Dennis DeYoung was watching the sun hit the waves in the sea off Hawaii when the angels appeared. It was April 1977, and his band, Styx, were on the island to play the Crater festival, aka Hawaii’s Woodstock.
It was a welcome stop-off on a long and grinding journey. Styx were six albums deep into their career, but they’d managed just a single Top 10 hit a few years earlier, with DeYoung’s proto-power ballad Lady.
“We should have been ahead of a plethora of bands – Queen, Kansas, we came before them all,” says the effervescent DeYoung, who was Styx’s keyboard player and co-vocalist from their inception in 1972. “But we were always opening for people - Aerosmith, Kiss, ZZ Top. Always the bridesmaids.”
Yet here they were in Hawaii, soaking up the sun. For a bunch of guys who had grown up on the south side of Chicago, this was a dream. Seeing boats bobbing on the glinting water, an idea began to form in DeYoung’s mind.
“I started thinking about sailing vessels, something that can take you away to the place in which you ultimately want to be,” he says. “Whether it’s a boat on which you’re the captain, or a gathering of angels appearing above your head, sweeping you into the heavens.”
That moment of celestial inspiration would be the spark for the song that revived Styx’s fortunes: Come Sail Away. Almost 50 years after it became a US hit, this grandstanding pomp-rock classic occupies a similar place in American culture to Don’t Stop Believin’, a shot of pure, euphoric emotion that has appeared in shows ranging from ER to South Park. And it remains the greatest power ballad ever written about alien abduction.
DeYoung started working up the idea he’d had in Hawaii as soon as he got back to Chicago. “Everybody thinks songwriting is magic – you pluck it out of the air,” he says. “No, it’s: ‘That’s good, leave it in. That’s bad, let’s not put it there.’”
As the band worked on it in Chicago’s SIR studio, the song evolved from DeYoung’s original idea into something even grander and more dramatic. It begins with his delicate piano notes, before a storm of guitars and drums erupt.
“That’s Styx pretending to be The Who,” says DeYoung. “I said to [drummer] John Panazzo: ‘Play like Keith Moon.’” The finished track was a six-minute mini-epic that revelled in its own grandeur, from DeYoung’s fantastically theatrical vocals (has any singer ever rolled their ‘l’s quite like that?) to its euphoric crescendo.
But what truly kicked it to another level was the lyrics. ‘We lived happily for ever, so the story goes/But somehow we missed out on the pot of gold,’ DeYoung sings, capturing the yearning he’d felt in Hawaii. But it’s his declaration that ‘a gathering of angels appears above my head’ that gives Come Sail Away its golden glow – a line reportedly inspired by The Book Of Ezekiel in the Bible. DeYoung laughs out loud at the suggestion.
“I wouldn’t know Ezekiel from the pizza delivery guy,” he cackles. “I was raised a Catholic, but devout? No. ‘A gathering of angels appears above my head’? I’ll tell you what that is. That’s the idea of being taken away by a higher power. Anything to get me out of standing behind the stage watching Gene Simmons.”
But there’s one last twist – these angels aren’t angels, but aliens, arriving on a UFO to pick up DeYoung and take him away with them. ‘We climbed aboard their starship and headed for the skies,’ sings DeYoung, welcoming this extra-terrestrial arrival. In the year of Star Wars and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, it made perfect sense.
“The aliens were JY’s [guitarist/ co-vocalist James ‘JY’ Young] idea,” says DeYoung. “He goes: ‘What if they were aliens?’ He liked all that stuff. Me, I don’t, but I wanted to make JY happy. But they’re not aliens. I said ‘starship’. I was thinking Captain Kirk. To me that was what it was about: getting on a starship and going all the way to the top. I wanted to be a star on a ship.”
Come Sail Away, the first single from Styx’s seventh album The Grand Illusion, was released in August 1977. Audiences latched onto its grandeur immediately, and, after some initial resistance, so did radio. Come Sail Away gave Styx their second US Top 10 hit, four years after the first. They’d reached the pot of gold.
“We stopped being the bridesmaid and became the bride,” says DeYoung. “We broke away and never looked back, until [guitarist] Tommy Shaw quit in 1984.”
Shaw’s departure on the back of the previous year’s contentious Kilroy Was Here album marked the end of the band’s initial run, but Come Sail Away was already a rock radio staple. Then in 1998 DeYoung got a request from the makers of South Park to use the song in the show.
“I said: ‘If these guys are gonna do a Barbra Streisand on Styx, it’s a no,’” says DeYoung, referring to South Park’s notoriously cruel send-up of the musical diva. “But [co-creator Matt Stone] called me up and said: ‘No, no, we’re fans of Styx.’ I said: ‘Okay, do whatever you want, make ’em laugh.’ Best decision I ever made.”
Come Sail Away appeared in two South Park episodes - most famously 1998’s Chef Aid, which featured an affectionately hilarious version of the song with Eric Cartman on vocals and a funky cameo from soul legend Isaac Hayes, who played Chef. Since then it has appeared in loads of TV shows and films, ranging from Freaks And Geeks and ER to The Virgin Suicides and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
“I’m watching Freaks And Geeks, and this prom scene comes on and Come Sail Away is playing. I started to tear up,” DeYoung says. Then after pausing a beat: “Yeah, I was thinking of the money I was gonna make.”
DeYoung was squeezed out of Styx in 1999, when health issues prevented him from touring (the band continued with replacement singer Lawrence Cooke). But he remains proud of what he achieved with the band, and with Come Sail Away in particular.
“It’s quintessential Styx,” he says. “All we wanted was to stamp out Queen and Aerosmith, but we touched a generation of people in a way that I never truly understood until years later.”
