Dennis Deyoung, formerly of Styx, has a new album ‘26 East: Vol.1’
UNITED STATES: The first time I saw Dennis Deyoung on stage was in Long Beach, California. He was with other members of the band he had formed in a South Side basement when he was a teenager. The band was Styx, the year was 1979 and Styx was riding high, filling stadiums across the country on its way to becoming the first band to release four consecutive multi-platinum albums.
“Our music is what finally sold us,” Deyoung told me backstage. “Even after our first four records went nowhere, we never gave up. We didn’t ever do a lot of self-promotion. We tried to let our music talk for us.”
That was then.
This is now and Deyoung, who is 73 years old, is locked down in a nice house in the western suburbs with his childhood sweetheart, Suzanne, who has been his wife since 1970 and is the mother of their two adult children, Carrie Ann and Matthew, tucked safely in their own homes. Dennis only goes out to buy groceries. He spends a lot of time in the studio in his basement. A great deal of it is on the phone, being interviewed by a stream of journalists, all eager to have him explain what is certifiably the second coming of this rock star.
Though he has been consistently performing on the road for the last decade with a band that is not Styx but singing the many hits he wrote for that group — “Babe,” “Lady,” “Come Sail Away,” “Mr. Roboto,” “Show Me the Way,” it is a long list — he had recently completed a new album and has become an internet sensation.
“I had been, still am, trying to understand what’s happening in this world,” he says. “I’d been asked to maybe play a song that could be posted on the Internet, maybe brighten things up. I gave in and played (1981u2032s) ‘The Best of Times,’ even though my piano wasn’t even in tune.”
The song was posted in April and it has since been viewed by more than one million people and counting. “I was stunned, overwhelmed,” he says. “I must have hit a chord with people.”
He has since posted another song, 1990’s “Show Me the Way,” and started his own Youtube channel.
But more enlightening and deeply satisfying than the number of viewers have been the comments they posted. There are more than 7,000 and counting, all along the lines of “Wow someone playing an actual instrument. Singing without any electrical enhancements” or “I’m not even an ‘official’ Styx fan, so why did this make me tear up.” And on and on and on and he has read them all. This is serendipitous because Deyoung formally releases a new album, his first since 2007. Its title, “26 East: Vol.1,” refers to the address of the two-flat in which he grew up at 26 East 101st Place in the Roseland neighborhood.
Its cover features three locomotives meant to represent Deyoung and the two pals, brothers Chuck and John Panozzo, with whom he started the band that would be Styx in 1972.
“I have been working on this album for three years,” he says. “Serafino Perugino, the president of Frontiers Records, had been after me for that long, writing every few months, ‘How about making a new record?’ I wasn’t enthusiastic. The music business is upside down and I didn’t need to prove anything.”
But his friend and neighbor, Jim Peterik (of Survivor renown) twisted his arm and the pair started working together. “The process could not have been better,” says Deyoung. “We got eight songs immediately and then I wrote a bunch of others by myself.”
It is a terrific album, 10 cuts that display Deyoung’s ever-catchy ways with lyrics and his still-compelling voice. So pleased was the record label that there will be a “Vol. 2.”
The song likely to create the loudest buzz is “To the Good Old Days,” a duet with Julian Lennon, the son — do I really have to tell you this? — of John Lennon of the Beatles.
“I had never met him, didn’t know him at all,” Deyoung says. “I had written an homage to the Beatles called ‘Hello Goodbye.’ I got the idea of involving Julian, but I realised that it really wasn’t his story. I then sat down and wrote ‘To the Good Old Days’ and I figured out how to send him a demo. I never thought I’d hear back. But I did and he said he honored to be on it.”
The pair met at a Brooklyn recording studio where they sang and Deyoung expressed to Lennon what a profound influence and inspiration his father and the Beatles were for him.
To listen and to watch the video is to be transported back in time. Filled with family photos and home movies of the Deyoung clan and friends, it is a comforting love letter to the past.