by Will Romano
The band was getting very good at smoothing out the jagged edges—the self-aware weirdness that made the band Kansas—and turning their work into formulaic commercial rock. That isn’t to say that Audio-Visions contains bad music. But the band had reached its pinnacle in balancing a commercial sound with its proggy side to the point that the adventurous qualities of the music were sometimes buried in production gloss.
Walsh quit the band, seemingly for good. Singer John Elefante stepped in, and Kansas enjoyed two hits in as many years: a Top 20 song, “Play the Game Tonight” (from 1982’s Vinyl Confessions), and “Fight Fire with Fire” (on Drastic Measures), the video for which was in heavy rotation on MTV.
“After that, the band went on hiatus,” says Ehart. “Actually, we disbanded. Kerry, Dave Hope, Robby, Steve had all left the band, and Richard [Williams] had gone fishing. It was just basically one of those things that I thought, ‘Well, if we are going to keep it going, we are going have to take a shot now.’”
Kansas re-formed (minus Livgren), with Steve Walsh and Steve Morse of the Dixie Dregs, and went on to deliver the explosive 1986 comeback commercial rock record Power and the Bob Ezrin–produced concept record, 1988’s In the Spirit of Things.
Though the band’s sound was virtually unrecognizable to fans of the classic lineup (Steinhardt was gone, and so was the violin element), Morse’s rifle-fast pick-every-note riffing, Walsh’s inhuman range, and Ehart’s sophisticated pounding made for a potent (if only mainstream) heavy rock combination.
“That was an incredible time for Steve Morse and Kansas,” says Ehart. “I think it was Steve Morse’s foray into a real band—a real democracy. He was running his own show with the Dregs. He was great. He had his growing pains like anybody else, of course. Billy Greer [bassist] had just joined the band, and these were the MCA years. We did two records with MCA, the Power album and the Bob Ezrin record, In the Spirit of Things, which we consider one of our best records ever. Putting Steve [Morse] and Steve Walsh together was a lot of sparks. I met Steve Morse at a Robert Plant concert and he said he wanted to come over and audition, which was funny that he thought he needed to audition. We jammed a little bit, and he and Steve started working on material. Steve told me he wanted to step in as a guitar player and take the Kerry role. He said, ‘I’m not good enough to write the way Kerry did.’”
Ultimately, Morse’s growing pains meant he constantly had to fight for his musical ideas, which led to the guitarist quitting the band. Soon after, MCA dropped Kansas.
“You’ll hear people talk about Journey, Chicago, Styx, Foreigner, and Boston, and we are never mentioned with those bands,” says Ehart. “Then people mention Yes and Genesis and ELP and we are never mentioned with those bands either, which is fine. We are not like any of those bands. We’re very much an anomaly. That’s why reviewers hated us—we didn’t fit into a bowl.
“Many years ago our agent tried to get us on Farm Aid,” Ehart continues. “We are the band Kansas, right? But they told us that we were not the kind of band they wanted on the bill. We’re used to being the ugly stepchild. We are what we are, and that’s exactly why our fans love us.”
STYX
Nineteen seventy-seven’s The Grand Illusion and 1978’s Pieces of Eight may be the best examples of Styx balancing commercialism with prog, but the band had recorded a string of quasi-prog records in the early and mid-1970s, including Styx, Styx, II, The Serpent Is Rising, Man of Miracles, and Equinox. Throughout their career Styx straddled the line between prog and pop, with such songs as the classically inflected “Clair De Lune” (a piece composed by Claude Debussy), “Come Sail Away,” “Castle Walls,” “Pieces of Eight,” “Father O.S.A.,” “Crystal Ball,” “A Day” (which falls somewhere between blues, folk, jazz, and liturgical rock), “Little Fugue in G,” “I’m O.K.,” the thirteen-minute “Movement for the Common Man” (featuring Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”), “The Grove of Eglantine,” “Man of Miracles” (its use of timpani and basic opening theme eerily echo Kansas’s “Magnum Opus,” which appeared nearly two years after Styx’s Man of Miracles record), and “Best Thing” (with its “Knife Edge”–like organ honks).
