pieces of eight

Styx came alive and spread their wings with the renegade riffs of this progressive pop powerhouse. Building on the success of 'The Grand Illusion', the band produced the sessions for 'Pieces of Eight' at Paragon Recording Studios and St. James Cathedral in Chicago with Dennis DeYoung on keyboards, synthesizers, pipe organ, and vocals; Chuck Panozzo on bass guitar and vocals; John Panozzo on drums and vocals; Tommy Shaw on guitar, mandolin, and vocals; and James Young on guitar and vocals.   

Shaw considers:    "'Grand Illusion' and 'Pieces Of Eight', they didn’t really set out to be concept albums. But they seemed to be. It was just a matter of consciousness. We were all so on the same page on 'Grand Illusion' and 'Pieces Of Eight' that we kind of agreed on everything—we had similar outlooks on life, we were all going through the same thing, and we were a team." 

Chuck Pannozzo reveals:    "The album cover I was most responsible for, was the iconic 'Pieces of Eight' album cover with the ladies on the cover. The funny part of that was that I went to Los Angeles, California, and spoke to some guys about the concept and when I went back to Chicago, somebody who worked with the band thought it was too big. I told them that it wasn't a postage stamp, it was an album cover. After some wrangling, everybody agreed and I am proud of it. It is certainly one of the most iconic and identifiable album covers out there."

DeYoung reflects:    "It's really very highly intellectual - it's three old broads on Easter Island, as far as I can tell looking at this thing. Here's the deal: when the people who designed this album cover, Hipgnosis, they're English - I think that explains most of it - when they showed me this album cover, I gotta tell you, I hated it. "Why do you have these old women on our album cover?" was the first thought that came to my mind. But here's the deal (and of course, now that I've gotten older, these women are starting to look pretty good to me): since pretty much what 'Pieces of Eight' is about is not giving up your dreams just for the pursuit of money and material possessions, this album cover symbolizes these women who are affluent by their demeanor and they way they're dressed, and they all have these earrings on which are of the Easter Island statues, made famous by Thor Heyerdahl in Aku-Aku, and what that supposedly symbolizes is that these women - imagine them all belonging to the same country club, where the status symbol is to have these earrings, the statue of these little Easter Island earrings, as a symbol of their achievements in life, a symbol of their monetary success and materialism, yet Easter Island, as we all know, the statues themselves symbolize a lost civilization, which somehow built these wonderful monuments, and has completely disappeared without any trace. So I suppose the moral of the story is, when you just pursue this sort of thing, this monetary gratification, that perhaps the ultimate goal would be extinction."

'Pieces of Eight' matched the triple-platinum success of 'The Grand Illusion', going to number thirty in Sweden and number six in the US.  






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"Renegade" hit number sixteen in the US.  

Shaw reveals:  "At the time, I was really into the Alan Parsons Project. There was just a lot of really great music production going on. If you lived during that time, you would put your headphones on, get those Koss headphones, and listen to Pink Floyd—things that are panning around left and right—and if you would just smoke a joint, and you were really in tune with that, there was this trip you could go on. I loved the way those songs were engineered. They were great songs, and they were beautifully recorded. So when I started “Renegade,” it was kind of like an Alan Parsons song, this slow dirge. You know how the beginning is, with those three-part harmonies? It was like that all through the verses, but it was slow. It was a real dirge-y kind of thing. And I was real proud of it. I took it to the guys in the band and they liked it, too, but they said, “Let’s bring up the energy.” So as soon as we did that, we felt like we were onto something."











    
"Great White Hope" 





    
"Blue Collar Man (Long Nights)" went to ninety-eight in Australia, twenty-one in the US, and number nine in Canada.  Shaw recalls:  "I was on a deep-sea fishing trip. It must have been at the end of Crystal Ball, or after the Grand Illusion tour. We were out all day, and I must have smoked a lot of pot that day—I haven’t done any of that in 21 years—but you know, we were on this boat, and on the way up there, a girl asked us, “You guys want some kona buds?” “Kona buds?” It was this lady taxi driver taking us out there. And we were like, “Sure!” So, she passed this joint around, and it was the strongest pot I’ve ever smoked in my life. When we booked this fishing boat, we said, “We are going to be partying. Because we just finished this tour, and we have a cooler and drinks, and I hope you don’t mind if we party.” Well, we smoked this pot, and by the time we got on the boat, we were paralyzed. We were, like, stone quiet for the first hour and a half. We finally started coming around a little bit and told [the boat owner] what happened. He’s like, “I wondered what happened to you guys, because you said there was going to be this big party, and you guys haven’t said a word.” We’re all sitting there in this daze from this pot, and the boat was making this sound: “mmm mmm mmm.” You are moving slowly when you are trolling through the water. The engines are at really low RPMs. The sound just sort of tattooed itself onto my psyche. And when I got back to the room, I got the acoustic guitar and wrote the music to “Blue Collar Man.” 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzk9zpnOJvM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDM6v1XhWEg












'Pieces of Eight' full album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he94OI4UKm0


Side One
"Great White Hope" (James Young) – 4:22
Lead vocals and lead guitar: Young
"I'm O.K." (Dennis DeYoung, Young) – 5:41
Lead vocals, synthesizer solo and pipe organ: DeYoung
Lead Guitar: Tommy Shaw
"Sing for the Day" (Shaw) – 4:57
Lead vocals, mandolin, all guitars: Shaw
"The Message" (DeYoung) – 1:08
All synthesizers: DeYoung
"Lords of the Ring" (DeYoung) – 4:33
Lead vocals and middle guitar solo: Young
Ending guitar solo: Shaw
Synthesizer solos: DeYoung

