yogi wrote:When Styx did their Edge tour in Minneapolis I had just gotten married and was living in Beaumont, Texas. A buddy of mine had scored third row seats and I flew up there to see my family and attend the show.
Talk about being BLOWN away. Glen was Tommy Shaw X's two that night. It was an AWESOME show!!! They had the fans in their palms all night.
What was weird was as singles Love Is The Ritual had come and gone without too much of a ripple. Show Me The Way had also done pretty much the same thing. But live the fans ate em both up. It wasnt until about a month after the concert that Show Me The Way hit big on it's rerelease. They also played Edge Of The Century, All In A Days Work, World Tonight, Not Dead Yet , and Homewrecker. You got pretty much the entire Edge CD plus most of their other hits.
The day of the concert the St. Paul paper ran an article where Dennis was hyping the concert and the Edge album. In the article he praised the talents of Glen Burtnik. I know hype is hype, but this seemed 100% genuine. He actually compared He and JY finding Glen to when Tommy joined the band. I still have this article somewhere. I left it behind, but my dad mailed it to me a couple of weeks after I got back to Beaumont.
Then 1999 rolls around and Styx and GLEN start bashing Dennis. I remember that I couldnt believe why Glen would bash Dennis after all the GREAT things he had to say about Glen in that article.
At any rate at least Dennis and Glen were BIG enough to put the bad past behind them.
I also own the St. Louis boot of the Edge concert. That rendition of Styx ROCKED!!!! I wonder what would of happened had Son Of Edge been released???
Styx made a huge error when they went in to do EOTC; they owed one album still to A&M and had to return, but they did not negotiate an extension deal before doing the record. They were hoping the album would hit big and they could then go to another label and get a big advance somewhere else like Columbia, because A&M ownership had changed and the people at the label at that time were not connected to Styx' previous success and didn't care that much about them.
EOTC did okay, but not well enough for them to get what they were demanding, especially since grunge came along right about then. Styx was a very expensive and demanding older band, while these new and less expensive young bands were suddenly outselling them six to one. The reality is that if those Son of Edge songs had been released in that marketplace at that time, it likely would have been a miserable failure. Even if they had stayed at A&M, A&M was not that much on board at that time to promote Styx properly, and it takes label support to break a record. And the fan base was quite divided at that time over Tommy not being in the band, so they did not have the full support of the fans at that time, either.
Glen came to feel the way he did about Dennis for the same reason a lot of people who work with him come to feel that way about him . . . he has his good side as well, but he can legitimately be difficult; arrogant, temperamental, demanding, self-involved. Not that unusual in an artist like that, there's a guy like that in every band, and he's almost always the one running the band. But it can be aggravating being stuck with that day in, day out. I think Glen's comments were in response to that, but obviously he has put it aside for the sake of the gig he has now.
I hope all is well.
Sterling
Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 2:12 pm
-ERIC