STYX – INTERVIEW

  This is the transcipt of a video interview with James Young, Tommy Shaw and Todd Sucherman of STYX. This interview was conducted for Oregon Public Broadcasting on a hot and sunny August day in Salem, Oregon during the 1999 BRAVE NEW WORLD tour. The members of STYX patiently answered questions for over half an hour, while their crew worked around us, the crowd milled around outside, and their Tour Manager waited patiently. Greg, our cameraman was occasionally invading their "personal space" with that "MTV" camera style that is so popular(ya know, it just looks so darned good on tape!) and they good-naturedly ribbed him about it at one point. It was a delight to have the opportunity to meet the band members, and to ask them a few questions. The interview was edited into short video "packages" and several of them have been aired by PBS stations around the country.
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TS= Tommy Shaw, JY= James Young and Td= Todd Sucherman.

Q: Tell me about this tour – it looks to me and from what I hear you guys are having too much fun.

TS: Oh no, no, no. That’s just fluff for the website (laughs) It’s hard work!

JY It’s really back to basics in a way – it’s more about focusing on the personalities and the music than we have in the past …rather than on the accoutrements like lasers. Just a straight ahead wall of amplifiers and five guys that are a "Juggernaut of Mega-tainment".

TD: It’s a message of hope, really.

TS:One thing we decided to do this time around was to go back – we decided to go open ended and revisit a lot of places that put Styx on the map in the first place. Because we realize that not everybody lives in the major cities and not everybody wants to drive 3 hours to sit though a 2 hour concert and end up at 11 with a 3 hour drive ahead.

…And we’re really finding that to be true. We’re discovering a lot of old friends. By coming out just as a rock band it’s possible to go play some of these places and still keep the whole thing running.

JY But also I mean Thank you Adam Sandler, thank you South Park, I think there’s a new young audience waiting to see this band and they don’t have $40 a ticket. We haven’t played Idaho in 3 years and now we’ve done 3 shows there and maybe the best reception we’ve had was in Boise – it was a wonderful moment for all of us

TD It’s amazing every night Tommy asks how many have never seen Styx before and about half scream and put their arms up!

TS: In a lot of ways its like when we first started going out on tour – there’s a lot of young fans out there and it’s amazing to see them all singing along with songs that were not singles.

But I think there’s an awareness now because of the Adam Sandler movie and because of you guys – PBS – playing our show. And everybody kind of has their time again. If you wait long enough you kind of come back around.

JY: It’s the cyclical nature of life – any entertainment business.

Q: But you guys manage to keep coming back

JY: Well this is really our first full studio album with Tommy and myself in the band since 1983. A Renaissance if you will. A starting over.

TS: What had gotten us back together in 1996 was a greatest hits album and they wanted to have the song "LADY" on the album...I was not on the original "LADY" and the master was also owned by another record company, so the only way to get LADY on a Greatest Hits record was to re-record it. My manager suggested to me if we would get together and go back out on tour they will come. . .

JY: Stage it and they will come…

TS: And "by golly" they came!

JY: Is he making another baseball movie?(laughs)

TS: Skepticism. We had no idea. But the easy part about it was; that we only recorded one new song and then got the band together and went out on tour. We had not taken the step of "OK, let’s make an album", that’s quite a different commitment all together. We did another "Greatest Hits" and recorded a couple of new songs. We kinda... tested the waters...to see what it was like. Once we did that, all of the sudden all of these ideas started coming up. In order to get those one or two songs, about half a dozen others songs got started, and for us the magic was starting to be reborne again.

JY: Re-kindled…

JY: Well we were without a recording contract. Due to somewhat overconfidence we lost our deal with A & M with an alternative Seattle Sound and what have you… and no one was interested in these old warhorses and, even though we are a "Juggernaut of Megatainment" now,(all laugh) But at the end of our 96 tour (the RTP tour) Our new record company president attended our show... he said "this is a great band I’m going to sign them to a recording contract". So Tom Lipsky at CMC records gave us a contract. And we would have done a studio album then, but there were other commitments that people put aside to do the RTP tour, so there wasn’t enough time to do a full record so we did a double live thing, and put three new tracks on that…and then the next project after that was the 1998 STYX record.

JY: Final night was the Autumnal Equinox 1996.

JY: No, it just worked out that way.

