In the 25+ years since joining Styx in 1999, keyboardist Lawrence Gowan has found a home anchoring the stage with his bandmates on top of an already successful (and still ongoing) solo career. The band has embarked on an extensive co-headlining tour this summer with Foreigner, supported by John Waite, and is coming to Saratoga Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, July 30 with subsequent performances in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts before venturing onward outside of the general Northeast area.
The longevity of the “classic rock” genre is proven with the younger generations (often not yet born when the bands first formed) showing up to these concerts with parents and friends the past few summers. That observation that many of us have made was affirmed from the stage perspective, echoed by Lawrence Gowan when he recently spoke to NYS Music.
Along with Gowan, Styx consists of James “JY” Young, Tommy Shaw, Chuck Panozzo, Todd Sucherman, Will Evankovich, and Terry Gowan.
Gowan took a few minutes before Styx’s recent show in Georgia about the tour, his solo work, and time with Styx. Here’s the interview in its entirety:
Steve Malinski: How’s the tour going so far for you guys?
Lawrence Gowan: Honestly, it’s exceeded expectations. You know, it’s an at-capacity house every single night, and the audience, they’re really phenomenal, quite honestly. It’s amazing to see, first of all, that half the audience, on any given night, half the audience could be like, under 40 years of age. So, they weren’t even born when these biggest records of the classic rock era were recorded. And yet they’ve embraced this music like it’s concurrent with their lives. You know, you can’t miss the fact that that’s very, very evident. So there’s that. Then there’s the fact that, you know, four hours straight of classic rock where you know every single song (and I’m including opener John Waite). It’s really entertaining, quite honestly, and I’m as entertained as anyone, you know, with the fact that I get to see the other bands and we have this, shared experience of seeing that this tour has exceeded expectations, and it’s just a joy to be doing.
SM: And how’s it been sharing the stage with a Foreigner? A lot of fun for you, I bet?
LG: Oh, you know, the last time we toured together was ten years ago. We did an extensive tour together, and then we also played the UK with them. So we have a nice shared history over the years. I mean, I even remember when they were going through a lot of the transition phase, because originally, when first couple of shows I’d ever done with Foreigner anyway, was back in, I think, 2001 or 2002. And then, you know, all the various transitions that Mick Jones had to go through were really pretty phenomenal. The guys in the band today are just tremendous. They really carry that flag so well. And they sound great. Every single night they put on a great show, and, you know, they definitely set the bar really, really high.
SM: I saw you guys last year at Bethel woods as actually one of the photographers right at the front of the stage near your setup. That was a really fun show, seeing you and Joe Bonamassa there.
LG: Yeah, yeah. Wasn’t that neat? We did that one and the next night, we did Jones Beach with him as well. That was pretty amazing. Maybe 15 years ago, he came out and actually was opening shows for Styx. Of course, everybody knew it was going to explode as a phenomenon and to see that happen, another great little, you know, side feature that I witnessed in my time in the band.
SM: Very cool. Yeah. When you were out on stage, it just seemed like yourself and the whole band was having just such a genuinely fun, high energy time. What drives you to have that energy and, you know, just that stage presence every single night?
LG: Great, great question. wish I had a pat answer for that. There’s something… There’s something about this band, the chemistry of this grouping of people. It just seems to embrace the moment, and that moment being the moment we get on stage, something happens where we really just kind of bond in a very entertaining way. Because I’m as entertained as the audience is when I look across the stage and see how everyone performs. I’d say it’s just one of those rare things. If you see it happen, you can’t really distill what the ingredients are. All I can say is that everybody wants to do it and wants it to be great every single day. Even if one or two, even if a member of the band is under the weather or something, I’ve seen them pull it together and somehow get through the show and still manage to put a smile on everyone’s face. So it’s a unique grouping of individuals that’s able to pull that off. I mean, even Todd, our drummer, has commented to this point, we’ve really never had a bad show. We can have things go wrong, but it still comes across as very good show. We’re genuinely as enthused about doing it as the audience seeing it.
