Back in 2012, I interviewed Dennis DeYoung for my Stuck in the ’80s podcast. I had grown up in the late ’70s and early ’80s as a Styx fan, and if you told the 12-year-old version of me that one day you’d spend 90 minutes talking with Dennis, I’d assume you were certifiably crackers.
The former Styx frontman was touring as a solo artist and performing nearby with the Florida Orchestra backing him up. Though we did chat for an hour and a half, only the first 45 minutes was on the record and digitally recorded.
As I continue to write a book about the ’80s and how it intersects with the podcast, I’ve been getting transcripts made of all the important interviews. You can, of course, listen to the interview as I edited it 11 years ago. For those who process the written word a little better, here’s a transcript.
Dennis DeYoung: Is this for the podcast?
Steve Spears: Yeah, for both. We’ll use the audio for the podcast and for the newspaper.
DD: It sounds a little bit to me like the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” I think I’m seeing Kevin McCarthy sneaking around in my house going, “Hey, hey, don’t say a word. It’s going on the podcast.” You remember that movie?
SS: Yeah, was it 1956 or you’re talking about the ’70s version?
DD: I think Kevin McCarthy was his name. That was the best one. [chuckle]
SS: Of course. And every time they remake something, it never gets improved in the process.
DD: Yeah. That was a good one and it scared me as a kid. I wouldn’t eat peas for a year.
[laughter]
SS: We actually met in person once. It was back in 2008. You were playing at Clearwater, Ruth Eckerd Hall, where you’re gonna be again in a few weeks. And you were doing a show and you were… I was backstage to write a review and I was with Bobby Rossi, and I asked him if he’d be okay introducing me to you. And so we went up to you and he said, “Hey, Dennis. This is Steve Spears from The Times.” And you smiled and you shook my hand and you said, “Oh, you’re in the media. You probably have some questions for me.” And I said, “Sure. How come “Desert Moon” didn’t make the set list tonight?” And you dropped my hand, your smile disappeared, and you pointed to Bobby and you said, “Because this asshole booked Night Ranger to open for me tonight.”
DD: Did I really say that?
SS: Yeah. And you did it with a total straight face and my…
DD: I didn’t mean it seriously.
SS: No, no. Well, my face turned white, and you could see that, and then you just burst it out with the biggest laugh I’d ever heard.
DD: Oh, God, I’m glad I don’t remember half the things I say.
SS: It was a chance to have some fun with someone who was obviously really starstruck with you. It’s my favorite story to tell to people when they ask me about people I’ve talked to and stuff like that. I always tell them the Dennis DeYoung story.
DD: I learned a long time ago that when you meet people, fans, or anybody, it doesn’t really take much to be affable and nice to them. And it’s a lesson I learned as a very young man. And the thing is if you don’t have time for fans or the media or whoever, how else do you get to have the career you have? You just don’t have them without those people.
SS: Sure.
DD: But that doesn’t include that bastard Bobby Rossi.
[laughter]
SS: Well, you got a chance to see him again. In February 24th, you’re down here and playing with the Florida Orchestra.
DD: Now, the last time we played with Night Ranger, it was a rock show. There was no orchestra, was there?
SS: Right. It was just you and your regular band.
DD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that band you saw has been completely changed. Top to bottom, buddy. I now have the band I probably should have always had. But I started out the first, I’d say, nine or almost 10 years of this solo venture I’ve been on by playing simply the music that I wrote within Styx and I sang. And then a couple years ago, my bass player was leaving the band and I had to replace him, and he sang the high harmony parts. And so I started looking around and my son looked on YouTube one night and called me up and said, “Check this out.” And there was this guy named August Zadra on YouTube in a Styx tribute band. And he was doing “Renegade” and “Blue Collar Man” and “Man in the Wilderness” and “Crystal Ball”, and my jaw dropped.
SS: All the Tommy Shaw songs. Yeah.
