Tommy Shaw - Girls With Guns

Tommy Shaw. Man, back in the day Tommy Shaw was my favourite part of Styx. Like most kids my age it was The Grand Illusion and Pieces of Eight that put the band on the map. Not to shit on Dennis, this is about Tommy so it's Tommy's songs that'll get top billing here. I remember hearing "Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)" on the radio sporadically, mainly because radio in a small town sucked. Although sometimes at night I could pull in a Vancouver AM station. Then came the big guns "Blue Collar Man (Long Nights)" and "Renegade" and if that was all he ever wrote that would have been enough.

But like they say on TV, "BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!"

There was so much more, Cornerstone had the awesome "Boat on a River" Paradise Theatre contained "Too Much Time on My Hands" and um, he played guitar on Kilroy Was Here. I am not sleeping on his debut with the band, Crystal Ball, where as a newbie he was gifted the title track, and his rocker "Shooz" was a cotton candy cavity inducing rocker ... one I played over and over and over, until I actually got sick of it. See, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

What I'm trying to say is that before there was Team Edward and Team Jacob there was Team Dennis and Team Tommy. It wasn't meant to be a competition. They were the key elements what made STYX work. The Yin and Yang where the sum of the parts was greater than the individual contributions. It was like that until it wasn't. When it worked it was magic.

It's weird to me now looking back on this era. At the time it never registered that when Tommy released Girls with Guns he was maybe thirty years old. An age when many people are just starting to get things together and figured out. Tommy had already had a career behind him that contained an impressive body of work. Here he was about to start again, and he'd have to try and measure up to his past accomplishments when he was still essentially a kid. All you have to do is look at the band photograph on the album insert - these are not old men whose best days are behind them.

"Girls with Guns" to me was a killer song. It was so different than anything he'd done in Styx and he was embracing the '80s. This was pure pop cheese and this was what I wanted to hear. It was the reason I bought the album. The momentum was hard to maintain, and the album quickly settled into middle of the road generic AOR. Oh make no mistake, this isn't the shot that it appears to be. I loved this style of music, and what Tommy brought to the table was an incredible rock voice and his guitar playing. He's not necessarily one of the great six string slingers, but boy howdy he's right up there - he's a tasty player, always has been. 

A rock album in the early '80s wasn't a rock album without a ballad or three. "Lonely School" ticked a lot of boxes. It was a minor hit which still surprises me, it should have been a big hit. It was so good. Of course it wasn't just ballads that were obligatory, if it was possible a duet was a sure thing ... okay, not a sure thing as "Outside in the Rain" never really did anything for me, but he was swinging for the fences. Not everything was safe either. "Kiss Me Hello" is one of the best songs he's written. Its a dreamy, atmospheric, almost progressive tilting slow burn of a rock song. I remember getting the CD and it tacked on a couple extra minutes of runtime. It was perfect the way it was. More isn't always more. I wish it had been included as a bonus track. So being able to hear the album cut was so good. This is an incredible piece.

While Girls with Guns wasn't a perfect album, it was a good album and when it was good it was really good. There were no clunkers, no obvious misfires and listening to it now it sounds like an artist who was free to try new things and realize his own vision. This was supposed to be the start of a new era ... that's what it should have been.