Styx member's roots are showing with Shaw-Blades

[styxfanNH]

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/ ... 46289.html

Styx member's roots are showing with Shaw-Blades
By: PATRICK BERKERY (Mon, Nov/26/2007)


When Tommy met Jack. Following his departure from Styx in 1984, Tommy Shaw released three solo albums that failed to make much of a commercial impact. So in 1989, he approached A & R guru (and Philly native) John Kalodner - who's helped advise Aerosmith among many others - to mull over some career options. Kalodner's advice? Hook up with singer-songwriter-bassist Jack Blades, who'd recently left Night Ranger. "I felt like I needed to be in a band or collaborative situation again," Shaw explains. "John thought hooking up with Jack made sense, and he couldn't have been more right on the money. We discovered pretty quickly we speak the same musical language, particularly our love of harmony singing. From there, Ted (Nugent) got involved, and I brought my drummer Michael Cartelleone on board. That's pretty much how Damn Yankees was born."


Coming of age in sweet home Alabama. The '60s in Montgomery, Ala. wasn't as backwoods as you might think, says Shaw. "You'd hear everything on the radio, and bands came through town. I was immediately drawn to the Beatles, but also very into vocal groups like the Four Freshman, especially the Everly Brothers. Later on I got heavily into funk and soul and was touring the region in some R&B bands. One of those bands brought me through Chicago and that's how I hooked up with Styx."


Their roots are showing. By virtue of past associations, Shaw and Blades are often lumped in with the "big hair" set, and viewed as peddlers of power ballads and lowest common denominator arena anthems. But the range of tasty covers (Steely Dan's "Dirty Work, Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence," The Zombies' "Time of the Season") and the folksy style in which they play and harmonize on "Influence" shows there's more to the duo than "High Enough," "Sister Christian" and "Renegade." Shaw: "We grew up on the great stuff of '60s and '70s radio, and wanted to pay homage to that. If you know our track record, you know we've always had a love of great harmony singing. I think that's something Jack and I excel at. We're taking what we did back on "High Enough" and stripping it down. Having a load of fun playing some of our favorite music."


The power of Howard. When Shaw-Blades released "Influence" in March, they appeared on Howard Stern's Sirius Satellite Radio show to play a couple of tunes and plug the disc and upcoming tour. Sales of the disc immediately spiked, and their tour of clubs and small halls began selling out regularly. A subsequent Stern spot to perform their re-worked version of the song "When I See Beth Smiling" (a super-sappy ode to the King of All Media's fiancée, Beth Ostrosky, written and submitted to Stern by a fan) has resulted in the song becoming a regular part of the duo's set. "Not a night goes by now where someone doesn't yell out for it. I think we do a pretty good job with it. You know, at its core, it's a just pretty song that suits our style well. I know Howard's mentioned having us perform it at their wedding. I can honestly say we haven't been formally approached and we don't know a thing about (any wedding plans). I think Howard and Beth know more than they let on. And if they formally ask us to do it, we'd be there in a hot minute."


Domo arigato? Styx's rock-meets-robots 1983 concept album "Kilroy Was Here," the single "Mr. Roboto," and the theatrics of the "Kilroy" tour was like Spinal Tap come to life. While the rock world enjoyed the project's unintentional hilarity, Shaw says it was no laughing matter in the Styx camp. "Very, very hard. Very tough. It was just not a lot of fun working on that record, doing that tour, all the stuff that went into it. That broke us the first time around. All these years later I can appreciate it to a degree, there's some good rock stuff in there. But the whole experience was nothing I'd want to re-live, put it that way."


No grand illusions about the future of Styx. The re-constituted Styx hasn't released an album of new material since 2003 and according to Shaw, isn't itching to do one any time soon. "You end up putting a lot of time and resources into something and you're not getting much at all in return. It's difficult getting a band like us played (on radio) these days, and who knows what's up with the record business. And live, when you do a couple new songs, everyone's off to the bathrooms or the beer stand. People want to hear the songs they know. The desire is still there to play shows and to tour, but making records in this day and age is another story."

[stmonkeys]

well, i'm sorry that there won't be any new songs in the near future. but i'm glad tommy & jack are having such great success with influence. it would be nice if radio got behind this album. i hope they tour again in the spring, so they can push "Summer Breeze" for a may or june release. and "I Am A Rock" would be a nice january release. LOL wishful thinking.

btw- didn't tommy & ted hook up first, and then ask jack to join? LOL

[Rockwriter]

well, i'm sorry that there won't be any new songs in the near future. but i'm glad tommy & jack are having such great success with influence. it would be nice if radio got behind this album. i hope they tour again in the spring, so they can push "Summer Breeze" for a may or june release. and "I Am A Rock" would be a nice january release. LOL wishful thinking.

btw- didn't tommy & ted hook up first, and then ask jack to join? LOL

Yes! But Tommy's never had the best memory when it comes to details, to put it mildly. And he also suffers from "selective memory" to a large degree, as one Styx associate so aptly put it. LOL. Tommy's a great guy, but I generally take what he says in interviews with a grain of salt because he simply does not recall things the same way all the time.

It's interesting to me that in this interview Tommy mentions that when you play new songs, there's a giant bathroom break . . . but right after the release of CYCLO I can clearly recall him saying that the fans were eating up the new songs as much as the old ones (though that certainly was not the case at the show at the Ryman in Nashville), and that there was not a song in the set that was causing a mass exodus. LOL, that's just one example of many where he sees things differently at different times. I'm not criticizing him for it, I'm just pointing it out. My observation has been that Tommy tends to shade what he says to put the best face on whatever he's doing now, but you can usually get him to be honest about something that is far enough in the past that it no longer has any promotional value to dissemble about it. LOL, everyone in the business does that, for promo reasons, but Tommy perhaps a bit more, or in a way that's a bit more obvious. I also think Tommy is the kind of guy who gets so excited about whatever it is he's doing right now that he sees only its upside, and he tends to see the downside only in retrospect. This is a guy who was mortally offended when it was pointed out to him that 'What If' was a really bad record, but in retrospect he's the first to admit it. So part of it is simply the way perspective changes with time and distance.

I hope everyone is well.

Sterling

[Blue Falcon]

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/81-11262007-1446289.html

Styx member's roots are showing with Shaw-Blades

Guess Tommy better start investing in hair dye, then.

[Grotelul]

well, i'm sorry that there won't be any new songs in the near future. but i'm glad tommy & jack are having such great success with influence. it would be nice if radio got behind this album. i hope they tour again in the spring, so they can push "Summer Breeze" for a may or june release. and "I Am A Rock" would be a nice january release. LOL wishful thinking.

btw- didn't tommy & ted hook up first, and then ask jack to join? LOL

I think they should package some new material with let's say the live 1981 show that supposedly exists. Lots of people saw that tour and I think it could do fairly well as far as these days is concerned. I just don't get what Universal is doing. They say there is no need for re-mastering of any the classics yet they all supposedly still do some numbers. Tack on some new stuff to that to. Give us something dammit!!!!