DD: He just nailed that stuff. I just went, holy crap! And he was a great lead guitar player. I thought, well, this is too good to be true. But I brought him in and met him. And we’ve been together ever since. And I changed my bass player. I have Craig Carter, a fellow out at Nashville, Tennessee on bass and the astounding Jimmy Leahy on lead guitar. And we now play really the set list that Styx fans have been clamoring for ever since I was let go from the band back in 2000, which is all the hits. Because in the last 10 years, if you went to see me or you went to see my former band mates, you never got the meat and potatoes because they also still to this day don’t play a lot of the big hit records that the fans really wanna hear.
DD: So now you get everything. You get all… You get “Lady”, “Babe”, “Best of Times”, Come Sail Away”, “Don’t Let it End”, “Mr. Roboto”, “Show Me the Way”. What am I forgetting? “Lady”, and “Too Much Time On My Hands” and “Renegade” and “Blue collar Man” and “Fooling Yourself” and “Suite Madame Blue” and “Rockin’ the Paradise”. And then I throw in “Desert Moon”. Now, once again, the show at Ruth Eckerd will have the orchestra and it will be… We’ll have the rock band on stage, but we’ll have the added excitement of the orchestra in show.
SS: I’d like to, if I can, take you back to Roseland in Chicago for a few minutes, if you don’t mind.
DD: Sure.
SS: I was watching the VH1 “Behind the Music” show on Styx this week probably for the 100th time. And every time they show the old photo of you with the Panozzo Brothers and you’ve got that accordion in your arms, I just laugh out loud every time. Do you still have your accordion, your childhood accordion?
DD: It was in a flood. The accordion in that picture, I still have, but it’s pretty moldy. It’s packed away in storage someplace. I can’t really play it anymore, but three years ago or two years, I think it was ’08 or ’09, I can’t remember anymore. I did a thing in Germany, 20 concerts in Germany and they have a thing called Night of the Proms. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that.
SS: Sure.
DD: I played accordion on stage and the Hohner people who make German accordions gave me an accordion at the end of the tour. It’s beautiful and it sounds great. But this is not gonna make the AP by announcing, there isn’t that much call for accordion players anymore in rock music. [laughter] But it was 1962. We were kids. It was before The Beatles by almost two years. We didn’t know they were going to be this phenomenon of rock bands that would play and sing their own music. We were just kids playing out of what they called the black books, which were these books that had all kinds of standard tunes on them. We were not a rock band. We were a wedding band. We played standards and that’s what those pictures illustrate. And so accordion at that time, people forget the most popular instrument in the ’50s after the piano was the accordion. It was not the guitar. The guitar was something that came along more or less in the ’60s, and became the predominant instrument. And of course it is the instrument of rock and roll.
DD: Here’s the humiliation that it teaches you. You spend your life learning an instrument that becomes obsolete and almost something to be derided and made fun of. That’ll set you on a course of trying to be an an overachiever.
SS: I’ll tell you, I will never make fun of the accordion. When I was a kid, about 14 years old, I was subjected to organ lessons ’cause the organ was the big instrument of choice back in the…
DD: Lowrey organ in the living room.
SS: Yeah, yeah. My parents still have the organ that I was tortured with for five or six years and it was so bad that they would drag me from football practice so I would not miss my organ lesson.
DD: Well, that’s the story of my life here, what you just said. When I was 13 years old, I was recruited to go and play on this football team and I told my mother that I was giving up playing music ’cause I wanted to play football. And I went and played that year and we won the city championship. And it was the next year when I was walking down the street and I hadn’t played the accordion for a year, and I heard the Panozzo Brothers that I went and dug my accordion out and went back to music. Otherwise, who knows?
SS: What was the spark you think that took essentially a wedding standard band and turned it to a rock band?
DD: That was The Beatles and it’s all over. That was the thing that it turned around the lives. If you talk to any baby boomer guys in rock bands, I would probably believe 80% of them, right, would tell the same story I told because 74 million people watched that initial show. It’s unheard of, I think. You know what I mean?