SM: And you’ve been with Styx for… do the math quick here… 25 years, pretty much.
LG: I’m into year 26 now.
SM: How’s that experience been? And how’s the experience been recently with your brother joining the band on tour?
LG: Well, this is a phenomenal thing. Terry [brother] played with me in my solo band, solo career in Canada that is ongoing. We just did three more shows a couple weeks ago, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonds. I was on the break from the Styx tour. So I played with him, you know, since 1985. So this, the other cool thing is, see, Todd took him and came and played my solo shows from 2010 to 2020. So they had played together over 100 times on stage, you know, Terry and Todd. So they already were an established rhythm section. They’d already kind of worked out all kinds of, you know, things in the past. And it seemed very… it seems very natural to see him on stage, quite honestly. It’s not that big a surprise to me that I’m just thinking, wow, I wish my mom and dad had seen this. That’s the only disappointment I really feel. But, you know, it’s just one of those things that worked out just kind of right. And everyone in the band really embraced him right off the bat. And that’s all. That’s all worked out very seamlessly.
SM: Yeah. And you actually just answered a question I had about still having some time to work on solo work. But going back into your solo career a little bit before, you know, joining Styx and having that new phase of your music career, what were some memorable moments or collaborations you’ve had? I think I saw that you collaborated with Alex Lifeson [of Rush] once before.
LG: Yeah, my fourth album was called Lost Brotherhood, and Alex Lifeson is the guitarist on that album. I was managed by the same manager that managed Rush for 14 years. So I would frequently see those guys and go to their concerts, etcetera. And we used to play hockey together. When it came to my fourth album, it was the last one of the ’80s, I think it was released early 1990, but we recorded in 1989…I don’t think Rush were touring at all that year. So, I just asked Alex if he would play on the album. And he did, and we did the video together for the title track. That’s actually where my spinning keyboard comes from. We cobbled it together as a prop. But if you ever looked at that video, Alex plays the smokin’ guitar solo in the middle of the song. And that’s the first time I used my spinning keyboard was there. You know, Tony Levin is the bassist on really all my albums, actually. Tony from Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon and John Lennon, I think you know who he is. And Jerry Marotta, the drummer from Peter Gabriel, Hall & Oates [and Orleans]. He’s been on a good number of my records, actually produced one of them in the nineties. Other great collaborations would be Jon Anderson of Yes; he was on my third album, but we did a song, actually, my most successful song ever called “Moonlight Desires.” That was the number one song in Canada and double platinum. I’ve been very fortunate.
SM: I know that’s quite a list of people to work with. I’m a little jealous!
LG: Yeah. Yeah. It’s pretty astounding, actually, when I start saying them all in a row like that. It is quite amazing. And that’s all prior to me joining Styx and so getting to play with these guys, that’s kind of like the cherry on top of all of that.
SM: Nice. Briefly, I just want to go back to Crash of the Crown, which was a pandemic era recording, if you want to call it that. I’ve spoken to a number. I’ve spoken to a number of musicians that recorded or did some creative thing during the pandemic, and everybody’s got a different story. Was recording a difficult experience for you, and were there any songs you were particularly fond of?
LG: It was almost like a predestined thing in a weird way, as far as the album goes, because we actually had all but two of the songs written in 2019, and we’d already begun recording at the time. We had most live on half of the bed tracks already done. So when everybody had to go home in March of 2020, we didn’t think about the record. Actually, for the first three months because we thought, oh, no, we’ll pick it up…because we’ll, you know… this will all be over… this will all be over in four weeks. You know, everyone did. You know, it’ll be like it never happened. And then it went to two months and it went to three months. We were doing these biweekly Zoom calls, which none of us knew what they were before March of 2020, and we’re discussing… the discussion was about how the dates got postponed and what new date they were going to be on – a lot of that discussion, which ended up being worthless. But then Tommy said, listening to the songs we’ve been recording, it’s amazing how lyrically they tie into what we’re going through right now. And we were all kind of shocked by that.
