Styx: The undisputed Kings of ’70s/’80s Heartland kiddie prog! If you grew up where I grew up, Chi-Town’s pomp poppers were your preferred bongload of lightweight Midwest progtwaddle, more accessible for sure than anything the virtuoso Brits were tour de forcing out, and cooler than Kansas even, the latter’s profound philosophical meditation “Dust in the Wind” (boy is that Kerry Livgren deep!) notwithstanding.
1977’s The Grand Illusion was, of course, Styx’s magnum opus, what with such epics as the title cut, “Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)” and “Come Sail Away.” The problem was you can’t top perfection, and while the albums that came afterwards also went multi-platinum they weren’t half as good and besides, by the time 1983’s Kilroy Was Here hit record store shelves an epochal six years later, kids with any brains whatsoever had moved on and were all listening to the Talking Heads and vehemently denying they’d ever liked Styx in the first place. I for one had so convinced myself I’d never liked Styx I could have passed a lie detector test.
But even to many of the still faithful, Kilroy Was Here was the sound of Styx jumping the shark. A rock opera about a rocker (one Robert Orin Charles Kilroy) imprisoned by a fascistic-theocratic regime for committing the crime of playing rock and roll (Marty Balin’s ill-fated 1979 musical Rock Justice took things ever further; it was about a rocker tossed into jail for not delivering a hit single!), it was so doggone dumb it led many a listener to root for the “concept’s” evil “Dr. Righteous” of the Majority for Musical Morality—tossing Styx into prison for the crime of playing rock and roll didn’t seem like a bad idea.
Styx compounded their problems by putting together a kind of off-off-Broadway “stage show” for the tour promoting the album, one that ended in ignominy at the annual Texxas Jam at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, where the hard rockers in the audience booed the feckless Styxians off the stage. Dressing as robots at a hard rock concert, it turns out, was not a good way to win hearts and minds. Why, poor Tommy Shaw took the rejection so badly he split the band shortly thereafter. And he wasn’t even one of the poor saps dressed as robots. Call it mortification by association.
The storyline itself is kinda bare bones, which is why Kilroy Was Here should have been (I think we can all agree) a QUADRUPLE ALBUM, at the very least, giving Kilroy (played by Dennis DeYoung), the evil Dr. Everett Righteous (played by James “JY” Young) and the young musician who is on a quest to save rock (played by Tommy Shaw) the chance to fill in the gaping holes in the plot with literally dozens of songs (and perhaps even some dialogue) making it crystal clear to the grateful listener exactly what the hell was happening. How are you going to tell a story of such artistic complexity and subtlety in nine songs? Several of which are tangential (at best) to the tale being told? Abraham “Master of Concision” Lincoln might have been able to do it, but rhythm and blues has produced only one Abraham Lincoln, and he hung up his rock ’n’ roll shoes in 1865!
Styx waste no time throwing you into the unappetizing aural soup. Lead-off track and legendary pain-in-the-ear “Mr. Roboto” isn’t just a very short lesson in Japanese phraseology; it’s a synthpop ruse, because the singing robot in question isn’t a robot at all, but Kilroy pulling a fast one by escaping prison disguised as one of the state’s evil android henchmen! The song itself is either diabolically catchy or diabolically annoying depending on your point of view, but it has certainly made its mark—for good or ill—on popular culture. That “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto” may as well be esperanto, and I guarantee there isn’t an outpost on Planet Earth so remote that your “Domo arigato” won’t be met by a “Mr. Roboto!” Then you’ll both laugh and laugh until you go to war or something.
“Cold War” is sung by Tommy Shaw in his role as the young buck looking to save rock ’n’ roll, and it boasts a synthpop vibe and middling rock riff and not much else. I don’t know why he keeps singing about a cold war when he obviously means a hot one—there are kids running in the streets, and blood everywhere. True, Shaw seems to be going for conciliation at the start:
“I’m tired of your psychology
To bring us to our bended knees
And if we could only talk to you
I’m sure that we could make you see”
But you can’t reason with the puritanical likes of the Majority for Musical Morality; and by the way Styx seemed to have foreseen Tipper Gore’s PMRC, which makes them prophets!