SS: Oh, yeah.
DD: And it was an epiphany. I was… My best friend Dave, who had bought Beatle boots in the first Beatle album, I just thought it was baloney, right? I listened and I didn’t get it. I listened, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and I thought, this is all baloney. And we were going to a dance ’cause the Sunday night dances were a big thing. We go to meet girls and I was… How old was I? I must have been 17, I guess. Maybe I was 16. No, I was 17 years old. And we stayed… I remember we were sitting and watching the TV in my house. We were getting ready to go to the dance with my friends and he made me watch it and I looked at it and I thought, well, there you go. That’s what I’m gonna do. Just like that. And that’s when we started to try to play rock songs.
SS: Wow.
DD: We didn’t really become an actual rock and roll band really until (John “J.C.” Curulewski) joined in 1968 when we were all at Chicago State College together all five of us. Imagine that. Actually there were four of us. Four of us were there at Chicago State and JC was a guitar player. And he came in and he was a rock guy. And that’s when we really… About right around 1968, we really started playing… Making our bones on playing rock music.
SS: I remember my music moment being 1979. I remember getting a copy of “Cornerstone” and it was probably the first album that I remember learning the lyrics to every single song, especially “First Time”, which was probably the first power battle that I ever connected with. What’s sad to me now, I guess, in a way is that when I read and I hear that that album kind of might’ve been the first time when the band started to sort of disagree on musical direction.
DD: After we did “Pieces of Eight” and we went to England for the first time and we were greeted with such derision by the press because they were in the throes of the punk revolution when we got there and we were labeled dinosaurs. Hell, we just become successful in 1977 in a big way. And after that experience, I came back and I started to look around and I really believed in my heart that a style of music that we had more or less been involved in, although we were never a prog rock band like The True Ones, like Yes, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, or Gentle Giant, or any people… Any of those kinds of bands, the early genesis bands. We were really a rock and roll band that had prog rock influences and pop. We were really very more… Much more eclectic. But still we still had a lot of albums that had those prog rock leanings.
DD: When we came back at the beginning of 1979 that prog rock was finished. I just saw the handwriting on the wall, and I believed that if we continued in that direction, our career would be finished. And so I kind of led the band to making “Cornerstone,” which was an album from my point of view, which was not trying to be necessarily softer, but more natural. In other words, if you listen, there’s real stuff like “Boat on the River,” stuff like “First Time”, stuff like “Babe”, even “Lights”. And the stuff that’s on there is more… Well, there’s horns on there, okay? It was more… I was going for something more organic, more naturalistic, because I knew we weren’t gonna evolve into a punk band.
DD: That’s just… That’s ludicrous. So that’s what happened at that moment in time. And what people fail to realize is any album that we did, any album, really 90% of it reflected the songs people brought in. That’s just it. If someone had brought in two great rock songs for ‘Cornerstone’ more that were better than say, I don’t know. Let’s pick one of my songs. Take “Why Me” off, okay? Or take “Eddie” off. Two great… Let’s say somebody brought in “Renegade” and “Blue Collar Man”, for instance, right? They would’ve been on that record, but nobody really brought those songs in ‘Cornerstone’. What people don’t understand is we never over recorded. In other words, we wrote almost to the song. If there were eight songs or nine songs on a Styx album, those were primarily the eight or nine songs that were brought in by the writers. There weren’t 15 or 20. ‘Cornerstone’, the funny thing about ‘Cornerstone’… You like that record and the funny thing about it is “Babe” was never supposed to be on that record. It was a song I wrote for my wife as a present never intending it to be a Styx song. And “Boat on the River”, when Tommy played it for me on a bunch of song ideas he had on a cassette, I just said… He said, “I have this song, but it’s not a Styx song.” And I said, “Why not?” ’Cause I just listen to songs, if you know what I mean.
SS: Sure.
DD: I’m not burdened by any particular category or genre of music. If it’s good, I can like it. That’s just me. And I heard “Boat on the River” and I thought, I said, “Not a Styx song. Well, maybe it isn’t, but it’s a great song and we’ll make it ours.”
