Last year I did a few posts on the phenomenon of False New Wave, and these were wildly popular, so the impetus has always been there to revisit the topic. The comments gave me grist for future posts I’ve yet to write. But as it transpires, much of this music has [perhaps willfully] fled my mind over the intervening three decades since then. Until now. This morning I had a horrible thought flit into my mind and it has left its unwilling imprint there, to fester into a full blown blog post on False New Wave; the topic that will not die!

The culprit today is one of the worst offenders ever. In fact, so spectacular was its failure, that it flat out destroyed the wildly successful band that dared to make it. Suffice to say that faux American would-be prog-rockers STYX® had bounced around for most of the seventies until their single “Lady” got re-issued enough times for their label, Wooden Nickel, to finally make a buck off of them and cause A+M to come sniffing around! They spent the rest of the seventies making money for A+M with a series of turgid rock epics beloved by seventh graders the world over. An eye opening glance at their history on Discogs.com reveals amazing facts.

1. I have only ever heard about eight of their songs in my life. Gosh, it seems like so much more!
2. All of their early, unpopular albums seem like they would be right at home with Kansas in the Home For Wannabe Midwest Prog Rockers! Really! They did “Fanfare For The Common Man” years before ELP got around to it! There’s Beaver & Krause covers on those Wooden Nickel albums nobody ever bought! If the name Beaver & Krause doesn’t ring a bell, you’re probably under sixty years of age!

By the time that 1981 rolled around, every other teen in America had a copy of their “Paradise Theatre” album. They were just about to mint coins with the images of STYX® on them… but then they realized that no one knew what they looked like! Suffice to say, at no point in my pre-teen or teenaged years did they once ever speak to me! They represented all that I wanted Punk Rock and New Wave to fully wipe from the smug rock star map. They were middlebrow aspiring to highbrow and firmly reaching a lowbrow audience. They were an embarrassment to all that I valued in music. After 1981, they could have done anything to the ecstatic squeals emanating from the accountants offices deep within the bowels [very appropriate] of A+M Records. What they chose to do in the heady year of 1983 was to… go New Wave!

Next: The horror… the horror!