“Equinox—that, to me, is our coming-out album,” says Dennis DeYoung, Styx’s lead vocalist and keyboardist for thirty years. “It had ‘Light Up,’ ‘Lorelei,’ ‘Suite Madame Blue,’ ‘Midnight Ride.’ We had made four records before this that, in my opinion, were not very good. But Equinox was it.”
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Fittingly, “Lorelei” (the second track on Equinox), a song aglow with the romantic euphoria, scored a number twenty-seven spot on the Billboard Top 40 chart in March 1976. Equinox hit number 58 on the Top 200 Albums chart.
DeYoung had emerged as a solid songwriter, one who was arguably the most accomplished player and singer/arranger in the band at that point, having written, or cowritten with guitarist/singer John Curulewski and guitarist/vocalist James Young, Styx classics such as “Light Up,” “Suite Madame Blue,” “Born for Adventure,” “Lorelei,” “Lonely Child,” and “Mother Dear.”
As the band’s fortunes swelled, so did the instances of stage theatrics on tour. “We used to do a sword fight onstage [during ‘Born for Adventure’],” says DeYoung. “In the middle of the song, this guy would come out with a big pirate hat and cape, and he would throw me a foil in the middle of the guitar solo, and we would sword fight. You talk about pretentiousness, you’re talking to the number-one guy.”
Despite the band’s newfound success, Curulewski, while a great foil for DeYoung (and also a great songwriter in his own right), decided to leave the band to focus on his personal life and his own music. (Tragically, Curulewski died in the late ’80s from a brain aneurysm.) Seemingly undeterred, Styx brought in Alabama-born guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Tommy Shaw (who made his Styx debut with 1976’s Crystal Ball) just as audiences were packing venues like never before. Shaw’s presence was felt immediately in the music: “Mademoiselle,” cowritten by DeYoung and Shaw, reached number thirty-six on Billboard’s Top 40 chart just as Crystal Ball soared to number sixty-six of the Top 200.
“We needed someone to sing the high part in ‘Lady,’” says DeYoung. “Tommy Shaw sat at the piano, and he Could do it. He never picked up a guitar. He played some tapes of his songwriting. I said, ‘This guy is the guy.’ I didn’t even care if he could play guitar. The fact that he could was a bonus. I wanted a songwriter in the band. You know, I told you the most important thing—songwriting—and that is why he got hired. Unbeknownst to me, he was a very good live performer.”
By 1977, Styx appeared to be nothing more than a knockoff of more successful progressive and quasi-progressive rock bands on either side of the pond.
“We started making records in 1972 with a very distinct style, right?” says DeYoung. “‘Lady’ was written before I ever knew who Queen were. The problem was, we weren’t really discovered in the United States until 1975, because our first four albums were completely buried and nobody knew who we were. So, we were doing that high-harmony, pop–progressive rock thing in 1972. I remember when Kansas backed us up for the first time, back in, I think, it was 1974. Kerry Livgren came backstage and said to us, ‘Man, we were really influenced by the Serpent Is Rising album.’ I thought to myself, ‘Geez. I hate that record.’ We were before Kansas. Boston. Queen. But we were not yet as successful as all those guys. So we appeared to many people as second-generation to those bands.
“Here’s my problem with progressive rock: After the first fifteen minutes, it [is] like, ‘Man, that guy can play like that,’” says DeYoung. “But then these prog rock bands went into what I call ‘musical masturbation,’ and you can do it, but it had better have a song in there. You take me on a journey, but I want the song first. Then I can go with you.”
“Do you want to go so progressive that you leave a market behind?” says Rik Emmett of Triumph fame. “American bands ... are going to figure it out a lot quicker than someone who
comes from the hinterlands. You won’t figure it out as quickly as a bunch of guys from Chicago who have a band called Styx. Those guys are going to figure it out and get it right, and they are going to get it right over and over again. To the point that people say, ‘They’re not a progressive band. They are just a rock band.’ In a sense, they are. But in another sense, they’re doing things that borrow from the progressive community. They took from Yes, and in truth Dennis DeYoung is a kind of music theater guy, really. Now we are coming back to it. What is progressive rock? It has to have drama. It is almost like music theater in a way, isn’t it? It doesn’t make it much different from when Mozart was putting on The Magic Flute.”