DD: ‘Cornerstone’ really reflects, as all the records do, the specific songs that were brought in by the writers. Since we were all working together, but competitive with each other as it should be, as writers, we would bring in what we believed were our best songs to present. And ‘Cornerstone’ reflected that with the minor exception of “Babe”, which was not intended to be on that record.
SS: I always kind of thought it felt… It had a different feeling to it that didn’t quite match up with the other songs on the album.
DD: Well, “Babe” is a… “Babe” was a demo. And the record became… The demo became the hit record that was me and the Panozzo Brothers. The only thing we changed was Tommy came in and played the lead guitar solo. Otherwise, it’s the demo, including all the background vocals which were sung all by me.
DD: Our music did not sound like The Beatles in any way, shape or form. I could never find it in myself to use those Beatle tricks in Styx records ’cause they were sacred to me those Beatle records, right?
SS: Sure.
DD: But what they did always influenced my thinking. So, I mean, you could have “Revolution” right next to “Ob-La-Di” and I could enjoy it. So I always thought if you… Here’s what I always say to people, and I’ll say this to you. If I just brought you from another planet and sat you down and you knew nothing about Styx, and I play three songs for you. I play “Babe”, “Renegade” and “Mr. Roboto”.
SS: I was hoping that’d be your third pick.
DD: There you go. All three songs. What would you say those songs have in common?
SS: Nothing.
DD: Nothing. You’re a fan.
SS: Of course.
DD: And here’s what you’re a fan of. You are a fan of my vision, which was I wanted Styx to be the band that lots of different people could come to the same party in. You know what I mean?
SS: Sure.
DD: You could have JY, his hard rocking, they’d be coming in and then the people who liked Tommy doing this and me doing that, and all of us doing… You’d all meet at the same place.
SS: Yeah, yeah.
DD: That was my dream for the band. It wasn’t to be some one-note pony. One-trick pony, I’m sorry. And, for instance, Queen wasn’t Queen like that? If you took “Bohemian Rhapsody” and you took, “We Will Rock You”, or you took the 50 song they did, but, bum, bum, bum, bara, bara, whatever that 50s song was.
SS: “Crazy Little Thing called Love”.
DD: Yeah. They were the same kind of band, weren’t they?
SS: Yeah. You could pick three Queen songs that would be totally different from each other.
DD: I dare you to do that with Journey. They’re more homogeneous in what they do.
SS: Sure.
DD: Nothing wrong with it. If you took Rush, kind of the same thing, right?
SS: Oh yeah, definitely the same thing.
DD: Alright. But what people… I’d like people to understand was Styx in my mind was never intended to just be one thing. Now, there are people in the Styx audience who would always want you to be the thing they like the most about you and nothing else. But that really wasn’t our… Our appeal was because it was more broad-based, which included people like you. What is your favorite Styx song? Quick.
SS: God, I can’t pick one. You mean pick one?
DD: Top three.
SS: “Castle Wall”, “Don’t Let it End”, and probably, “First time”, I guess.
DD: Okay. But “Castle Walls”, if you listen to “Castle Walls” and “First Time”, you wouldn’t think they were from the same band.
SS: No.
DD: “Castle Walls” is that artsy-fartsy, you know what I mean? Dark prog rocky, you know what I mean? Thing and “First Time” is a power ballad. Sweet and then it explodes on the chorus. Something I might say. Here’s another thing I wanna mention to everybody. I can’t say it enough. Styx was before Queen.
SS: Oh yeah, that’s right. You guys date him by a good…
DD: Well…
SS: Almost a decade.
DD: Record recording by a year.
SS: By a year.
DD: And “Lady” was written with that little piano beginning and the power thing and the big harmonies and the high voices a good two years before I even knew who Queen was. But because our success came after, right? When the public at large discovered us, Queen, Kansas, Foreigner, Boston had all come, had huge successes before us, but it was a musical style that we were doing unsuccessfully, but it wasn’t derivative of anybody.
