TOP 40 DEBUT: January 19, 1980
PEAK POSITION: #26 (February 9, 1980)
Rarely does a #1 single break up a band. But “Babe” certainly came close. The gloopy love song that gave Styx their first—and only—chart topper also exacerbated divisions brewing within the group for years; decisions over how to proceed in its wake nearly fractured the Chicago quintet into pieces. Singer and guitarist Tommy Shaw threatened to quit. Singer, keyboardist, and “Babe” creator Dennis DeYoung was briefly fired. And ultimately, one of the most successful progressive rock acts of the late Seventies mended fences via the unlikeliest of methods: the release of “Why Me,” the now-forgotten second single from Styx’s triple-platinum album Cornerstone. Rarely does a minor chart entry reshape an entire band’s trajectory, but if “Why Me” didn’t exactly save Styx, it certainly delayed their demise for a good half decade.
The nucleus of Styx formed in 1962, when a 14-year-old DeYoung start jamming with fellow neighborhood kids in the Roseland area of south Chicago. Twin 12-year-old brothers Chuck and John Panozzo played bass and drums, respectively; DeYoung sang and added occasional accordion. They called themselves the Tradewinds, later changed to TW4 (short for “There Were 4”) after a different Tradewinds scored a Top 40 hit in 1965. By 1970, TW4 were a five-piece with three separate vocalists—guitarists John Curulewski and James “JY” Young, plus DeYoung, now switched to keyboards—and a moniker that no longer made much sense. Upon signing with tiny Chicago label Wooden Nickel Records in 1972, the quintet changed their name one last time, and the self-titled Styx album was released that same year.
Early on, Styx seemed dead-set on proving their prog-rock bonafides; their debut opened with a 13-minute epic in four parts, and a different classical composer got a co-writing credit on each of their first three albums. But there’s a reason Styx is rarely cited within the progressive pantheon: Most of their work within this subgenre is, objectively, terrible. Take 1973’s The Serpent Is Rising, a loose concept album involving a vagina, a volcano, Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” and a hidden track entitled “Plexiglas Toilet.” DeYoung later called the record “one of the worst recorded and produced in the history of music.” If anything, he might be understating it. It’s telling that Styx’s only hit from the Wooden Nickel era turned out to be “Lady,” a straight-ahead love song with no progressive overtones whatsoever. (DeYoung’s 1973 proto-power ballad peaked at #6 in March ‘75, two years after its initial release. It’s a 7.)
The belated success of “Lady” prompted a move to A&M Records, as well as a reappraisal of the band’s true strengths. Gone were the wonky sojourns and bizarre stylistic detours, replaced by a more accessible brand of streamlined, arena-friendly “pomp rock” (to use Styx’s own terminology). DeYoung’s grand ambitions now took the shape of actual songs; the increasingly rare prog-rock numbers—like “Suite Madame Blue”—finally landed with appropriate weight. Following Curulewski’s departure in 1976, Tommy Shaw came on board and quickly expanded the quintet’s reach into harder territory. But his presence also created a problem. Styx were now a band with two alpha males: DeYoung and Shaw, competing songwriters sharing the frontman role while each trying to pull the band in their own direction. The fissures were present long before “Babe” took off. Its ascension simply brought them all to a head.
Like “Lady” before it, “Babe” had been written by Dennis for his wife Suzanne; unlike the earlier hit, there was no plan in place to turn his demo recording into an actual Styx song. In a lovely bit of irony, DeYoung needed convincing from Shaw and Young before he agreed to add “Babe” to Cornerstone’s running order. (The released version wound up being his original demo with a guitar solo from Tommy overdubbed on top.) A&M, of course, took one listen and instantly pegged it as the first single.
“Babe” topped the charts on December 8, 1979, making Styx the first progressive rock band in history to hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Of course, it’s debatable if Styx even deserved the “prog” classification by late ’79, especially once the brazenly commercial Cornerstone hit store shelves. But there’s no real debate over their monster single: “Babe” was never prog-rock, or hard rock, or even rock at all. “Babe” was a straight-up prom ballad, a #9 Adult Contemporary hit that enraged Styx’s audience of suburban male teenagers by accidentally appealing to those teenagers’ suburban moms. (It’s a 4.) But “Babe” also confirmed that Styx could easily appeal to that bigger, broader demographic—if they stayed the course. And Dennis already had the perfect song in mind.
With A&M’s blessing, DeYoung pushed to release “First Time” as the follow-up single. Like its predecessor, “First Time” was another Fender Rhodes-driven soft-rock jam, written and performed by Dennis with minimal contribution from the other members. It was also toothless enough to make “Babe” sound like Black Sabbath by comparison. And for Shaw, that was a ballad-heavy bridge too far. In a 2000 episode of VH1’s Behind The Music docuseries, he explained his position thusly: “The band was big enough already, you know? We didn’t have to stretch out into Barry Manilow’s territory. And so, we put our foot down.”
