INTERVIEW: Styx’s Lawrence Gowan opens up on band’s legacy, new fans

Styx is the quintessential classic-rock band. They have been touring for decades, bringing their many hits to adoring fans around the world and back again. From “Come Sail Away” to “Renegade” to “Blue Collar Man” and “Lady”, the band’s deep catalog is readymade for summer amphitheater tours and intimate venues during the colder months.

Singer Lawrence Gowan joined the rockers in the late 1990s and has been with the group ever since. A successful musician in his own right, especially in Canada where has has a legendary solo career, Gowan is a big part of Styx’s success in the 21st century.

Check out the band’s live version of “Blue Collar Man”.

Recently Hollywood Soapbox caught up with the singer as the band was preparing for a show at the Los Angeles County Fair.

On Styx’s continued touring schedule in 2014 …

Yes, we’re having perhaps the time of our lives because things change in our lives as well, and we had a phenomenonal summer there with us and Don Felder and Foreigner. We continue on now where we’re back to doing the Evening with Styx, which means the longer shows. Tonight we’re playing at the L.A. County Fair, and that’s one of my favorite venues to do. We were just in L.A. a couple of months ago doing the Greek, but this is a different thing because it’s in Pomona. You just get the vibe of an end-of-summer fair, and 20,000 people in a grandstand flipping out. I’m looking forward to tonight very much, and that sums up what’s going on in the band. We look forward to each and every show and bringing another Styx epic adventure to people, and that’s what we’ve been able to do in 2014. And perhaps, if people have seen our show this year, it might be the best ever because we’ve elevated the whole production of the show, and the way it presents is taking another step in the right direction.

On Styx’s new, young fan base … 

That’s the phenomenon that I think has led us to having such an extended run that continues to proliferate. It’s the fact that about 50 percent of the audience on most nights are people under 30 years of age, and that means they weren’t even born when some of the biggest Styx’s records were made.

They’ve come to the band through whatever channels have drawn them out. Obviously there’s a great deal of Internet access where they look at the names and look at some videos of these classic-rock bands, and once they see the kind of level of show we put on, they become just as enamored with it as we were growing up. … I mean when I started in the group, it really was the die-hard people that grew up with the band and who had been loyal to the band all along through all the various changes and eras that the band has had to navigate. But as I say, about nine years ago I started to notice just pockets of people in the audience that were not there with their older brothers or sisters or their parents or anything. They just kind of discovered it through whatever means they had through cultural reference, etc.

That part of the audience has continued to grow and grow, and really they kind of have their own voice now. That’s something that we highly encourage to continue because I love seeing the wide age range of people in the audience. It’s very invigorating.

On the difficulties of touring …

We draw a certain leve of vitality from touring. There’s nothing really difficult or over-taxing other than the travel about what we do, and even the travel is great because apart from having to go to the airports occasionally, the tour bus experience has become like our own hotel.

There’s clearly no hardship involved other than the hours, which even that’s not much of a hardship because we have access to all the things we have at home. There’s Internet on the bus and [a] big widescreen TV and lots of books and things for us to occupy ourselves with in a postive way every day. Every guy in the band we agree that when we actually go home for a few days, that’s when the work begins because you’re trying to get caught up on your home life, and that’s a more difficult path than what we do on the road, which is basically enjoy ourselves and make music.

On his favorite part of the setlist …

At the end of the night, a song that I don’t sing lead but it’s a song … where I really get to observe the audience and the band and the whole experience is during ‘Renegade’ because that’s always toward the end of the night. It’s a great song, and Tommy [Shaw] gives it a killer delivery of it every night. Whether we’re in Sweden or England or Mexico, America, Canada I see the audience … they’re united by the time we get to that song. They’re very different at the beginning of the show, and then by the end of the night when we’re playing that song ‘Renegade’ it’s amazing how alike they are and how their emotional response is very similar after they’ve been through the show.

On deciding on the setlist …

I used to get very involved in that my first five or six years in the band, and then … there’s such an embarrassment of riches when it comes to choices of songs that we could change the set every night and never play the same show twice over five or six nights in a row. Generally there are standard songs that everyone has to hear at every Styx show. So I pick ‘Come Sail Away’ and ‘Fooling’ Yourself’ and ‘Renegade’ and ‘Blue Collar Man’. I put those in that category, and then there’s other whole rafts of material that we can choose from. As I say, I used to get very involved in that, and I have less and less so because there gets to be too many cooks before the show.

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• Styx continues its North American tour in the coming weeks. Click here for more information.