A&M 3719
Producers: Styx
Track listing: A. D. 1928 / Rockin’ the Paradise / Too Much Time on My Hands / Nothing Ever Goes as Planned / The Best of Times / Lonely People / She Cares / Snowblind / Half-Penny, Two-Penny/ A.D. 1958
April 4, 1981
3 weeks (nonconsecutive)
Chicago-based quintet Styx was one of the prime American purveyors of progressive rock in the ’70s, but as the band moved into the ’80s it began to shift gears. “We tried to be a song-based band, one that didn’t rely as much on long musical passages,” says singer Dennis DeYoung. The results of the of the stylistic shift were the band’s first Number single, “Babe,” and Cornerstone, the 1979 album that spawned the single and climbed to number two. That success set stage for Paradise Theatre.
The concept of Styx’s 10th album was inspired by a painting DeYoung saw hanging in a Chicago art gallery. “It was a painting of the Paradise Theatre, with the words ‘temporarily closed’ on the marquee. I bought a copy of the painting and I took it home to conceptualize an idea about an album with ‘paradise’ being the metaphor for America. It just struck me as the perfect metaphor for urban decay, America, and American culture.”
The Paradise Theatre was built in 1928. Thirty years later it was leveled after falling on financial hard times. Fittingly, Paradise Theatre opens with “A.D. 1928” and closes with “A.D. 1958.” Says DeYoung, “It starts out with hope and promise and ends up run down in complete decay, so that gave us plenty of room to say what we felt about America, growing up in the ’60s, coming to grips with the end of Vietnam and Watergate and the oil embargo.”
In “Rockin’ the Paradise,” DeYoung warned Americans not to go for the fast buck. “That was the first song written for the album. With the Paradise Theatre I had this vision of doing something theatrical,” DeYoung says. “Not just because of the title, but something that tried to take the more interesting aspects of the Broadway theater and incorporate them into a rock show.”
By the ’80s, Styx was a well-tuned machine maintaining an album-a-year schedule. For Paradise Theatre, the band returned to Pumpkin Studios in Oak Lawn, Illinois, the same room they’d used to record Cornerstone. “I don’t recall any real snafus,” DeYoung says of the sessions, which were completed in approximately three months. “It was a wonderful time creatively for the band.”
DeYoung composed “The Best of Times,” the album’s first single, on the grand piano at his Chicago-area home. “I remember thinking, ‘This ain’t too bad. This might be okay,'” he says. His hunch proved correct — in March 1981, the single reached number three on the Hot 100.
“Too Much Time on My Hands,” the album’s other big hit single, was written by lead guitarist Tommy Shaw. “He was having a little bit of writer’s block during the Paradise Theatre period. Three days before we went into the studio he played me ‘Too Much Time on My Hands,’ which he had just written the night before. I knew that was a good one,” DeYoung says. DeYoung was right again, as the tune became the album’s second top 10 hit, climbing to number nine in May. Meanwhile, Paradise Theatre had debuted on the album chart on January 31. Ten weeks later it knocked REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity from the top spot to become Styx’s first and only Number One album.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of April 4, 1981
1. Paradise Theatre, Styx
2. Hi Infidelity, REO Speedwagon
3. Moving Pictures, Rush
4. Arc of a Diver, Steve Winwood
5. Double Fantasy, John Lennon / Yoko Ono