DeYoung catches second wave of stardom
Styx co-founder now a YouTube sensation too
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 their 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, 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” and “Show Me the Way,” to name just a few — 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 (1981’s) ‘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 1 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 on Friday 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 realized 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 (would be) 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.
Another song sure to cause a stir is “With All Due Respect.” Co-written with Peterik, it is a tough and angry message to the many talking heads of cable television, who DeYoung feels are fueling the fires of our divided country.
“I hate the way we receive news,” he says “It’s been bastardized into a form of entertainment, sensationalism just meant to attract viewers. Been that way for a long time and getting worse. It drives us apart. It needs to stop.”
Or as he sings in the song:
“With all due respect You are an (expletive) With all due respect You make me sick With all due respect Plug up your pie holes With all due respect You don’t deserve no damn respect!”
In conversation DeYoung has never been loath to express his political views or exercise his wicked sense of humor. He has been this way since I first met him in California 40 years ago, when I was with the band on tour for a week to write a series of articles for the Sun-Times.
“In my songs, for my whole life, I have been trying to tell my own story,” he says.
Shadowing DeYoung’s current resurgence, more than evident in the YouTube comments’ string, are questions about a possible Styx reunion. DeYoung left the band or, as he sees it, the band left him two decades ago.
J.Y. Young, who joined Styx in 1970, and Tommy Shaw, who came aboard in 1975, recruited others to fill in the roster, with Chuck Panozzo sometimes on stage. This Styx has been on the road ever since, singing many of the DeYoung-written songs that made the band famous.
The reasons for the split? The answer is where things get complicated.
Some will tell you that it was because of personality clashes on the band’s tours in 1996 and 1997, after DeYoung returned to it after a few years away as a solo artist and working in the theater as an actor and composer; Shaw badmouthing DeYoung in interviews; the death of drummer John Panozzo; a controversial episode about Styx on VH1’s “Beyond the Music”; and DeYoung’s struggles with a rare disease.
DeYoung’s current high visibility has heated up the topic. A recent story in Rolling Stone quotes DeYoung saying this about a possible reunion: “Let’s get together and give the fans one more run at this thing and then I’ll ride off into the sunset. You’ll keep doing your Styx thing and using the name. I don’t care. I want it one more time for our fans.”
Author Andy Greene then makes his plea: “Gentlemen of Styx … Dennis has put the ball firmly in your court here. What do you say? Will you try the best that you can to carry on as you are? Or will you think of childhood friends and the dreams you had and let him back in? Together you can once again search for tomorrow on every shore.”
On the Tuesday morning we talked, DeYoung was coming off two hours of interviews.
“I suppose this new album is a way of me saying goodbye to Styx fans,” he says. “They have been very good to me and I have done what I can for them. It’s really been all about the music.”
He has not heard a word from Shaw or Young.
“We haven’t talked in 20 years,” he says, although Chuck gave permission to use his image on the new album and also told Dennis how much he enjoyed the accompanying video.
“But you know what? Life goes on and I have had a glorious life.”
Then he said goodbye to me. The rock star for a half-century was on his way to the grocery store and had to get there before it closed.