TS: One of the things about it when you mount a tour and take on all these things and its full of cues and... the more you play it, the better you get at it. It was our last night so we were the most rehearsed that we had been in a decade. And the elements just kind of all conspired in our favour that night too. That much you can never control, you can’t control if someone might have a cold or you just can’t concentrate that night...but for some reason that night everything worked. We didn’t have any technical breakdowns... and when it came time to post produce the show, there were not that many things that needed to be fixed. A lot of times, when you are working live, things get unpatched...

JY: Cameramen get in the way... ( referring to our shooter) (laughs)

TS: I know you’re going to talk to JY about this, but it made it somewhat easier, if that is possible, for him to produce the thing, because it was such a good performance, it didn’t need much polishing or repairing…

JY: The 60 minute version was really edited together by Channel 11 in Chicago.(WTTW) So we have to thank them for being the first PBS affiliate station to actually air this thing. And actually their special is a little more than 60 minutes – we had to cut a few songs out…(mimes crying) being the diplomat,(ahem) I cut out a few of mine(slaps TS on the back)

JY...I had a lot of great help in this. And I have a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Illinois Tech and Mies Van Der Rohe was sort of the great architect out of there and he said "God is in the details," and I just took care of the details. And we hired the very best people to take care of things – our lighting designer, Jeff Rabbits(sp?), does a magnificent job – he does Bruce Springsteen, Shania Twain and he helped us find the right people and I coordinated it from there. When you shoot 11 cameras, you have choices to make in the shots, "looked bad there, cut that one out.."(mimes giving direction to an editor)

(JY jumps up and circles TS and TD…dances chickenlike to laughter all around…stops and poses arms outstretched….) …Supremely Confident!…

TS: That’s the "I’m confident" dance…

JY: A good friend of ours who’d helped us do some other video production in the 97 tour…. had connections with Public Television…and without telling me, he submitted it to the Telly Awards and I as producer won a Telly Award.

(Clapping and cheers all around)

TD: I’m always the last to find out.

TS: I gotta tell you... When this was going on,... he’s being modest about all this. This was one of those thankless jobs that JY had. Because, when we’re making records, we’re all in there together. We’re a band, everybody knows whats going on. JY spent countless hours re-mixing this stuff. And he put this whole team together, I didn’t make one phone call, so I know I didn’t do it. And it got done. It was really, one of those things…

JY: This whole side of my face was radiating...( rubbing side of his jaw)

TS: it was one of those things...

JY: (grabs TS cel phone & holds to side of face as if talking) Keep talking…keep talking...

TS: That’s (gestures to JY with phone) what he was doing, and there was other stuff going on at the same time, so he does really deserve the recognition for it and I’m glad that …

(JY jumps up and circles them again)

TS: JY’s one of these kind of guys, he’s the detail guy. He knows where everything is.

...and I don’t know if he even realized he was THE producer of this thing. He’s so used to taking care of all these things... he was prepared not to take credit as the producer of the whole deal.

JY: It’s a collective effort…and we’re diverse personalities in this organization or as the Canadians say or gaNIzation and I’m a team player!

TS: I told him, you did it, Take credit! Be there! Be there for the credit for this thing.

JYWell it’s democratic – it’s the American way

TS Every body had their own strengths, and that’s the great thing about this band is everybody chips in and does what they're good at. And at the end of the day, we wind up with great music, great records. It’s hard, we try to make it look as easy as we can but making these records and producing these things is a lot of hard work.

The good thing is all the time we get to go up and play the concert. That’s the best part of it – that’s what makes the whole thing worth while. At a certain point we get to go out and do our music…(and we) focus only on that, away from all distractions, and we get to come out here and be musicians for a couple of hours and that’s what it’s all about.

Q: Todd..do you agree?

Td: It was fate… really. I had met JY socially a couple times and I think Dennis had heard of me and a guy who had worked for them in the past did a lot of my cartage, took care of my gear...

JY: Mr Keith Marks...

Td: Keith Marks was his name, he pretty much came to these guys when John Panozzo wasn’t well and said "you oughta check out this guy", & we kinda got together and played... and the hang was cool & everything was cool & JY said "hey what are you doing this summer?"

