Come on guys, give him back the Wurlitzer!

[Toph]

Hey everybody,
"Way back in 1972 I was sitting in my garage with a little Wurlitzer electric piano when this song popped out and started this whole train a rolling".

This was a line I came up with for the the Paradise Tour in 1996 briefly describing how the song Lady was written. Suzanne and I and CarrieAnn were living in Park Forest, Illinois in a two bedroom ranch we had recently purchased.

JY's father who owned a construction business was tearing out a bunch of acoustic ceiling tiles out of the University of Chicago and had asked if we had any use for them. I had decided to turn my one car garage into a small rehearsal space for the band while we assembled some songs for our first record. It was in this garage that I wandered out one day in hopes of writing a song that would make the album. To that point I had not considered myself a songwriter but more of a singer keyboardist in a cover band. I had written a song years before for TW-4 called So Long Now that we rarely played but other than that my only solo song writing attempt had been "I'm Gonna Make Ya Feel It" which we first recorded in 1971. What did I know about composition, not much. It has been a mystery to me all these years as to how I came up with Lady in the first place. My memory tells me I was listening to King Crimson's "Court of the Crimson King" at that time and maybe the images of kings and queens and lords and ladies was lurking in my subconscious. Or was it "What Has Come Between Us" a song given to us to record that contained the lyrical chorus "Lovely Lady" that I thought sounded pretty cool that once again had seeped into my brain. I know for sure the lyrics I came up with were written to describe Suzanne, who even at a young age had always maintained the aura and dignity of a true "lady". It could have all these things, I really can't say because I had never written much so I was clueless that Lady was in fact special. Anyway I found this photo on Google taken by Warring Abbott a great photographer who followed us on parts of the Paradise Theater in 1981. This is backstage in a dressing room at Nassau Coliseum and there it is that little Wurlitzer Piano. Rumor has it that Prince saw me in this Purple outfit and immediately wrote Purple Rain and Raspberry Jacket which he later turned into Beret. But that's just a rumor.

Truth be told I started writing this song on the Wurlitzer but finished it on a Waltham baby grand piano in our house. My daughter now has the Waltham in her house but sadly in my dismissal from Styx it was not returned to me. Bummer!

Cheers, Dennis

[Boomchild]

Sorry, but word has it they gave it to Gowan as a present on his last birthday. Which was a better present then they gave him the year before. That year they gave him DDY's Roboto suit and told him it was the latest thing in fashion.