SS: Sure.
DD: Well, it was, but none of those bands. The bands that influenced us were, obviously Yes, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer early on. I said it was like The Who meets Emerson, Lake and Palmer meets Yes meets Three Dog Night. That’s what I always think we were like in the beginning.
SS: You mentioned some of those bands like Kansas, Journey, REO, Speedwagon even, these were all bands that really kind of in the late ’70s and early ’80s, they transitioned from being not prog rock, but some sort of a harder derivative rock into a softer, more FM friendly thing. When I was in high school, the big thing was wearing… You either wore your REO Speedwagon Hi Infidelity concert shirt, or you wore your Styx Paradise Theater concert shirt, and we would break into cliques depending on which band you went to see live. I kind of wondered, at that time of your career, did you feel any competition or rivalry with bands like those from that era?
DD: Totally. Everybody is… They’re grabbing for the same ring. So there’s incredible competition. And mentioning REO, the thing that has become, I guess, the most surprising to me is the… I wouldn’t even say the French, the camaraderie because when you’re not really competing in the same arena in the same way anymore, a lot of that stuff goes away. ’Cause I know Kevin Cronin, and he’s a nice guy, but the fact that Styx and REO have become such so closely allied, not to make a pun here, would’ve been unthinkable when we were in the band because we… The guys in Styx always thought, REO, please. You know what I mean?
SS: Yeah, yeah.
DD: We’re Styx, if you know what I mean.
SS: I saw them together two years ago here in Tampa. They played together and I wanna say Night Ranger was the third band on the bill. And it was Night Ranger, and then REO came on, and then Styx came on and I left halfway. No, I don’t even think I made it halfway through Styx because in my mind, it’s just not Styx without you playing with them.
DD: Well, here’s what I would say. I don’t think if I were still in the band, I can’t imagine there being any questions whatsoever about who should be the closer or the headliner.
SS: Oh yeah.
DD: There’s just no doubt. There was no doubt. When we toured last time I was in the band, we had Kansas and Pat Benatar, and they were just special guests.
SS: Let me take you to… If you have time, I wanna talk about Kilroy for a second. That was probably the first concert I was ever allowed to drive to go see on my own, so it’s always got a special place in my heart. And I kept the concert shirt until my washer finally digested it. But if you could go back to that record and that tour, would you do anything differently? Knowing how that the series of events that would follow Kilroy, would you go back and do anything differently?
DD: I’d have had the Roboto mask made larger ’cause it didn’t fit well on my face. [laughter]
DD: Yeah, I think… Look, I can go back. I can tell you that I would listen to “Come Sail Away” and change things. That’s just human nature. Rarely will an artist look at what he’s done no matter how much it’s appreciated and respected, and not believe in their heart that they couldn’t have made it better. Here is the fundamental problem with Kilroy. More than any song about a robot, more than my encouragement and almost insistence that we try to act on stage a little bit and tell a story in a real dramatic setting, more than any of that, the greatest failing of Kilroy is… And I’ve said this before … I needed “Renegade” on that album. … The worst thing about that record is my premise being that rock and roll music was being subverted, and it was being censored to the point of putting rock stars in jail. This is my premise. Correct?
SS: Right.
DD: And there weren’t any songs on that record that really encapsulated the spirit of true rock music. There isn’t a “Blue Collar Man” rock in the “Paradise” or “Renegade”. You see what I’m saying? A “Midnight Ride”, a “Miss America”. That straight ahead balls out, you know what I mean? Had I to do it again, I would… But the truth of the matter is nobody brought those songs in. Even JY’s contribution, which is “Heavy Metal Poisoning” was…
SS: Good, but not great.