Td: They were(points to head) like Mozart, all here…, up here… already up here…(JY & TS laugh)

TS; (He) Can’t hear a thing…no…that wasn’t….(laughs)

Td: No, it was funny, I went back and I spent an afternoon listening and went "oh yeah". The live endings I remember because I had all the records when I was younger and I was kinda ready to go by day one, it was fun!

JY: Todd went to his first STYX concert at age...

Td: eleven...

JY: I guess I shouldn’t be broadcasting that...

TS: And went to see us doing the Roboto thing..in Chicago when you were...

Td: I was 13. I was a freshman in High School, I believe, no I was in 8^th grade, just about to graduate 8^th grade…it was April of 1983… a very infamous show, where the film didn’t work, & I had to come back 2 days later… but I did, it was a great show. You guys were great that night!(to JY and TS)

JY Thank you, young fellow! (laughs)

Td: (stage whisper: Democracy… yeah right!

JY: Todd also done a number of shows with Brian Wilson...

Td: Yeah I have some irons in the fire with Brian Wilson. I do a lot of recording sessions in LA... We’ll see what’s in store for us next year. Tommy may do some Damn Yamkees stuff. We’ll see where everything falls. But I hope to be playing with these guys whenever they decide to play, whenever they decide to have me (laughs)

Td: Correct, yeah.

Td: It’s the best of both worlds, really It’s kinda having your cake & eat it too. There’s nothing like playing for thousands of people that are screaming & cheering I mean it’s... It’s a different type of thrill in a recording session, where you're reading a piece of music & you got a music producer who’s kinda scary & creepy and you're trying to please them & trying to please an artist you don’t know. You end up listening back to the take and it’s a good feeling when everyone is happy and you get called back again. It’s a great way to make living, I mean, playing music is the best job in the world, if you are fortunate enough to actually really do it.

TS: Well... It starts out that...every record is it’s own little individual self. Even if you tried, you could never repeat that same process over & over. Because you're starting out with creating a song just out of nowhere, out of inspiration and that sort of thing. So you really have to watch for the thing to get it’s own legs, and you kind of guide it along.

When you’re a band…we almost don’t have to say anything, you know, when we play each other a little song bud, a little sprouting idea of a song. You can usually tell whether it sparks any kind of enthusiasm or not. And, it’s all about enthusiasm towards the song, because that’s what you want, you want the response, you want to know you’re connecting with somebody.

So we all... go off & write, kinda privately, getting things started. And we’ll bring the pieces to each other. You do this over & over and the next thing you know is you have a collection of song ideas. What we would do is demo these ideas out, so we can kind of have an idea of what, just a rough sketch of what…the song would be like when it was finished. You go through all these phases like that and ultimately, you’ve decided on all your songs. Then you start creating these songs for real, ya know and you start building like almost an assembly line, because you’ve done all of the creative...most of the creative work (already) and that’s the hard part, figuring out what you’re going to record on the album.

Especially these days with home studios, there’s any number of ways you can gather all the parts for the record, you don’t necessarily need to all be in the same room at the same time.

TS: Well. We all started out pretty much in Chicago all working together around getting the best drum tracks we could with Todd. We were all gathered around and built the foundation of the record like that. The individual overdubs and that sort of thing, we were (then) able to go off to separate places and do those.

JY: No actually, it was me on a airplane going back and forth between Tommy’s studio and where we work in Chicago which is partly Dennis’s home studio and some other places in Chicago as well. And Tommy did an extra drum track in the old Frank Sinatra room at Capitol…

So I mean, with modern technology, you can take tapes from one place to another and as long as conditions are standardized, there’s my engineering degree again, there will be no problem, and I think, as long as two of us, I mean really, it was produced by Tommy, & myself and Dennis. The record… as long as two of us are kind of in the room at the same time then you got... I mean Tommy spent all afternoon playing this one guitar solo and said "this is terrible" and I said "this is great, we just need to add this one little part". Then we added it and "boom, you’re done", but otherwise if you’re there all by yourself you, you know…

JY:Yeah, It’s very much a collective process with this band, but there has to be a spark there has to be a germ, & this guy (points to TS) is the driving force, ya know, behind the genesis of the concept of this record, and the lions share of the material.

