Kings of Cock Prog: Styx and the Triumph of Japanese Robots

Styx- KILROY WAS HERE (1983)

I’m very proud of the fact that I can stay in any conversation about Krautrock and know my Grobschnitt from my Eloy, that I have 42 different King Crimson concerts on my IPod from all eras of the band, and that I am one of perhaps a dozen global experts on the Danish Prog scene of the early 1970’s. Esotericism has its perks. It keeps the Coldplay-listening riff-raff away, pegs me as an elitist and thus ensures my continued Olympian detachment and peaceful segregation, and obviates any danger that someone might stop by and say “Hey, I’ve got this extra ticket to Springsteen Friday night, wanna come with?” Because sneering at someone’s taste in music is not a good way to preserve a friendship. My cock-rock listening friends know better than to even ask such a ridiculous question of me. And I truly believe Bruce Springsteen is the most overrated musical act since Nero’s lyre rondo, ca. 64 AD.

But sometimes you have to acknowledge the genius of mass-marketed musical “product”. There are excesses and stupidities that no marginal band could ever perpetrate, ludicrous flights of ambition that only a band that plays in arenas and stadiums could be responsible for. And it is unthinkable that a truly underground band could ever have been at the very vanguard of horrible 1980’s pseudo-Prog, like today’s subject for post-mortem dissection, Styx, the progenitors and apotheosis of Cock-Prog.


Cock-Prog is a style of music that developed from the deep need owners of ’74 Chevy Novas have for cock. An onus which can’t be admitted openly because these same muscle-car jockeys are scabrous cowards. In the 70’s, bands like Supertramp had an enormous string of hits based on Prog-like formulae, but were frankly too obviously feminine for the macho toughs of the American Midwest to publicly acknowledge as 8-Track fair. These young men – driving fast cars and wearing tight jeans, drinking warm Budweiser and impregnating their girlfriends before settling into their career at the local NAPA franchise – needed something more sublimated to match their stunning cowardice in facing the fact that they needed cock, and needed it badly. While Bruce Springsteen brought Broadway showtunes to FM radio and therefore provided an avenue for these closeted Nova drivers to explore their more obviously “swish” side, there was a need for a type of Prog that was jazzy and ambitious enough to be “Prog”, but still could be blared from car stereos while beating up queers behind the town library.


Enter Styx. From their first records, the Prog elements of the band were fully on display, including bloated song structures, pitiful lyrics, meretricious insight into the human condition, annoying synthesizers with pitch-bending technology, heroically preposterous album covers, hausfrau-romance-novel storylines, laser beams, and a general level of awfulness not available to more straightforward and less ambitious bands. But Styx also managed to be as dumb as Foghat while faux-rocking to the cockish extent of Molly Hatchet. Thus carving out their own niche, Styx sang about lizards and wizards and such and peppered their music with ample annoyances of keyboards, but were still rocking enough that no one knew the entire front row at their concerts was watching Tommy Shaw’s package with the intensity of a Green Beret sniper. The sheer absurdity of the band grew through a series of amazingly bad records through the Seventies, but it was only with Kilroy Was Here that the overwhelming anti-talent of singer and demiurge Dennis DeYoung found full flowering and stench.


There has never been anything quite like Kilroy, and that it is a travesty of uniqueness matched only by the Crucifixion of Jesus. Styx had four straight gold albums before this mess, and didn’t make another record after for five years. And well so they should acknowledge the dread pinnacle of their career! For where can a band go after making a rock opera/concept album about Japanese robots enforcing a 1984-style dystopia on a society ruled by an anti-Rock crusading preacher named Doctor Righteous? And that the only way for Democracy to survive would be that the persecuted rock star Kilroy (De Young) would need to break out of prison and hand the flame of rebellion to young Jonathan Chance (Tommy Shaw, in an especially “chicken-ish” turn) – leading to the album’s most superb lyrics, “It’s high time for us to start a revolution/Just like an A-bomb explosion”. But of course you need to hear how De Young is singing that gibberish, because he warbles and ululates like a gravely injured small bird, and then add the accompanying Sha-na-na production of the song in question, “High Time”, and you have a masterpiece. Adjectives are wasted trying to describe such a fiasco, like explaining to an investment banker the virtues of a conscience. Dennis De Young sold a song like Herb Tarlek sold commercial time; with great unction, oleaginous insincerity and absolutely no sense for fashion. You simply have to hear it.


Very rarely does an album excel at slovenliness in all aspects of production from start to finish, but Kilroy is no ordinary Bad Prog album and reeks of failure in a way only the Special Olympics can match; surely, they are trying hard, and of course they really believe that they are all “champions”, but watching retarded children pole-vault is still a painfully embarrassing spectacle nearly as discomfiting as Dennis De Young in a lavender jump-suit singing about Japanese robots while he is accompanied by band mates dressed like those Japanese robots doing the “potato masher”. You can download the album if you want, but the really extra-special best way to experience Kilroy is via the follow-up video from 1984, Caught in the Act, the title another little nod that the band secretly knew that most of their followers were gay men who simply weren’t brave enough to embrace the cock. I, of course, have the video in an excellent DVD-rip quality, and will gladly share with anyone who writes, provided you come up with a way to send a 1.4GB file through the Internets. I can’t stress this enough: the album is perfectly horrible, but the stage production is where the true Holocaust takes place. Imagine being a fan of Styx, bringing your best girl to the Syria Mosque or Stanley Theater and expecting to hear Paradise Theater and getting THIS. Dreams were dashed and women beaten following the Kilroy shows, I guarantee it. The lavender jump-suits are the most overwhelming, but certainly not the only, vaulting monstrosity contained in Caught, and James “JY” Young has never been at a more frenzied Cowardly Lion-esque peak than here, sporting the worst modified mullet in the storied annals of shit rock.


As a kind of bonus, you get not one, not two, but THREE power-ballads that you can croon to your pillow while pretending it’s that hunk of a mechanic who is always so greasy, sweaty and inviting down at the Esso station. And the great thing is that all three of them are so superbly treacly and maudlin that they, too, are highly enjoyable in the way that squeezing an infected pimple free of pus is. While students of Freud will notice a certain ejaculatory confluence to my choice of metaphor, I assure you this is only about the bliss of minor pain, the small splendor of the minor masochist or bush-league flagellant. “Don’t Let it End” is the kind of “hit” that undermines popular music by its total incompetence and fraud, and “Just Get Through This Night” is a fantastic synthesis of sitars and gobshite, but “Haven’t We Been Here Before” is the stunning apex of Styx’s complete mastery of sentimental gobbledygook, a song whose full import of Broadway-bound balderdash must be seen in the video to fully appreciate. Picking my favorite song from Kilroy is sort of like picking which bodily orifice I would most like to bleed to death from, but if haemorrhage has a name, thy moniker be Tommy Shaw, and he gushes life from the rectum of Prog in what is very likely the worst song ever written to actually make the Top 40.


If your tastes run to the foul, open up and swallow the rotting carcass of Prog that is Kilroy Was Here. Anybody who still doubted that American rock n’ roll had reached the full pitiful depths of abysmalness hinted at by so many releases of the previous decade must bow to the epic vision of Dennis De Young, a silly, pretentious, gangrenous, mawkish, knife-to-the-guts of Cock Prog that enters you, tears you, leaves you bleeding and in agony, yet strangely satisfied and fulfilled all the same.


Sort of like...oh, never mind. It’s Styx. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes Bad Cock Prog is just the death of irony and the end of Western Civilization.


But at least it’s not gay. - TR