Dennis Interview

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LiveDaily Interview: Dennis DeYoung
Published April 20, 2010 02:04 PMComments and 0 Reactions print email
By John Voket / LiveDaily Contributor
Styx co-founder and primary songwriter Dennis DeYoung [ tickets ] is back on the road again, revisiting the material he wrote or co-wrote while he was a member of the popular arena-rock act.

Currently billed as "Dennis DeYoung--The Music of Styx," he is performing with an entirely new band whose players are already so musically tight after their first few gigs together that they rival the Styx lineup of the late 1970s and early '80s at its best.
Besides lending his soaring tenor vocals and signature keyboard lines to a catalog of classic-rock staples that includes "Come Sail Away," "Babe," "Lady" and "Mr Roboto," DeYoung has retained an astounding pair of guitarist/singers in August Zadra (who performs "Blue Collar Man," "Renegade" and "Too Much Time on My Hands") and James Leahey.

Their visually footloose but highly precise guitar interplay could easily be mistaken for Tommy Shaw and James "JY" Young, who carried on as Styx in 1999 without DeYoung following a couple of on-again/off-again reunion attempts.

Styx, which is still touring and recording today, currently features the voice and keyboard work of former Canadian solo star Lawrence Gowan. And neither DeYoung nor the Shaw/Young camps are looking back.

Despite his definitive split from Styx, DeYoung has continued to enjoy a career in show business, having won a lawsuit to permit billing himself as "performing the music of Styx." He has also supplemented his career by writing for the stage, contributing the book for a musical based on "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and last year, penning tunes for "The 101 Dalmatians Musical."

In an interview following only his fifth live show with the new band, DeYoung settled down for an extended conversation with LiveDaily. And it was difficult for the 63-year-old to contain his excitement at being able to showcase his current musical collaborators and his most beloved song creations to both new and rabidly loyal fans.

He started out the conversation talking about the new band, and how getting back on tour fulfills the wishes of most of his longtime fans who come out to relive the memories, and in some small way for just a couple of hours, recapture the innocence of their younger days.

LiveDaily: Your two new guitarists are pretty impressive look-alikes and sound-alikes. If fans of Styx close their eyes and listen, it might be difficult to hear any difference from what they might have heard in concert halls going back to the late 1970s.

Dennis DeYoung: You know, my son [Matthew] called me up and said, "Dad, I heard this guy August Zadra," and he sent me some videos of August performing "Renegade" and "Too Much Time on my Hands." And I thought, "Yikes, it says Dennis DeYoung and the music of Styx, let's do that!" It all happened by accident because my son found this incredible [performer], August. I wouldn't have done this tour without him. Then I found [bassist] Craig Carter through Phil Earhart from Kansas, and I made big changes in my band, essentially replacing three members with two. I'm so glad, because it has invigorated me on stage in ways I didn't think were possible. But, after playing five shows, I have come to realize this is what Styx fans have been craving. Those people come to see me for a very specific reason: to relive their past, when they rightly or wrongly believe they were happier. At 63, it does an old man's heart good that I can still experience this.

Maybe it's a shared experience, and it doesn't end after that couple of hours for the fans, either. Do you think maybe that experience of reliving their past can validate that they can still experience that magic, and maybe a few of them get up the next morning and move forward in a better way?

That's what I say in my show. I talk about winners being losers who got up and gave it one more try. And the last words that I sing on stage before the encore: "But tonight can always last as long as we keep alive the memories of paradise," which is my way of saying, "we'll take the best, forget the rest because these are the best of times," whenever that is sung. It's our responsibility as humans to find the good that we have in the present, and find a way to make that important. What I think we did as a band back then was what we stood for and said in our music, though so many times it was dismissed--even castigated by the rock press.

But Styx certainly wasn't singled out in that respect, was it?

If I look at all the bands of our generation--Journey, Styx, Foreigner, Queen, all those bands--and I look at what we said lyrically, forget the music, I think we had lyrics that were more substantial than any of our peers. Not to disparage them, but they did what they did. Looking across the main rock bands of that era, I think Styx was the only one that really talked about our views of society, and how America and individuals fit together in the scheme of the world.