This musical drama is something Styx had done very well on The Grand Illusion, which plays like a concept album expounding on the paradoxes of fame.
It’s easy to be deceived by the pomp and circumstance of the record. The opening title track trumpets out of our speakers with something resembling a classical rock march—a fitting oeuvre for such a record.
“The lyrics were warning, ‘Don’t buy this. Don’t believe in this. Don’t be fooled by the radio, the TV, or the magazines. They’ll show you photographs of how your life should be, but they’re just someone else’s fantasy,’” DeYoung continues. “We said, ‘We see you in the audience. You’re looking at us up here. I know what you’re thinking and it ain’t true. This is a grand illusion for your entertainment.’ This was 1977. That was all bullshit. That is what I said. But ‘please buy our tickets anyway.’”
The Grand Illusion went to number six on the Billboard Album chart and spawned two hit singles: “Come Sail Away” (number eight) and “Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)” (number 29).
“I discovered Styx when I was looking through my dad’s record collection,” says Oliver Wakeman, current keyboardist for the Strawbs and Yes, two gigs his father Rick also won decades ago. “I had a demo copy of The Grand Illusion. It obviously had been given to Dad because he was on A&M Records as well. I remember putting this record on ... and hearing ‘Miss America,’ which blew me away. Then I started to listen to the other tracks, ‘Fooling Yourself,’ ‘Castle Walls,’ ‘Come Sail Away.’ This whole album from start to finish I thought was superb.... It kind of made me realize that as a keyboard player you can rock out a little bit. You don’t always have to just write the ballads because you play a keyboard.”
“The Oberheim was my signature sound,” says DeYoung. “Hammond organ and Oberheim and whatever else was handy, basically. I had a Moog 10, which I used on ‘Lady.’ I also used an ARP 2600 on some records. ARP Pro Soloist sometimes. But mostly Oberheim. If it had keys, I played it.”
The band’s next studio record, Pieces of Eight, was a conceptual record ruminating on the fame and fortune the band had recently experienced.
“I told the guys after The Grand Illusion that we had made more money in one year than we could ever have imagined,” says DeYoung. “It was ridiculous. What did it mean to have this fame and this money? What did it mean if you were Lords of the Ring, suddenly? When you make a lot of money, you find out who your friends are. You find out who your family is. That’s what Pieces of Eight is about. ‘The search for the money tree/ Don’t cash your freedoms in for gold.’ That’s me telling myself what I needed to hear.”
Despite their diversity, the band feared they were being pigeonholed. “After 1978, the Pieces of Eight record, I felt I was being tagged as ‘Mr. Prog Rock,’” DeYoung says. “I had done it for almost eight albums. I looked around and I said, ‘I think prog rock is going to die.’ At that moment, we went to [England for the first time]. I was in love with the Beatles and the English music scene, and we arrived on the shores of England just as we were being called a dinosaur, being vilified by the English press. We were in the rapturous throes of the Sex Pistols and the beginning of the punk movement. I saw that and I said, ‘Jesus. What is this thing?’ I thought, ‘If [the press] were looking to the antithesis of what we do, they’ve found it.’ For me, 99 percent of it was antimusic. I thought it was a social movement, and I’m interested in writing songs and music.”
The cover of Styx’s The Grand Illusion is a cunning knockoff of surrealist René Magritte’s 1965 painting, Carte Blanche (aka Le blanc-seing).
The story goes that punk and its minions may have tried to kill prog, but they were unsuccessful. As proof, Pieces of Eight was selling millions of units, and a 1979 Gallup poll revealed that Styx were the U.S.’s most popular band among teenagers.
Of course, the band would continue to have less and less to do with prog rock as they recorded Cornerstone (which spawned the Fender Rhodes–driven number-one hit “Babe,” which DeYoung confesses was his first time using that particular electric piano), Paradise Theater, and Kilroy Was Here, the latter two (ironically) being concept albums and inspiring extravagant rock shows.