Dennis DeYoung’s “Don’t Let It End” is a treacly power ballad that has nothing to do with the story line, and if this is the reason he escaped prison I hope the robots caught him. And the other guys in the band hated the song—Dennis’ “Mr. Softie” inclinations caused a lot of tensions within the group. But DeYoung gets back on script on the Broadway rocker “High Time,” in which he vows to escape from prison to help jumpstart the revolution and establish a “rockin’ nation” over lots of really wacky backing vocals. The big horn section is amusing as well, as is the exchange between Dennis and a Roboto, which ends with DeYoung laughing and saying “Up yours, Roboto!” DeYoung does some decent stuttering too.
But the LP’s highlight howler is “Heavy Metal Poisoning,” on which bad guy JY Young (singing like a Grade B villain) delivers a lecture (and a spanking!) to the drugged-out perverts who listen to rock ’n’ roll. It’s a faux-metal assemblage of lyrical howlers—first Young calls heavy metal (which Styx knows nothing about) “a toxic wasteland in your ear canal,” and he’s right! That’s what’s so great about it! Then he goes on about sex and drugs like they’re bad or something! And it doesn’t get any better than
Everything is black and white
You are wrong and we are right
First we’ll spank your big behinds
Then we’ll twist your little minds
Kinky! Throw in some backwards masking (“sterces eht sdloh nataS”), the disturbing statement that rock is “a toxic wasteland in your love canal” (like an STD or sumpin!), and what you’ve got is comedy of the first order. Unfortunately the song itself is virtually unlistenable, so all the good comedy goes right down the drain!
Young Hero Shaw opens “Just Get Through This Night” with some nifty shamisen (it’s a Japanese instrument, get it), before singing like a wimp sucking on pure estrogen; the song’s opening has some connection with the story, but before you know it he’s singing about who knows what. If he was a novelist, if he was a movie star, “this is the longest night in recorded history”… No, this is the longest song in recording history, or at least it seems that way.
Dr. Righteous sings the forgettable “Double Life” and I don’t have a clue what he’s singing about—I can understand Kilroy or Shaw’s character leading a double life (life during wartime and all that), but why the diabolical Dr. Righteous? The Berlin Wall merits a mention, but I’m not sure why, and the only funnier line than “Can it be wrong when you know that it’s right?” goes “I’m schizophrenic, and so am I.” Now there’s a keeper!
“Haven’t We Been Here Before?” is a sickly power ballad cum duet between Shaw and DeYoung that sounds like a love song to me, although if you squint your ears you can almost detect some connection between it and the battle between “free expression” and the evil robotoids intent on making the youth of America listen to (I’m just guessing here) Andrew Gold.
Closer “Don’t Let It End (Reprise)” is a completely different beast from “Don’t Let It End”—a duet between Shaw and DeYoung, it’s an actual rocker and victory song that lets you know the forces of good have prevailed, or at least are ready to keep on fighting. Shaw is “modern man” with “guitar in hand” dedicated to keeping “rock and roll alive”; DeYoung vows to “keep on rockin’ til I lose control,” which I for one don’t want to be around to see. In the outro he name drops Jerry Lee, Elvis, Chuck (and even the Platters!). Although it’s hard to imagine a band further divorced from Jerry Lee—were the Killer to have heard “Mr. Roboto” on the radio, he’d have no doubt shot the radio.
Kilroy Was Here is proof that ambition and stupidity make for dangerous bedfellows. Lester Bangs wrote of Styx, “Gall, nerve and ego have never been far from great rock & roll. Yet there’s a thin but crucial line between those qualities and what it takes to fill arenas today: sheer self-aggrandizement on the most puerile level. If these are the champions, gimme the cripples.”
On Kilroy Was Here Styx melded a ludicrous concept to banal songs, and they did it with a confidence borne of an almost shocking blindness to their myriad creative limitations. Listen to Kilroy Was Here, and you risk heavy metal poisoning of the old ear canal. Somebody should have spanked Styx’s big behind.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D-
