FEATURE 35
What Styx Says ONE THING THAT’S GREAT ABOUT INTERVIEWING ROCK VETERANS IS THAT THEIR EXPERIENCE OFTEN GIVES THEM A WEALTH OF INFORMATION AND INSIGHT TO SHARE. THUS, THE CONVERSATION I HAD WITH STYX BASSIST RICKY PHILLIPS WAS QUITE ENJOYABLE. AFTER SOME SURPRISING CHIT-CHAT AT THE START, WHERE WE LEARNEDTHAT WE LIVE ONLY A FEW MILES FROM EACH OTHER INTHE AUSTIN AREA, HE GLADLY ANSWERED ALL THE MANY QUESTIONS I HAD AND STARTED DROPPING A FEW GEMS HERE AND THERE – LIKE “MUSIC IS NOT A COMPETITION.” I LOVE THAT ROCK WISDOM. BESIDES BEING A WEALTH OF KNOWLEDGE, HIS EASYGOING ATTITUDE MADE IT CLEAR HE’D BE A BLAST TO HANG OUT WITH FOR A DAY, THAT’S FOR SURE.
Photo: Ash Newell
I’m curious how you ended up with Styx. What’s the story of how that happened? Ah. Wow, that’s a good question. I actually met the guys in 1979. I was in a band called The Babys, which is a British band with John Waite as the lead singer.
Yeah, I’ve got a question about them later. Okay. Well, we toured with those guys way back then and we would tour with Styx, Journey, AC/DC and Cheap Trick. Kinda all the bands that were big at that time. Tommy Shaw and I sort of became friends from that point on and then when Tommy was in Damn Yankees, I was in Bad English, so it was basically we just kinda stayed in touch. We didn’t hang out or go to dinner or that kinda friendship, but we gravitated towards one another at industry functions and stuff. Just hanging out. Around that time, the last project I really did was a record with Jimmy Page and David Coverdale and that was in the early ‘90s and everything was changing with downloads and music was just changing over to a new sound and I kind of really decided it was a good time to dig in and write. I’d always been a writer and gotten lucky with getting some songs into major films and thought, ‘You know, I’m going to lean on that a little bit more.’ So I started doing that and had been kind of away from doing much touring. I did a little bit with Ronny Montrose and a few other people, but I really was focusing on writing and trying to get songs placed and Tommy called me up and said, “Look man, would you consider touring again? Would you want to join Styx?” It was at a time where I had just finished a huge project and I was kinda beat up over writing a bunch of music and getting it recorded. I thought back and realized, ‘I didn’t start playing music to stare at a computer screen and be locked up in a room by myself writing music all the time,’ you know? When you start playing guitar when you’re 10, 11, 12 years old, starting your first bands and you’re making the little girls scream and
stuff ... it’s kinda hard to get that out of your blood and then the little girls turn into big girls and it gets even better. And so, you know, all joking aside, it really is something ... I think the biggest deal of all and the best fulfillment is playing for a live audience and getting that interaction and I missed it. And so that was in 2003 and it’s in the next year I will have played my thousandth show with Styx.
Wow. Yeah.
I’m always impressed with musicians that can join another band. I don’t know if the word journeymen would be the right fit, but uh … musicians learn a lot of material fast. How does one go about doing that? Like learning an entire set and stuff like that? It’s different. You know what’s funny about that is I’ve recorded entire albums in a day. But that is short-term memory. You learn something... As a matter of fact Todd Sucherman and I used to do exactly that – and that’s how I met Todd. Todd Sucherman is the drummer in Styx. He was voted best drummer of 2009 in the Modern Drummer readers’ poll and he’s always you know, right in the there at the top 3, probably. And Todd is just an amazing, amazing musician. He’s got a photographic memory. And he and I would record in the studio. We would blow out, like, 10 songs in a day. And I thought, ‘Okay, I can learn anything...’ Well, it isn’t exactly true, cause the Styx catalog not only is … there’s a lot there, but Styx is one of those bands that never sings the same lyric in the second chorus as they did in the first. Third time it comes around it’s even a little different. Theres a lot of segments there. It will go from 4/4 to 6/8 to, you know, 7/4. The time signatures change in the songs, but they do it suddenly, so it sounds like a nice fun melodic pop song when there’s all this other dimension going on. So, I would