In short order, the following events transpired: Shaw threatened to quit the band if “First Time” became the next single. A band meeting was held. Grievances were aired. DeYoung was fired. (Presumably after Shaw and Young conveniently forgot their earlier “Babe” cheerleading campaign.) Eight weeks passed as the remaining four members hunted, in vain, for a suitable replacement. Finally, Dennis returned to Styx, with no one outside the band’s inner circle even aware of his previous dismissal. And somewhere in the midst of all this madness, the rollout for “First Time” was cancelled, and “Why Me” became Cornerstone’s official second single in America.
“Why Me” is not the anti-“Babe.” DeYoung still dominates; Shaw mostly disappears. From a commercial standpoint, it’s too lightweight for AOR and far too quirky to be truly embraced by Top 40 radio. (Considering how huge Air Supply and Christopher Cross became in the spring of 1980, it’s a cynical-but-safe bet that “First Time” would’ve been the bigger hit.) But the song scores points for messing around with the usual Styx formula—even if “Why Me” mostly gets there by borrowing another band’s formula instead.
For most of 1979, the biggest pop-prog outfit in the country wasn’t Styx. It was Supertramp, a long-running British quintet who celebrated the year by watching their breakthrough album Breakfast In America hit #1, spawn two Top 10 hits, and sell four million copies. DeYoung never admitted to intentionally copying his peers across the pond, but large chunks of “Why Me”—the stop-start rhythm, the driving electric piano pulse against a half-time beat, even the mere presence of a horn section—definitely engage in some high-end Supertramp cosplay. On the other hand, playing in another band’s sandbox seemed to shake something loose in the quintet, and there’s an oddball energy here that doesn’t resurface on Styx’s later, more conventional hits.
Worryingly, “Why Me” kicks off like a Broadway musical: overly jaunty keyboard line, overly eager background vocals, and DeYoung, as usual, over-emoting to the back rows of the theater. The chorus doesn’t get much better, stacking cliché atop cliché—“Hard times come, hard times go/ And in between you hope and pray/ The scars don’t show”—with a neutered Shaw echoing each line, probably at gunpoint. And then, just when all hope is lost, the whole track is rescued with one single word: “Rubelator.”
Seriously? Rubelator? What just happened? Am I hearing this correctly? (I originally interpreted the mystery word as “Groove-A-Lator,” which doesn’t make a lick of sense either but sounds way cooler.) Turns out “rubelator” refers to the “Rube Goldberg machine,” shorthand for accomplishing a simple task in an overly complicated way. I have no idea what “rubelator” means in the context of “Why Me,” and, frankly, I don’t want to know. A random Styx member—Dennis? JY? It’s probably JY, right?—dropping a nonsense word into the middle of a nominally serious song instantly makes “Why Me” about ten times more ridiculous, and that’s a good thing.
Ridiculous Styx is easily the best Styx, at least when it comes to the DeYoung material. It’s the reason why “Come Sail Away”—a song where Dennis floats his piano out into the Virgin Sea, only to get abducted by aliens who communicate using ARP synthesizers and gargantuan guitar riffs—is clearly the greatest Styx Song Not Sung By Tommy Shaw. (“Come Sail Away” peaked at #8 on January 28, 1978. It’s a 10.) It’s the reason why I’m going to have complicated feelings about “Mr. Roboto” in a few years. And it’s also the reason why this stitched-together song is far better than it has any right to be.
Nothing in “Why Me” quite matches the insanity of that “rubelator” moment—but not for lack of trying. The first instrumental section kicks off with an honest-to-God sax solo (the instrument's first appearance since that awful Serpent album) before segueing to a guitar solo, which morphs into a saxophone-guitar duel, which finally culminates in Young and session man Steve Eisen playing incredibly tricky lines in unison. It’s the epic Styxian guitar-saxophone duet we never knew we wanted. It’s Duane Allman and Dickey Betts jamming on “In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed,” if Dickey decided to ditch the guitar to play saxophone. It’s weird. It’s glorious. It’s borderline crazy.
And it forgives a lot of Dennis DeYoung-related sins in the process. The bizarre parts of “Why Me” allow me to overlook his musical theater vocalizing, and his shallow stabs at profundity, and especially his lame attempt at “humor” before the outro. (I assume that’s what the whole “Why me? That's what I wanna know! Ya know what I mean?” bit is supposed to be, anyway.) It certainly helps that DeYoung’s awkward joke is immediately swallowed up by a final round of weirdness: Brass band cacophony, synth trumpet, and the return of Eisen’s saxophone, all atop a stomping Argent beat? More Styx songs should’ve embraced this kind of chaos.
To the chagrin of A&M, “Why Me” failed to follow in the footsteps of “Babe,” peaking at a disappointing #26 and effectively halting most of Cornerstone’s commercial momentum. The album’s third single, “Borrowed Time,” only got as high as #64; “Boat On The River,” a brooding Shaw ballad that became a major hit across Europe, wasn’t even released in the States. But “Why Me” still did its job. DeYoung and Shaw smoothed over their differences, at least temporarily, and the quintet went back to the business of cranking out platinum albums. Both men, and both their visions of Styx, would return to the Top 10 several more times before their uneasy truce finally fell apart for good.
GRADE: 5/10
BONUS BITS: In the absence of any clips specifically related to “Why Me,” let’s take a moment from the 1999 movie Big Daddy to honor the biggest Styx fan in the free world: Adam Sandler.