“After we started writing songs, I started to get ideas about how to stage [Paradise Theater],” says DeYoung, who portrayed Pontius Pilate for a theatrical production of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1993, and in 1997 presented the musical The Hunchback of Notre Dame. “I said, ‘I have some ideas to stage this theatrically as the old theater house coming back to life.’ It worked. It was our most successful tour. It set the record at that time for the most people in an indoor arena tour.”
When the band hit the road to support Kilroy Was Here, Styx presented more musical theater: DeYoung, for one, wore a costume complete with heavy robot boots, and during the performance, band members read lines from a script.
Prior to the live-action show, a ten-minute film was shown, outlining Kilroy’s convoluted plot involving a former rock star wrongly accused of murder and silenced by the head of the Majority for Musical Morality, Dr. Everett Righteous.
“There will be those who think that we should have never changed,” says DeYoung. “I know when the Beatles first made Revolver, I thought they had lost their minds. Now I think differently. Paradise Theater is more like Cornerstone than Pieces of Eight. Show me the prog rock on that one, because I don’t know where it is. It’s not there. Yet that was even a bigger seller. It was a pop rock record and I’m not ashamed of that. Now that I still wander around this country of ours, I see that people still like ’em. Mission accomplished.”
TUBULAR BELLS
Exorcising Mike Oldfield
MIKE OLDFIELD WAS JUST FIFTEEN WHEN HE RECORDED THE album Children of the Sun (issued through Nat Joseph’s Transatlantic Records in Britain) with his sister Sally Oldfield as the folk outfit Sallyangie. The duo didn’t stir up much attention (though it has become something of a cult hit) and broke up after the release of debut, at which time Mike decided to join forces with another sibling, his brother Terry, with whom he formed Barefoot. But Barefoot didn’t make much of an impression either, and it too broke up.
Oldfield was a shy and insecure youth who holed up in his bedroom to escape the perils of his dysfunctional family (his mother was a heavily medicated manic-depressive). He created his own world by listening to Bartók, John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, flamenco guitarist Paco Peña, and others, and learning the ins and outs of a variety of instruments and fingerpicking guitar technique. He gained a reputation on the British music scene as something of a guitar prodigy. At age sixteen he was asked to play bass as a member of Kevin Ayers’s the Whole World backing band.
Consisting of keyboardist and arranger David Bedford, who’d later forge a musical relationship with Oldfield; Soft Machiner Robert Wyatt on drums; saxophonist Lol Coxhill; and Ayers himself (who had recently signed with EMI’s progressive sublabel Harvest), the Whole World (along with Richard Sinclair on bass and others) cut two records: Shoot at the Moon and Whatevershebringswesing, the former being the follow-up to Ayers’s oddly entertaining solo debut, Joy of a Toy—a slightly loony hybrid of psychedelia, studio experimentation, and pop, rooted as much in British literary tradition (evocative of childlike wonder à la Lewis Carroll) as musical tradition.
While a member
of Ayers’s band, Oldfield began tinkering with his own ideas, even experimenting in the studio environment until Ayers lent him a tape recorder to construct his compositions. Oldfield customized the device to allow for multitracking.
Oldfield went from label to label in England, playing them portions of his unfinished work, but no one bit. The question was raised: “How could we sell an eighteen-minute instrumental?” Oldfield didn’t have an answer, except to continue working on his recording project—even when it was at times inappropriate.
One promising lead was Virgin Records’ retail store, which had recently opened in London. (Prior to this, Virgin was a mail-order retail music business.) Oldfield’s demo caught the attention of both Tom Newman and Simon Heyworth (the in-house producers /engineers of the soon-to-be Virgin label), who knew Oldfield from sessions he’d done as a bass player with singer Arthur Louis at Virgin honcho Richard Branson’s Manor Studio.
Without the proper mechanism in place to support a young artist, Virgin turned the eighteen-year-old away. Disappointed but determined, Oldfield pushed on and again made a run at releasing his massive instrumental via an established label. Still no luck.
Some months passed and it occurred to Oldfield that perhaps he should try Virgin again: They’d seemed receptive, and maybe their business operations had evolved or fundamentally changed. Oldfield returned to Branson, and this time the barely formed label did not let the quiet but persistent composer slip away: Oldfield became Virgin Records’ first signing.