So we started listening again and realizing, you know, these songs seem to be about a sense of renewal after a cataclysmic event without ever stating what that event is. But somehow a lot of the songs are about this sense of renewal and coming through something that was a difficult ordeal. And that suddenly got our attention back. And we said, okay. And then Todd mentioned or, no, no, sorry. I was an engineer. I was working in Toronto, said, you guys ever tried Audio Movers, which is where you can hook up studios in various parts of the world in real time, you know, like a Zoom call, but in real time, you could hook up various studios to where you’re listening in the monitors in your studio simultaneously, because I’m listening in Nashville simultaneously with Todd listing in Austin, Texas. And we decided, let’s try. We had a couple of newer songs that come up. Let’s try recording those this way and see how it goes. Well, as you’ll probably remember, Steve, technology very quickly becomes second nature. You know, like, when I even say to you that I didn’t know what a Zoom call was before March of 2020, it’s amazing how quickly a Zoom call became part of our lives, you know, de facto kind of accepted part of our lives. And this is what happened with us in the studio where we had each other on the screens, we play in real time together and be able to listen back and criticize, etcetera.
And the next thing you know, we’re really carving at the album and getting well down the path and realized we can. We can get to the finish line here, which we did, you know, like a studio I have in Toronto, it’s got all the analog stuff, you know, like the old Studer 24-track tape, the two-track Studer tape machines, and all my best vintage keyboards, you know, an old Steinway and B3 and Mellotron, believe it or not, Minimoog and my old Oberheim OB-X8. So I had all my vintage stuff, which is like, oh, I normally don’t get to record with this for Styx because we’re, you know, they’re Nashville or, you know, we’re usually renting vintage stuff, you know, but my own stuff has got onto that record. So when we finished it. We were really proud of it. Universal said, so here’s the plan. We’re going to hold it until you guys start playing again, which was a brilliant strategy because, you know, so much was coming out on the internet during the lockdowns that things could get lost if you weren’t actively promoting them. So it was a good move because the moment we went back out, in June of 2021, they released the album, and two weeks later Billboard had it at number one on their rock album chart. There’s a rock album chart? I had divided everything into genres and subgenres, but when we saw that, we thought, oh, this is really, really worthwhile and really great for the faithful who followed the band for all these years, to see us at the top of a chart like that.
SM: Yeah, definitely the silver lining for a tough couple of years there.
LG: Yeah. Yes, it was. It was an emotional release as well. And I don’t mean just the album, but I mean, for the audiences in that first year in particular, you could see this heightened sense of gratitude. “Grateful emotion” is basically the best way I can put it, seeing it on the faces of the audience. And when they had those songs to those newer songs to kind of celebrate the reopening of the doors, so to speak, you could see that it was connected with them in a great way.
SM: So, to wrap things up here in a bit… With the Renegades and Jukebox Heroes Tour, what can fans look forward to at that show?
LG: Four nonstop hours of classic rock, where, you know, just about every single piece of music. You know, our opener, special guest, John Waite, he starts it off. Fantastic band. He sounds tremendous. You know, he sets the bar so high, vocally speaking, for everyone else to follow on the night. And then you have Foreigner and Styx, where again, the Foreigner said, you know, every single note and you just deliver so. So in such an entertaining fashion. And then for us, I think, you know, we. We are still at the top of our game as far as trying to exceed what we’ve done the night before. And that seems to, even if it’s only by 1%, we continue to push forward with the quality of what a stick show can be. And the kind of. I call it the pompous, the epic and pompous nature of what we do, which is really ties in so well with what classic rock is. It’s a larger than life kind of breath of be, so to speak. It goes into a great rock show, and I think we’ve got that.
SM: Excellent. Okay, well, thanks for your time. I really appreciate it. And good luck there on the tour and try to stay cool there in Georgia today.
LG: That’s the one. That’s the biggest challenge of the tour so far, believe me. Charleston, South Carolina, the other night, that was. I mean, I took a shower after the show. The shower was actually drier than we were on stage!
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