Styx will conclude its current North American tour on Saturday, Nov. 11, at 7 Clans Council Casino in Newkirk, Oklahoma.
The show is just one of 100 the veteran rock band performs each year, a pace the group has kept up since the late 1990s. Vocalist and keyboardist Lawrence Gowan says that Styx continues to reach for new musical heights each night and, he adds, continues to make new music.
A follow-up to 2021’s “Crash of the Crown” is about “half finished,” he says, and the band continues to have daily discussions about how they’ll complete tracking amid a busy touring schedule with dates already on the books for 2024.
Gowan, who continues to enjoy a successful solo career in Canada, will return there after the current run of Styx gigs for a tour that will end at Toronto’s storied Massey Hall.
He recently spoke with KMUW about Styx’s longevity, the importance that a shared sense of humor plays in keeping the band together and a deeply memorable night on a Toronto stage that put him side-by-side with some rock music’s greatest legends.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The last time I spoke with you was about two years ago. “Crash of the Crown” had just come out and the response was really strong. It seems like the fans are able to embrace the new music as well as the classics.
We are in a really sweet spot at the moment. For the last 15 years, we’ve seen a percentage of the audience that keeps getting younger. Half of the people in the audience now can be under 40 years of age, which means they weren’t even born when the biggest classic rock records came out. They’ve embraced the last two albums that we’ve done, “The Mission” and “Crash of the Crown,” as being concurrent with their lives just as much as the classic rock they’ve been drawn to from a staple of the last half of the 20th century. I think that’s part of what drew them to us. They continue to thrive and connect their lives to it in a really amazing way.
Styx does 100 shows a year, and I wonder if you’re able to still find new things in the music night after night.
That’s an amazing question, that, because I don’t know why Styx seems to find new ways of elevating the show every year and, to some degree, every week that we’re on the road. It seems to thrive on the more you throw at it. Audiences are very inspiring, quite honestly, and you want to figure out how [the show] can become even 1 percent better than it was the night before. What’s really odd is to be in a band where everyone thinks exactly that way.
You’re usually divided in that regard when you get a group of musicians together. But there’s something about the personality of this band that seems to want to exceed and surpass whatever it’s done [in the past]. Tonight’s show will be an attempt to tighten up something or to elevate it to a deeper degree.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that it’s a new day. Even if we’re playing mostly the same songs, you’re engaging with that song on a new day, and it takes on a nuance of meaning that if you’re open to absorbing that and observing it, it helps to keep you fresh, engaged, and full of gratitude that you’re able to do it another day.
I’ve heard some performers say that sometimes they’ve had a rough day on the road or in their personal life and the second they hit the stage, and they hear the audience, that takes over and everything else falls away.
That’s very accurate. Out of 100 shows a year, there are maybe 10 every year when, late in the afternoon or even an hour before the show or even a half hour before the show, I will personally feel like, “I don’t feel like I got it in me tonight. I almost want to be doing anything else right now but going out and facing a few thousand people right now to play music.” Once the show begins, usually around the 15- or 20-minute mark, three or four songs into the show, your mind does a complete 180 and you’re suddenly like, “What was I thinking 20 minutes ago?” I’m in a completely different state of mind and a completely different state of mood and feeling. That’s what happens when you walk out onto the stage [and] there’s a sea of smiling faces staring up at the band. I really begins to lift, like a rocket. You’re suddenly [thinking], “Oh yeah, who wouldn’t want to go on this trip?”
Will Evankovich came aboard as a touring member of the band in 2021 but otherwise this lineup has been together for 20 years. That’s a long time for any band. It seems like having a common goal is important to that kind of longevity.
The band is in its 52nd year. I’ve been part of it for nearly half of its life. It’s a relatively low number [of people who have been in and out of the band] when you consider that we’ve been a band for half a century. But we do seem to share the same vision. Maybe that comes with maturity. The things that can threaten a band’s existence early on -- individual ego or money, musical differences -- those tend to quell with age because you realize, “Yeah, we’ve got something really good here that we don’t want to get away from us because of our own petty view of things.”
How much does a shared sense of humor play in keeping the band together?
[Laughs.] That’s gigantic! I don’t think I could underplay just how much of a factor that is. We enjoy each other’s company because we always find something to laugh about. It’s just part of the nature of it. You might be the first person that’s ever brought that up in that way, at least. I think that bands that have stayed together for longer periods of time … the music is one bond but a sense of humor and things to laugh at? Ultimately, they make the whole ride a joy.
Sometimes it’s a dark sense of humor. The inside joke thing. Those are the funniest of all because really, you’re the only ones that comprehend them to a deeper degree than anyone else could ever absorb them. And some of them, quite honestly, have gone on for years. There are punchlines that have a shelf life that doesn’t seem to have an expiration date.
You’re bringing this leg of the tour to an end. What will you do when it’s done?
[Laughs.] I’m going to go home and embark on a 12-city tour in Canada with my solo band. I’m going right up until Nov. 30 before I come back to Styx in December to do a couple of things we have on the agenda for December. A lot of time away from the band, unless I’m writing with them, is spent playing. I do about 15, 20 Gowan shows a year in addition to what I do with Styx. I’m getting ready to play one of the most revered venues in Canada on Nov. 30, Massey Hall in Toronto. The last time I headlined there was two nights in 1987, that’s a great homecoming for me. That’s something that actually helps with the band. Tommy [Shaw] said one time after I’d done a run of solo shows, “You always bring something fresh back to the band, sometimes in a subtle way, sometimes in a very obvious way.” I think that freedom that they’ve allowed me ever since joining the band has been part of what keeps us going.
Since you mentioned Massey Hall, I have to ask if you have a particularly strong memory of a show that you either saw or performed there?
In 1995, Ronnie Hawkins, who came to Canada in the early ’60s … really brought that Southern rock thing to Canada. There really were no rock bands prior to him coming there. He dominated Yonge Street, which is kind of like Broadway, with various bands. The band that he put together became The Band [who backed Dylan and had its own career]. So, in 1995 Ronnie had his 60th birthday, and he had all these friends from Arkansas, where he’s from, and Memphis. On the bill, it was Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ronnie Hawkins, myself, The Band and Jeff Healey. It was basically a rock ‘n’ roll all-star band.
To have my piano facing Jerry Lee Lewis and then to have Garth Hudson [The Band] on my right hand and then Levon Helm is on drums and Carl Perkins is on guitar? [Laughs.] Then Jeff Healey blew everybody away that night. He had a stellar, stellar performance. That’s one of my greatest memories of playing there.
[That show became the album] “Let It Rock!” You can look it up on YouTube.