DD: I don’t mean not good or bad. Forget about that. That’s a whole another thing. I’m talking about in essence was not… You can’t compare Midnight… JY’s, “Midnight Rider” or “Miss America” with “Heavy Metal Poisoning”. Forget the lyric. Okay? The music itself wasn’t as hard rocking as some of the things he had done. But had we… What we really needed musically was a song like “Renegade” because the characters in Kilroy were based on the personalities. I mean, Tommy Shaw is the “Renegade” rebel, right?
SS: Sure.
DD: He needed to sing “Renegade”, “Oh, mom, I’m in fear for… “ That needed to be on that record, a song like that, and nobody wrote one. I being the one… The least likely guy in the band to write that kind of song. I’m better at ballads in the big art rock statement. That’s the thing that I would like to change. I would like to have had a couple more really great rock songs on there, but let’s be honest. At that moment in time, what Roboto… The song reflected was the techno explosion coming from England with synthesizers, right?
SS: Correct.
DD: Which appealed to me. And why did they appeal to me? You tell me why.
SS: Yeah. You play keyboard.
DD: I play keyboards. So there is that influence on the record with “Roboto”, with “High Tide”, with “Cold War” and even with “Heavy Metal Poisoning”, that goofy synth in the background.
SS: I noticed when you play “Mr. Roboto” live these days, you seem to really enjoy it maybe just a touch more than the others. Is that almost sort of a lingering defiance and defense of what is an album you love and many fans love, but an album that your former band mates have kind of washed their hands off?
DD: Well, here’s what I think. I think it would never make any sense for me to come out publicly and deride successful music that we created because it just doesn’t make any sense. First of all, I don’t feel that way. Now, I’ve had strong opinions about some of the Wooden Nickel albums, which I’ve stated publicly that I just didn’t like. Okay?
SS: Well sure, yeah.
DD: But primarily because of my contributions. But having said that, those Wooden Nickel albums were not successful and they never will be because they weren’t that good. So what I believe is all these controversy, which has been self-created and the fact with my dismissal from the band back in 1999, it divided the fan base, something that I could’ve never, ever imagined nor wanted because then what you’re essentially doing is you’re asking guys like you who like the music just ’cause why? ’Cause you liked it, right?
SS: Exactly.
DD: I don’t think most fans are looking at the albums. The real diehards do, but looking at the albums and trying to find out and figure out who wrote what and whose idea was what. They’re judging it… they’re judging the song first and the group second. I don’t know how many times you can go and play someplace and people will say to you, “Jesus, I didn’t know you… I couldn’t… I didn’t remember you did all those songs.” Which means they knew all the songs, right?
SS: Sure.
DD: But they couldn’t exactly remember who did them. This is very typical. So my point is, I don’t understand and I have never participated in that by publicly deriding the music we created. Heck, I thought we did a pretty good job. But then you’re asking the fan base to make a choice.
SS: That’d be like McDonald’s saying, “You know what, we like the Big Mac, but we could have made it much better.”
DD: Or shit, “We like the Big Mac, but we’re not crazy about the fries.”
SS: Yeah. Why would you do that?
DD: I can’t answer that ’cause I wouldn’t do that.
SS: So it’s about the same time then that you get the opportunity to make a solo album and it’s ‘Desert Moon’ and often…
DD: Never wanted to make a solo album.
SS: I know.
DD: I wanna be clear. Tommy quit the band on stage during the Kilroy Tour. He quit the band and we were faced with what was gonna happen next. And John and Chuck wanted to replace Tommy and just move forward, go right back in the studio, do a summer sort of greatest hits tour with a live album with a replacement and then move forward. And I couldn’t understand that because to me, fundamentally, I believe that the fan base really liked Tommy [chuckle] and liked us together and asking them to suddenly like somebody else, it just felt wrong to me. And I really believe Tommy would make a solo album and decide he’d wanna come back. That’s what I was banking at. But in the interim, Tommy had already begun his plans to make his solo album during the Kilroy Tour. And when I found out about it, I knew I had an option with A&M. They had write a first refusal, which means if you’re going to make a solo album, they get the first choice at it. And they said they’d like to have a solo album for me. I only did it, I only recorded “Desert Moon” to have something to do.
