roboto” was the fact that DeYoung doubled down on his overwrought sci-fi farce, filming a fifteen minute version and projecting it into arenas every night to open the “Kilroy Was Here” tour. And what made less sense than that was that DeYoung asked his bandmates, who could not act, to act, and designed a show that cost more than any show Styx had ever put on in spite of the fact that they were playing to crowds less than half the size they once had. And what makes the least sense of all is that the song — a vaguely Techno, fully Broadway shlock banger — totally works and that the ludicrous movie is actually oddly prophetic.
Like Queen, with whom they’ve often been compared, Styx has always been the kind of band that swings for the fences. Most of the time they whiff, but in a charming “love the effort” sort of way. When they connect, however, as they did roughly one time per album between 1973 and 1982, they hit it out of the park. Way out of the park. During that run, DeYoung, Shaw, Young and the Panozzo brothers scored a half dozen top ten hits and five consecutive platinum-selling albums. And yet it always seemed to me that the band was a mistake — that we already had Queen and Journey. That DeYoung should be wowing audiences on Broadway (which he eventually did) and that Shaw should be fronting a Hair Metal band (which he also eventually did).
In spite of their inarguable commercial success, I’ve never met a Styx fan. Or, more specifically, I’ve never met an unironic Styx fan. I know that they are out there, but they are outnumbered by the throngs of parodic fans who dance “the robot” and over-enunciate “modern” as “modren” (like DeYoung) while singing along to “Mr. Roboto.” Or those who play air guitar and thrust their pelvis whenever “Renegade” comes on the radio. Styx survives today as a certain kind of Seventies Rock cliche — massively successful, arena-sized hair, worse fashion, virtuosic and overly-theatrical. They were the anathema of Punk, doomed not by The Sex Pistols or Kilroy but by a wave of more telegenic Pop stars — Michael, Prince and Madonna.
Before they were memed, however, Styx were mainstays of the mainstream. Their most popular songs occupied an oddly compelling space between the drama of Queen, the populism of Journey and the romance of Air Supply. DeYoung’s vocal prowess and the sheer musicality of his writing was always their superpower — his songs were the sort that ambitious school choirs would take on if they really wanted to impress the parents. But, for years, his corniness existed in a mostly healthy tension with Shaw’s muscle (“Renegade”) and nerves (“Too Much Time on My Hands”). Against all odds and in spite of their many whiffs, Styx worked.
That Shaw and DeYoung — two oversized talents with divergent styles and interests — could mutually flourish was the miracle of Styx. Ultimately, that was the thing that never made sense. For eight years the brunette perm and the long blonde feathers worked together as creative foils. But, after “Kilroy,” an album which broke the bank and seemingly the band, it appeared that there was no coming back. In 1984, Tommy Shaw left Styx. It seemed very likely that their audience had moved on as well.
Six years and a new lead guitarist later, however, Styx returned — kind of. “Edge of the Century” was the Dennis DeYoung show — softer, bigger and totally balladic. The band’s twelfth studio album snuck its way onto the charts, in the years before the Alternative revolution, on the shoulders of “Show Me the Way” — a big, cheesy, barely rocker that coincided with the first Gulf War and whose chart success was guaranteed once DJs mixed dewy-eyed letters to soldiers on top of the track. The hit was sufficiently well timed and placed to nudge the album to Gold status in the U.S. But the success was both short lived and completely local. Everywhere else, “Edge of the Century” was a flop.
For the rest of the Nineties, Styx remained miles outside of the zeitgeist. Shaw found a second act alongside Ted Nugent in Damn Yankees. Dennis DeYoung made a preordained turn towards Broadway, starring in the twentieth anniversary production of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” releasing an album of Broadway favorites and, eventually, putting on his own musical version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” As Grunge ascended and Styx’s legacy faded, Shaw’s move into Hair Metal and DeYoung’s to musical theater felt inevitable. What happened next, however, absolutely did not.
While Damn Yankees was on hiatus and as John Panozzo succumbed to alcoholism, Shaw and DeYoung mended fences. In 1995 Styx, featuring both the perm and the feathers, rerecorded version of “Lady” for a greatest hits compilation. The next year they toured the world, made a surprisingly vital live album and — finally in 1998 — returned to the studio to make new music.
“Brave New World” is the sound of a once great band off balance and unable to find their weird spark. At the time of its recording, Dennis DeYoung was increasingly unavailable, suffering from extreme fatigue. And so, if “Edge of the Century” was Dennis DeYoung’s middle-aged Styx, “Brave New World” was Tommy Shaw’s turn at the wheel. Without DeYoung’s flair for the dramatic, however, Styx was rudderless, like a band still holding on after the fall. “Brave New World” is by most accounts an inferior album — possibly the worst Styx ever made. But its failings are not for any lack of competence or effort. To the contrary — the tragedy of “Brave New World” is the distance between the band’s obvious effort and their inability to recapture any semblance of their former greatness.
At their infrequent best, past prime Styx sound like an overqualified, hard rocking, mega-church house band. Shaw’s “Best New Face” and “I Will Be Your Witness” are his lone standouts — the former resembling Nineties Rom-Com soundtrack fare and the latter oddly reminiscent of a lesser Justin Timberlake track before Timbaland adds the beats. As a singer, Shaw is a belter — range and strength are not the issues so much as tone. Alongside DeYoung’s theatricality, Shaw’s voice is a useful — essential — contrast. But out front on his own, pairing Classic Rock riffs with deep thoughts about psychotropic meds (a theme he returns to several times), Shaw sounded lost, out of touch and a little unhinged.
Sadly, DeYoung fared no better. On account of his poor health, he could only muster five of the album’s fourteen tracks. And though his voice was still the band’s greatest instrument, his sense of grandeur was lost somewhere on Broadway. Fifty-two year old Dennis DeYoung resembled Barry Manilow more than he did the swaggering, mustached Arena Rocker in the unbuttoned vest who sang “Babe”. A certain mellowing with age is obviously to be expected. But on “Great Expectations” and "High Crimes & Misdemeanors (Hip Hop-Cracy),” DeYoung sounds adrift somewhere between Streisand and Shaggy. It’s almost as though he’s working on a different record — one where the Adult Contemporary charts are full of torch songs inspired by Reggaeton; one where Tommy Shaw’s songs do not exist.
Because he’s such a good vocalist and because he has an ear for melody, though, the results are more embarrassing than turgid. Like Freddie Mercury, Dennis DeYoung is a volume hitter — his ratio of misses to hits is as unfortunate as it is necessary. You can’t get “Come Sail Away” and “Lady” without a whole lot of whiffs. Nine years removed from his last hit and seventeen years from “Mr. Roboto,” DeYoung could still swing, and he could still occasionally connect. But he simply could not hit the ball out of the park.
“Brave New World” was a last gasp — an arranged marriage between a Tommy Shaw album and a Dennis DeYoung EP. It’s formally bizarre, adhering to no particular genre. And commercially, it was the wrong music from the wrong band at the wrong moment. There were four more Styx albums after “Brave New World,’ but none with Dennis DeYoung. Tommy Shaw and JT Young kept the name. Dennis DeYoung kept the voice and the hits. And, as weird as it sounds, I think that was the most rational outcome — a clean (if not always polite) divorce for the band who, for a quarter century, succeeded in the face of logic.