Journey wrote a lot of love songs. And Foreigner"Juke Box Hero"--that's about themselves, and the self-aggrandizement of rock stardom, which is something I consciously tried to never do in my songs.

I'm off on a tangent, but you still see it today with rap music, which is based on the idea of self-aggrandizement of the performer: "My name is, my name is...," I found songs talking about the rock-star life in that way tedious, unless it related to the greater world. Like in "The Grand Illusion." My take on rock stardom in "The Grand Illusion" is: don't believe this. Everything you see in advertisements, the glamorization and the glorification of popular culture is a grand illusion. We said it in our music. You know, you look up on stage and you see us, but just a few short years ago we were out there in the 14th row looking up here.

And Styx had plenty of time to get it right because you guys were somewhat ahead of your time. The band did not catch fire with a nationwide or global audience for quite awhile after you got some regional attention from your song "Lady," right?

I have been really lucky to have the career I've had. It could have gone the other way so easily. I wrote "Lady" for the very first Styx album and it was turned down by the producer. It got on the second album, but "Lady" was the first song I ever wrote, recorded and sang by myself. So I had a vision of what I wanted to do musically early on. But, through no fault of our own, we weren't discovered on the East Coast until 1977, seven albums into what we were doing. That musical style in "Lady" was done in 1972. Had the world known us in 1972, we wouldn't have felt like so many people misguidedly thought of us as following in the [styles] of Kansas, or Boston, or Foreigner, or Queen. We were before them. We did that style first, in obscurity.

When we finally made it onto a worldwide stage five years later, we were never able to shake the [reputation] of being followers of those bands, even though it was not true. That's my biggest regret above everything. The style of music we played in 1972 was never recognized as ours just because of bad record promotion. But this happens. So when the world finally saw us in 1977 and 1978, we were motherf---ers.

Of the half-dozen Styx shows I saw with the configuration of you, Tommy, JY, Chuck and John [Panozzo], it always seemed like they had the rock-star thing going on while you brought a greater sense of theater to the stage. Was that unintended or was that dramatic flair always part of your fabric?

I guess it was part of my fabric. But you have to understand: I really like Danny Kaye and Anthony Newley. There is a theatricality about them both. You know, Mick Jagger has millions of fans, but I could never picture myself doing that. I watched a lot of Danny Kaye, I watched him sing, and the hand gestures. And you may ask, "What does that have to do with rock and roll?" Well, when you first saw Elvis, he had a few gestures, you know what I mean? For me to squirrel around on stage like Mick Jagger, or like a million other stars in tight pants, I mean, tell me who you want me to act like and I'll act like that. Otherwise, I go out of my way to not act like that because when I watch certain rock stars, it's comical to me. Too much of it looks like insincere posing.

You also managed to pull off something else that a lot of rock stars tried unsuccessfully to do, and not just one time. I'm referring to concept albums.

That's right. Long before I wrote the [theatrical] book for "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," I wrote a little book called "Kilroy Was Here," about censorship and all that. The concept albums I wrote for Styx were: "Grand Illusion," "Pieces of Eight," "Paradise Theater" and "Kilroy Was Here." Those were the ones where I told the guys in advance, "Look, here's the theme."

We talked about "Kilroy" already. "The Grand Illusion's" theme was: things are not always what they seem in rock music or advertising. "Pieces of Eight" came after we made a ton of money that came crashing into our lives. And it really changed me fundamentally and all the people around me, so I wanted to artistically investigate that. "Paradise Theater" came during the [President] Carter to Reagan transition, and was very much inspired by the Reagan campaign.

I bet you didn't sell it that way, though...

Not a very popular thing to say for a rock star, but Reagan embodied to me the spirit of what I think this country really stands for. That is, despite our flaws we are capable of great things. There was a spirit of hope in him after a time when more things happened to destroy Americans' belief in their system of government from Watergate to the Iranian hostage crisis--a miserable eight years. So along came "Paradise Theater"--a metaphor for an America in decline. And for all those people who thought Reagan's idea of a shining city on the hill was bulls---, well guess what? I believed it. There have always been plenty of politicians that stand for nothing, no matter what they say. Sure, [Reagan] would say things that made me cringe, but he also embodied what leadership was about: setting an agenda--standing for something.