TS: We do, we do keep an eye on each other…

JY: He’s being modest now…

TS: A lot of times, just like he said, you don’t know when your… it’s hard to judge your own performance. When JY was out at my studio writing, in the very early stages of this thing, we’d write the demo and record it as we’re writing it & there were a couple of times when he was trying to catch a plane and he’s looking at his clock (mimes JY) and I‘d say "just play one solo, just play a solo… it’s really…" and he’d say "I can’t. No I gotta go!" and I’d say "No, here’s a guitar, all tuned up… just play it! Don’t even tune it up, just play it…". and so I got him on there and he’d play it and go "I gotta go…" (TS mimes JY tossing guitar back and hopping off the stool) and, because it was recorded right, we were able to take that solo and transfer it over to... there was just something magic about that (solo). He didn’t even know until he came back & heard it again, with his mind clear of not having to think about anything else…

JY: Boy did I curse him on the way to the airport on a Friday afternoon, I wanna tell you, in Los Angeles! (all laugh)

TS: But you know all of that feeds into making a record, and so, ya know… That’s the great thing about a band like us, we’ve known each other for so many years, and we’ve had our ups and downs and our agreements and disagreements...and we’ve been like this family, so anything that ever happens to you while you’re making the record, it shows up…

JY: The Manson family?? (laughs)

TS: (laughs)It shows in your music, whether it’s tension, whether it’s sadness, loss, love....

JY: The adams family( laffs)

TS: It leaves it's impression...on the music... (laffs) I'm trying to be serious and you're not helping any!

Q: I read somewhere that you said it's "our story", can you expand on that?

TS: Well a band like us, you write what you know. I think saying things literally in songs, doesn't leave much to the imagination...So we're kind of poetic... The stories of our lives come through in the poetic expressions of our lyrics. We wouldn't necessarily say "I said this" or "I felt this" or "this happened to me"....It's hard to explain, but as a song writer you use...

JY: Not exactly an ongoing autobiography but ...a poetic interpretation there of.

TS: Right.

Td: Unauthorized.

TS: You use your own experiences and your own story to create...it's almost like dreams, you know ,when you dream something you'll go tell someone "I had this crazy dream ". You created that, that came from your story. And songs are, I think, in that same category.

JY : And the beauty of the new album, The title of Brave New World was, really, Tommy came up with that and he will have to confirm this but Aldous Huxley's widow lives not far from him. That just kind sparked with him and he said "you know there's lot of parallels between that utopian novel and things that are going on in our world today and the end of the century". It seemed like a good starting off point:

Q: Did you read the book?

TS: well, JY....

JY: I read the cliff notes

TS: He got me the book, I read the whole thing. and it was a little darker than I expected.

JY: He predicted Prozac... Seritonin re-uptake inhibitors

TS: Yeah, what he said...

Q: There's that degree again!

JY: Yeah, it's sure a pain in the...

TS:(to JY)Yew shure tawk purty....(all laff)

TS: yeah, there was a song called BRAV NEW WORLD... But we look at... in the song, the chorus was like...basically you're looking down the road at this brave new world, and the question is "Where do I fit into this", or Do I fit into this? "How do I know there's a place for me in this Brave New World?", and to me it was like, that's SO STYX right there...

Q: We interviewed EW&F last week and they said their contribution to the music scene was a positive message, a positive vibe. What do you think STYX's role is, as far as your music and it's message?

TS: We've always, I think because we write from our own perspective... we've always been able to look inwardly and ask some of these personal questions. When I look back as songs like crstalball, and fooling yourself, and man in the wilderness and things like that, I almost think gawd, I was... it's like you're naked and you don't realize that through the glass there are thousands of people out there. But I think that people have always identified with knowing they're not not alone feeling these kinds of emotions. And I think that's one of the greatest things we've been able to do... is to have that kind of connection with our fans. That they've felt some of those same things too, and we've kind of grown up together.

JY: We've had a profound effect on people's lives in many ways for reasons we don't exactly understand. I think, starting out in a career that for me, was an avoidance of getting a real job... but believe me there's a tremendous amount of work that goes into what we do. And the fans have responded, I mean they'll look at you square in the eye and say "you guys saved my life five year ago...." It's an incredible burden (sometimes) I mean for us, this is something we go out and enjoy doing, but we've created this tremendous level of responsibility for ourselves, to be responsible songwriters........Yes, we do have wonderful fans and we truly can't thank them enough.

(more....to come)