Styx

Unlike other classic AOR bands, all fronted by a single lead singer (Kevin Cronin of Reo Speedwagon, Steve Perry of Journey, and so on), Styx could boast three different vocalists. Two of whom also played guitar. One of them, John Curulewski, decided to quit the band out of the blue to spend more time with his family (a recurring theme among American bands of the era – just ask David Hungate of Toto). With a national tour already booked, the remaining members had to scramble to find a replacement. Luckily for them, Tommy Shaw showed up at the auditions, a young man from Alabama whom they'd already seen playing guitar a couple of years earlier in a Chicago club, and who could perfectly sing "Lady" (their biggest hit to that point). They hired him on the spot, sealing the birth of what would become their most famous lineup. The veterans, for the record, were Dennis DeYoung (vocals, keyboards), James Young (vocals, guitars), and brothers Chuck and John Panozzo (bass and drums respectively).

Their first album with that lineup, "Crystal Ball" (1976), wasn't exactly a commercial triumph, but things were about to change. In the first half of 1977 the quintet went into the studio with a very specific project in mind: to record an album about the illusions that grip the life of the average American. The result is the record with their most downbeat lyrics to date, set against increasingly exuberant music. The success would be triumphant (the album reached number 6 and stayed on the American chart for 127 weeks), so much so that from that point until their temporary breakup in 1984, Styx would be among the best-selling acts in the United States, not counting concert ticket sales.

This latter source of income is worth mentioning not merely as trivia, but because it's essential to understanding the band's musical aesthetic. Over the years, especially in Europe, the genre Styx came to spearhead has been labeled AOR, an acronym for "Adult-oriented rock", which can sometimes cause confusion, given that in America the very same acronym already stood for "album-oriented rock", a more generic term for FM radio rock, so called because it also included tracks that had never been released as singles, or the full-length versions of songs that were often trimmed down for 45s.

So while "album-oriented rock" refers to a radio format that could encompass a huge swath of music made by white American musicians in the Seventies (as long as it was guitar-driven), "adult-oriented rock" ended up denoting a more or less definable genre, albeit one with a misleading name. In fact, Styx's target audience at the time was teenagers, or at most listeners under thirty. The idea that it was aimed at adults is a retroactive mystification, owing to the fact that the fans of those artists have simply grown older in the meantime. But you'd only need to listen to the lyrics of those bands to understand just how much their music was aimed at youth and its dreams.

And here's where concert tickets come into play: Styx – like several other bands who shared their sound – were one of the most formidable live machines in the music industry of the time. They could fill arenas with a snap of their fingers, to the point that some started calling their music "arena rock". This writer believes that term should be preferred to "adult-oriented rock", because it points to the same kind of band without retroactively altering the meaning of that music, and it actually highlights one of its defining traits: being consciously built to fill huge venues.

Filling huge venues, however, didn't stop Styx from singing about rather intimate matters. In this respect, the title track, which opens the record, is a statement of intent: Dennis DeYoung urges his listeners not to trust what the media shows about the lives of entertainment idols. "Don't be fooled by radio, TV or the papers. They show you pictures of how your life should be, but they're just someone else's fantasies. So if you think your life is a big mess because you never win, remember it's just a grand illusion, and deep down we're all the same."

The song opens with a Renaissance-style march swollen with blaring synthesizers, before turning into a midtempo hard rock track that alternates more frantic moments (note the jabbing rhythm guitar hits in the first verse) with lighter ones, like the chorus dominated by electric organ. As is often the case with Styx, the structure isn't linear, and right after the first chorus there's an interlude with a guitar solo and a reprise of the march. The song then glides toward the ending, alternating between its different sections without ever repeating the same pattern.

"Fooling Yourself (Angry Young Man)" is instead aimed at the figure of the doomed rockstar. Tommy Shaw wrote it when he realized that DeYoung, the band's driving force at the time, couldn't find happiness despite their growing success. "You see the world through your cynical eyes. [...] You've got the world in the palm of your hand, but your hand is sweaty and your head needs some rest."

After an instrumental intro halfway between Emerson Lake & Palmer and Yes, with a peculiar keyboard riff that at one point seems to mimic the timbre of a human voice, the song unfolds across several sections, with sung parts in steady 4/4, alongside a whole array of instrumental digressions — between acoustic guitar patterns and synth flourishes — that don't shy away from odd time signatures either. Not all, but a good part of first-wave arena rock actually overlapped with progressive rock, which, though moribund in Britain, was at that very moment starting to show signs of its influence on the American continent. Kansas themselves, at least throughout the Seventies, were a full-fledged prog band.

"Come Sail Away" — half piano ballad, half rousing choral hard rock — deals with the passage into adulthood, with some lines that seem to anticipate the closing moments of "Stand By Me," particularly when DeYoung sings: "I think about the years I spent just passing through / I'd like to see the things I saw again through your eyes." It's not hard to understand why young Americans, especially those stuck in small-town life, identified with these words. Just as it's not hard to understand why critics, who at the time were falling in love with the cynicism of punk, were horrified by such candor. DeYoung won that battle in the end, though: his song has since become a pillar of American pop culture, turning up in practically every TV series, film, or commercial.

In "Miss America," a violent hybrid of boogie rock and prog, the lyrics seem on the surface to be an attack on the beauty pageant of the same name, which grinds through its winners year after year on a wheel of fame always ready to cast aside anyone who's already had their fifteen minutes. James Young later stated that his intention was actually to write a tribute to his wife, who always kept smiling despite suffering from a congenital illness. Whichever interpretation one prefers, nothing can justify the accusations of misogyny and bigotry that Joe Fernbacher of Rolling Stone leveled at the band after hearing the song. DeYoung — who wasn't even the song's author — was so stung by those accusations that, many years later, he felt compelled to respond online, calling the critic "ignorant and malicious."

The darkest lyric on the album belongs to "Man In The Wilderness." Inspired in Shaw by the change he saw in his brother's character after returning from Vietnam, it's a universal hymn to the difficulty of coping with loneliness. "Sometimes I feel like I'm lost in the wilderness. Sometimes I feel just like a lonesome soldier at war. Sent to die, never knowing why. Sometimes it just don't make no sense at all." Structurally steadier than other moments in the tracklist (aside from the central instrumental break, where the rhythm guitar echoes the earlier "Miss America"), it's a power ballad with progressive-rock overtones tinged with gothic atmosphere, driven above all by the slightly sinister tone of the synthesized strings.

"Castle Walls" also opens on a menacing note, with Panozzo's intermittent bass set against a church organ mixed far in the background. DeYoung's processed vocal again sings of the passage from adolescence to adulthood, this time emphasizing its most frightening aspects, such as having to face the unknown, "far beyond the walls of this castle, where I thought I heard Tiresias say: life is never as it seems, and every man must meet his fate." The horror-tinged synthesizer that enters at 2'33" even calls to mind our own Goblin, and seems to underline that outside the castle (or rather, outside the shell), the world can be full of danger.

Even though their catalogue would go on to be enriched with plenty of memorable songs over the following five years, culminating with the famous "Mr. Roboto" closing out their golden era in 1983, Styx would perhaps never again release such a cohesive record.

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18/12/2018