SS: The songs that are on that album, could they have been Styx’s songs if…
DD: “Desert Moon” would’ve been a huge hit for Styx. We’d have gotten together and that song would’ve been fundamentally the same, but it would’ve been different because we’d have gotten in the room and everybody’s personality would have been brought to bear to the sound and the interpretation. And yeah, I think it might’ve been a top three record for Styx. Tommy and I would’ve been singing together on the choruses. We’d have been in harmony. I made that record really by myself. I brought a couple guys I didn’t even know in to play, but I made that. That was me. And what I was trying to make with “Desert Moon” and really my first three solo albums was any album that was not a Styx album, I was trying not to imitate what I did with Styx. I was trying to curve out a little different style for myself. More of a pop AC style.
SS: The other thing that strikes me about that album and the songs and specifically the videos that come from it is that for the first time, we get to see Dennis DeYoung as both a singer and sort of a storyteller and an actor. I mean, there are big swaths of these videos where you act out a story, “Don’t Wait for Heroes” being one of them that it really engages a part of your creativity that we haven’t had a chance to see up until then. Was that a purposeful thing? Did you need to stretch your acting legs a little bit there?
DD: Look, it started with “Desert Moon”. I should say, it started with Kilroy. So there absolutely positively was a part of me that wanted to act and you see it in the Kilroy video and then in the… But I would clearly say were weak attempts to do it on stage within the confines of the show, although it worked wonderfully in real time. But if you go and film it and look at it, I cringe a little bit ’cause I think it could be so much better. But I would say that the “Desert Moon” video was somebody else’s idea. We just presented them the song and then Jack Cole and a guy named Miller, God, what was his name? The kid who wrote the storyboard screen, like the video play, the screenplay for “Desert Moon”. That wasn’t my idea. That was something that the guy had written. And I looked at it and I thought, “Hey, that’s pretty good.” And so the second one, “Don’t Wait for Heroes”, because of the success of “Desert Moon”, which was enormous at the time as a video, we went right back with the same team and tried to recreate the wheel with “Don’t Wait for Heroes”.
SS: I like that one almost better as a video.
DD:”Don’t Wait for Heroes”?
SS: I do. I like the song a lot, but I also like the… I play at my desk a lot. It drives my people around me nuts to see me sitting there watching Dennis DeYoung videos all day.
DD: Yeah. They’re starting to question your sanity.
SS: That’s been questioned out for years.
DD: They’re starting to say, you’ve been overwhelmed by Republican attack ads.
[laughter]
SS: There’s a scene where you’re gonna blow off the audition and then you look at your friends, and you’re like, “Like hell.”
DD: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SS: Then you launch it.
DD: That’s all stuff in the…
SS: I just… I got the feeling. At the time, I was like, “God damn, this guy can really act.” I wish… I’d love to have seen you. I know you’ve had a couple opportunities.
DD: The thing about acting is I did some stage acting, but you really… I never just… I didn’t commit to it, I didn’t commit to it. I’d had to go to LA, get an agent, and I probably should have, but I didn’t. I always wanna be in The Beatles more than anything, and I got that from being in Styx, okay? That’s what I really wanted. I would’ve rather been in The Beatles than being Brad Pitt, you know what I mean?
SS: Yeah.
DD: So to go and go through what I would’ve had to go through to be an actor, I don’t know that I was… And I had a wife and I had two kids, and it would’ve entailed an awful lot of personal sacrifice within the family to do that kind of a thing.
SS: Sure.
DD: And I don’t think I was prepared for it. So I do have some regrets that I didn’t see if I could have been a better actor. But that’s saying, those videos, like I said, the “Desert Moon” was not my idea. Somebody wrote that, and I just participated in it. My biggest contribution to “Desert Moon” was the original script called for an MG. And I said, “No, you have to have a ’65 Mustang.”
