Styx - The Grand Illusion

I couldn't help myself. This was three bucks and looked to be in decent shape. Nothing a little bath wouldn't clean up.

A few weeks ago I had a hankering for Crystal Ball and it was on repeat in the truck for several days. This was around the same time I'd spent quite a few hours spinning Equinox, the last album to feature the original line-up. Crystal Ball was one hell of a transition album that introduced Tommy Shaw to the world. His impact was huge and immediate; Styx still sounded like Styx, but more better.

Then in the summer of 1977 Styx returned with The Grand Illusion and the band was a cohesive unit where everything worked together. The album opens with the title track and this just felt different, not ick different - it felt special. Dennis and Tommy were both front and centre, with "JY" offering up the blistering riff monster that anchored "Miss America" to start side two.

This was the start of the big run for the band, and while there are some killers on their next album Pieces of Eight and the band's subsequent albums, The Grand Illusion was the band's big breakthrough, and honestly, in hindsight, their crowning achievement.

The liner notes were a geeky teenager's wet dream. The insert labelled the lead vocal and lead guitar player. This was important stuff. This was a band who had not one, but two lead players.

One of the biggest surprises to me was that Tommy provided the lead guitar on James' "Miss America" and it was perfect. The guys complemented each other and played off one another.

One of the things that always bugged me about songwriting credits was how singular they were back in the day. The songs are attributed mainly to one person, but you just know that behind the scenes, while things were being arranged, the other guys brought more to the table than simply playing their assigned parts.

Take "Man in the Wilderness." When the song goes into the break that segues into the guitar solo, it sounds like Wooden Nickel-era Styx with "JY" out front, but in the credits it is Tommy delivering the blistering solo. So how much of the structure was guided by the band?

Does it matter? No, it doesn't, but the obsessive kid still wants to know how the sausage was made.

Regardless, The Grand Illusion stands as one of the best albums Styx would ever record. The band was balancing their progressive elements with pure, unadulterated rock and was simply killing it. There was no sleight of hand or any attempt to bait and switch the listener into thinking this was anything other than a killer rock and roll album.

There are no duds here, and the album is loaded with now-classic songs: "The Grand Illusion," "Fooling Yourself," "Come Sail Away," "Miss America" (yeah, this is a killer song — well played Mr. Young, well played), and one of my favourites, the understated "Castle Walls," are indelible songs.

If anything, it was the band who were pulling a fast one on themselves by burying the ballads and focusing on melting faces. They'd manage to keep up appearances on the next album, but when Cornerstone hit and "Babe" was released as a single, it was as if Dennis just sat back at the table, undid the top button of his pants, and slouched in his chair, finally able to relax.

It's not like this wasn't in his repertoire. "Lady," the other gack-inducing song by the band, was already part of the catalogue. It's just that for a few years Styx was a real rock band, and this is how I like to remember them.

Yeah, this is why they were one of my favourite bands

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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