DeYoung still touching lives with ‘Music of Styx’

The best of times continue to come to Styx’s former lead singer and keyboardist, and the fact each milestone just happened, without any formal planning, still pleases him.

Dennis DeYoung will perform “The Music of Styx” at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Francis Marion University Performing Arts Center, 201 S. Dargan St., Florence, the closest this tour will come to Myrtle Beach, after a stop Friday in Durham, N.C.

Calling last month from home in his native Chicago, DeYoung said the desire to be a musician didn’t hit him until age 14 or 15, and “the magic of music” has thrilled him on multiple levels his whole life.

Styx amassed hits for about a decade from 1975, starting with “Lady,” and continuing almost annually with such staples as “Come Sail Away,” “Babe,” “Too Much Time on My Hands,” “Rockin’ the Paradise,” “Mr. Roboto” and “Don’t Let It End,” and DeYoung, a keyboardist, composed many of those for the rock band by himself.

DeYoung said he remains amazed that “a song from my mouth” will trigger the sense of smell, and the memories that people bookmark with records. He said hearing Frankie Avalon’s “Venus,” from 1959, “I remember it was hot that summer,” and that still arouses his olfactory nerves, plus “I had a crush on a girl.”

At age 68 and as Suzanne DeYoung’s better half since 1970, he needs no convincing that “music is more magical than writing.”

“The music is more important than the lyrics,” Dennis DeYoung said, because when fans attend concerts, “they sing the melody.”

Calling music “a vibration,” he said Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson pointed out that attribute, “and it’s an organic response.”

“Sound waves do things to us that we are not fully aware of,” DeYoung said. “Why does the hair on someone’s back stand up when a singer sings a certain note? It’s a physical response. It’s a mystery.”

Pilate came into place

DeYoung said the way his musical career has played out, including some Styx reunions, after embarking on solo albums, beginning with “Desert Moon” in 1984, no course was charted.

“I never aspired to be in anything but in a rock ’n’ roll band,” he said, but other milestones have sprung up on his career journey.

He created a 17-song musical, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” based on the Victor Hugo novel, and his sister-in-law’s husband, who was executive producer of a “Jesus Christ Superstar” touring show, sold him on playing Pontius Pilate.

DeYoung recalled getting over his initial reaction of “What?” — which also resulted when a friend at Atlantic Records asked him to record a show-tune album.

That project, “10 on Broadway,” included “Pilate’s Dream” from the aforementioned play, as well as other classics such as “Summertime,” from “Porgy and Bess,” and “Bring Him Home,” from “Les Miserables.”

Then an opportunity arose to record a TV special and DVD of Styx tunes with an orchestra and children’s choir in Chicago for a PBS “Soundstage” program.

Such projects were not pursuits, DeYoung said, but they all “just kind of happened.”

“I lived in the greatest time of being a musician in mankind,” he said, thankful for growing up and wishing he could’ve been part of the Beatles. “Music was so fundamental to young people’s lives.”

DeYoung also liked how “back then, … distractions” were less numerous among everyday life and pastimes, and “music wasn’t free” for downloading.

‘Lucky guy I am’

Bringing Styx’s parade of songs on stage, DeYoung said “I can’t tell you” how flattering he finds fans’ reverence of the music “and how it has impacted their lives.”

“I hear their stories all the time,” he said, “and I think, ‘What a lucky guy I am to have a job where folks can’t wait to come up and thank you for being in their city and playing those songs for them.’”

Again, DeYoung chalked things up to fate, stating he never calculated his career to work out this way, as a string of strategic decisions.

“I was making it up as I went along,” he said. “I was pretending I knew what I was doing. … I would like to tell you it was all planned. My answer back then was this wanting to be in the Beatles. If you can’t be in with them, then get yourself a band that does that.”

DeYoung reiterated how “everything is about songs,” and that if “you write and sing a good song, people show up.”

He said songwriters earn and deserve their rewards from royalties, “because they have the hardest job.”

Many people play the music, he said, and there are “guys that play circles around me, but the gold is in the song: communicating words and songs that touch people. … Extending heartfelt emotion: That’s it.”

DeYoung saluted his former colleagues in Styx, who tour on their own and played last month at House of Blues in North Myrtle Beach. He said — “warned” actually — to look for all the group’s hits, with his solo and show tunes, in this concert on Saturday in Florence, a short ride west from Horry County.

Thanks to the catalog of music Styx made together when reaching new plateaus in the 1970s and ’80s, and thanks to his core touring band in recent years that makes DeYoung “very proud,” he said, “I play the first few notes” of a tune, “and people scream.”

This story was originally published April 16, 2015 at 2:00 PM with the headline "DeYoung still touching lives with ‘Music of Styx’."