Styx Wikipedia - Part 2 Stardom in the 80's

[styxfanNH]

This is the first part of the Wikipedia site on Styx. I know we can do better than what is there and get something that everyone/most could live with. Probably best if we deal with it in chunks. Remember that they are getting big on citing your sources. I imagine with Chuck's and Sterlings books out and digested, that we can probably quote both books regularly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx_%28band%29

If you are going to edit the text, copy the last version and edit appropriately.
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Stardom in the 1980s

Paradise Theatre
By 1980, Styx had (over the course of several albums) established themselves with their lyrics, criticizing unemployment ("Blue Collar Man"), consumerism ("The Grand Illusion"), and materialism ("Pieces of Eight"). As teen idols, Styx also topped magazine polls for "Most Popular Rock Band."[citation needed] However, at their height of fame, Styx never actually broke out in Europe.[citation needed]

In January 1981, Styx released Paradise Theatre, a loose concept album that became their biggest hit, reaching number one on the Billboard pop albums chart and yielding five singles, including the top ten hits "The Best of Times" by DeYoung (#3) and "Too Much Time on My Hands" by Shaw (#8).

The band was accused by a California religious group and later Tipper Gore's P.M.R.C of backmasking Satanic messages in their anti-cocaine anthem, "Snowblind." J.Y. has often gone on the record, refuting this charge during his concert introduction for "Snowblind," with Dennis saying on In the Studio with Redbeard which devoted an entire episode to the making of Paradise Theatre that "we had enough trouble to make the music sound right forward. It was the name Styx which is the river that runs through the underground. Can you imagine attacking the band that made Babe, I mean please!"

Owing to its accessibility and quality production, this album helped win the band a People's Choice Award in 1981, and became the band's fourth consecutive multi-platinum album.

Throughout the 1980s, the band would use the album's opening track, "Rockin' the Paradise," which hit number six on the rock charts in 1981, to open their shows. The album closes with J.Y.'s "Half-Penny, Two Penny" which segued into Dennis' "A.D. 1958" and ending properly with "State Street Sadie".

During this period of greatest success, the band, particularly DeYoung and Shaw, continued to be affected by interpersonal tensions. Tommy Shaw later went on record as saying "I was always the 'new guy' in Styx."[citation needed]


Kilroy was Here and breakup
On the successes of the ballad "Babe" and the Paradise Theatre album, Styx founder DeYoung began pushing for a more theatrical direction, while Shaw and Young favored a harder-edged approach. The band followed DeYoung's lead with their next project, Kilroy Was Here (1983), was another, more fully-realized concept album.

Set in a future where music itself has been outlawed, Dennis DeYoung portrayed Kilroy, an unjustly imprisoned rock star. Representing the "younger" rock generation, Tommy Shaw played Jonathan Chance, who fights for Kilroy's freedom.

Part of the impetus for the Kilroy story, were the false accusations of backwards satanic messages leveled at the band in 1981.

Critics said that the concept behind Kilroy Was Here was still very murky.[citation needed] Whilst band members themselves admitted to not really understanding the concept[citation needed], it must be noted that guitarist/vocalist James Young relished playing the "heavy,"[citation needed] starring as Dr. Everett Righteous in the 20-minute "Kilroy" feature. The Panozzo brothers played his henchmen, Col. Hyde and Lt. Vanish in the concert version (although John Panozzo also played one of the prisoners in the Kilroy Was Here film, which preceded the shows, and was the one who uttered the tag-line, "Hey, Roboto, your mother was a Toyota!")

Sailing high on the Styx name, Kilroy went platinum in 1983, boasting two Top Ten hits, the synthesizer-based "Mr. Roboto" and power ballad "Don't Let It End."

Straying away from the pop-rock vein, J.Y.'s "Heavy Metal Poisoning" takes the listener back to Styx's early funk-jazz style, taking a poke at religious critics. Its introduction included a backward message, the Latin phrase, "annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum," from the Great Seal of the United States. It is translated to "God has favored our undertakings. A new order for the ages."

Although time would prove cynical for the members of Styx following Kilroy, at the time Kilroy earned a nominee as Best Engineered Recording for engineer and long-time friend Gary Loizzo, and fellow engineers on the album Will Rascati and Rob Kingslad, for the twenty-sixth Grammy Awards (1983)[7] On the Kilroy Was Here tour of 1983 for half of the Kilroy tracks, the band used the instrumental backing tracks for Mr. Roboto (with Dennis singing live whilst disguised as a roboto and Tommy Shaw as Jonathan Chance), "Heavy Metal Poisoning" (with J.Y. singing live and the Panozzo brothers acting as his henchmen on stage) and lastly, the wistful "Haven't We Been Here Before," featuring a rare live duet between DeYoung and Shaw. The songs that the group played live were Dennis' "Don't Let it End", with an extended ending, Tommy Shaw's bluntly naive "Cold War," featuring an extended guitar solo and two extra verses. "Don't Let It End Reprise" began as a soliloquy by Tommy Shaw and Dennis DeYoung, but ended with the full band on a positive rock and roll note.

Despite this ambitious stage show, Kilroy brought tensions within the band to a breaking point. In 1984, the band debuted its first live album, Caught in the Act (1984). Taken from both the "Paradise Theatre" and "Kilroy Was Here" tours, the project featured one studio track, "Music Time", which became a Top Forty hit. However, the band had already parted ways before the release of the album.