[laughter]
DD: Because I owned a ’65 Mustang in 1965. So I said, “Nope, you gotta you have to have a… You have to have a… “ And that car is incredibly important symbolically to that video.
SS: A return to the past.
DD: Well, it’s the idea of letting go of things that are in the past that you really are… You’re no longer part of them. Those are moments in time and they cannot be relived.
SS: That’s painful to hear in a way. Pretty much I make my living these days writing about the past and trying to come to grips with it and maybe come to peace with it in my own way.
DD: When you get older. The fact is this, when you’re young, of course you’re gonna write about the future because that’s…
SS: That’s all you got.
DD: That’s what’s coming up. And then the older you get, the more reflective you get if you’re not some sort of a retarded adolescent. I see Steven Tyler on American Idol. I think, well, this guy’s made a cottage industry of that thing he’s doing, right?
SS: Sure.
DD: But I just don’t feel it’s right for me. It feels… I don’t know, there’s… I don’t wanna get in trouble here, but there’s some sort of desperation there. And what I was saying in “Desert Moon” is you really can’t, you can’t hold on to those things. In your heart, you can, but you can’t really… You can’t continue to replay the same movie in your own life.
[music]
SS: I talked to Chuck Panozzo right after his autobiography came out, and I guess that’s been five years now. And we talked a lot about the old days with Styx and the Roseland days and the rehearsing in the basement and his feelings for his band mates. And I asked him if you’d reached out to him in reaction to his book. And he said, if I can quote him, he said, “I haven’t heard any responses from him.” He said, “The whole thing is a misfortune. I’ve known Dennis since we were kids, and it doesn’t make me feel any better that he’s not in the band, but he’s gone his direction and we’ve tried to stay true to ours.” And then I asked him, and I’d get around to this, about the need for a reconciliation or a reunion in any shape, form, and he said, “Before any of us die, I would hope it could happen. Every year that it doesn’t happen as another year that goes by. And if you wait too long, who will care?”
DD: Well, it has nothing to do with me. I would’ve never left that band. That was my band in my mind. I’ve known Chuck since he was a kid, of course. And the only answer I have is I think Chuck made it clear. You read the book?
SS: Oh, yeah.
DD: I think he made it clear. And there was a moment in 1999 or 2000 when JY and Tommy were adamant about moving on without me. And legally, I believe it would’ve been difficult. And I think Chuck openly admits that he was the one that cast the deciding vote. Didn’t he say that in this book?
SS: I think he did.
DD: Well then, well, I don’t… I’m not sure how to respond.
SS: Yeah. I guess I wonder, do you feel there’s a need eventually for a reconciliation?
DD: I felt that since the day I was asked not to… From the day I was replaced.
SS: So you’re still open to that idea?
DD: I would just ask anyone in the ensuing 10 years or 11… How many? 11 years. What is this? Maybe they’re going on the 12th year. I have never wavered. And what I have said at the beginning is what I’ve said now. You can’t go back and find one statement that I had made that was false in any way. And I’ve said from the beginning that I was essentially voted out of the band and it was not my idea. We were working on a record album when it happened. I wasn’t in the Sahara Desert contemplating Buddha. We were working together on the record. And so I think it’s clear if anybody really looks at it that they decided in their minds that they wanted to replace me, but that was never my desire.
SS: I think we’ll see a day. I really think, based on everything, the way things go in this world, I’d like to see a day where everyone’s standing on the stage again together.
DD: I can’t impress upon the fans enough that I did not and I’m not standing in the way of that happening.
SS: In the meantime, are you gonna be able to… Are you happy with what you’re left with, I mean, to performing the music of Styx with your own band, of your own choosing, the band that you said you should have had all along? Is this what makes Dennis DeYoung happy these days? Are you content with where you’re at?
DD: I think the band I have now recreates this music in a manner and the spirit, not just the play and the singing, but the stage presence, the performance of these guys in a manner that is as close to the original thing as you can get. The original thing would involve the original cats.
Click here to listen to the full interview with Dennis DeYoung.
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