Side Two
"Blue Collar Man (Long Nights)" (Shaw) – 4:05
Lead vocals and lead guitar: Shaw
"Queen of Spades" (Young, DeYoung) – 5:38
Lead vocals: DeYoung
Lead guitar: Young
"Renegade" (Shaw) – 4:13
Lead vocals: Shaw
Lead guitar: Young
"Pieces of Eight" (DeYoung) – 4:44
Lead vocals: DeYoung
Lead guitar: Shaw
"Aku-Aku" (Instrumental) (Shaw) – 2:57
Lead guitar and whisper chant: Shaw

the grand illusion

Styx crossed from the rock underworld into mainstream success with this dramatic progressive rock concept album. 'The Grand Illusion' was recorded at Paragon Recording Studios in Chicago and produced by the band, which consisted of Dennis DeYoung on keyboards, synthesizers, and vocals; Chuck Panozzo on bass and vocals; John Panozzo on drums and vocals; James Young on guitar, keyboards, and vocals; and Tommy Shaw on vocals and acoustic and electric guitars. Much of the material was developed during the tour for their album 'Crystal Ball'. DeYoung recalls: "We went on the road and toured and it really took that time for us to become a band with Tommy. We became writers together and 'The Grand Illusion' is the outcome...I was the theme guy in Styx and I had come up with the theme for 'The Grand Illusion'. I got everyone together and I said, 'Look, in the last year we’ve made more money than we ever thought we would make in our entire lives. How has it affected us?' I know how it had affected me. We set on a course of trying to make a loosely thematic album based on success, failure and money."


'The Grand Illusion' was the band's seventh album; and they found it quite fitting to release it on 7/7/77. It became a huge success for Styx, eventually going triple-platinum. Tommy Shaw remembers: "It was just fantastic, it was exciting, and we were all in such a great creative zone at that point. We were too busy to have been jaded by it all, those first two or three years together. And things just kept getting better and bigger. We could hardly keep up with the way success was coming to us. I mean, I was just so happy to have that bowling-alley lounge gig. I’d spent the last three years making fifty dollars a week, if I was lucky. I would be lucky to pay my bar tab. I was hoping something good would happen, but this really came out of left field." 'The Grand Illusion' went to number thirty-eight in Sweden and peaked at number six in the US.











http://styxworld.com/










A top thirty hit, 'Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)' was written by Shaw. He says: "Some people have different ways of motivating themselves. I was just happy to be onstage, and so many times I would look over at him and he would get really cross onstage. I think he got homesick a lot. He didn’t like to be on the road. I just didn’t understand it when I first joined the band. Because this was early on, and things were going so well for us; I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t happier. But then time would go by, and I would realize I could use those same words on myself. You know, when I would get moments of weakness and look at life and be so cynical about things. It would surprise me. It’s like your dreams—you are every character in your dreams. I was the one who wrote those words, so I can’t really put them on anyone else other than myself. "








'Come Sail Away' went to number eight in the US. Songwriter DeYoung reflects: I think the song 'Come Sail Away' means so much to people because it is a song of a great journey to be someplace else. It is a song of guarded hope that it can be better. The character in the song says in the very beginning that he wants to set a course for a virgin sea. He doesn’t want to be held back; he wants to have all options open to him. It is fraught with peril and he realizes in the second verse that he chased the pot of gold but that he didn’t get it. We, Styx, didn’t get it either, but that isn’t going to stop us from moving forward...This is about the disappointment of what I had lived through. It is the realization of the good and the bad; some happy, some sad. The song talks about childhood friends. I’m talking about the band and our dreams and I’m trying to encourage myself to carry on. I had to carry on; I needed to." Shaw explains their promotional campaign for the song: "There was this guy Jim Cahill, who now does international stuff for Fox News. He is a very creative force. He and I were the same age, and we were probably on the leading edge of the bad behavior in the band. So we were fearless. I was in an unhappy situation at home, so I was more than happy to work on my days off and go out of town. Jim and I would just be on these relentless campaigns with the local promo guys, or anyone who would come with us. And we would have a pocket full of, you know, fun-powder and cash, and we just went around and did everything that we could to get this song on the radio. We had big plans for that song, so we just went at it like a kamikaze: 'We are going to get this on the radio or we are going to die trying.' We went coast to coast and gave away TV sets and VCRs and promised this and that—plane tickets, anything—and we got the bullet back. "












'The Grand Illusion' 
full album:

Side One

"The Grand Illusion" (Dennis DeYoung) – 4:36

Lead vocals: DeYoung

First guitar solo and guitar fills: Tommy Shaw

Second guitar solo: James Young

"Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)" (Shaw) – 5:29

Lead vocals: Shaw

"Superstars" (Young, DeYoung, Shaw) – 3:59

Lead vocals and lead guitar: Shaw

Soliloquy: DeYoung

"Come Sail Away" (DeYoung) – 6:07

Lead vocals and synthesizer solo: DeYoung

ARP Odyssey: Young

Lead Guitar: Shaw

Side Two

"Miss America" (Young) – 5:02

Lead vocals and guitar solo: Young

"Man in the Wilderness" (Shaw) – 5:51

Lead vocals and guitar solo: Shaw

"Castle Walls" (DeYoung) – 5:59

Lead vocals: DeYoung

Lead guitar: Young

"The Grand Finale" (DeYoung, Young, Shaw) – 1:57

Lead vocals: DeYoung

Lead guitar fills: Shaw

Melodic guitar lead: Young

'Le Blanc-Seing' by René Magritte