Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,998

This is the grave of John Panozzo.

Born in 1948 in Chicago, John Panozzo and his twin brother Chuck became super interested in music as kids as they grew up in their postwar Italian-American family, which moved to the suburbs shortly after their birth, as did so many now-white ethnic families. John became interested in the drums as a young boy, Chuck mostly played guitar. They had a neighbor named Dennis DeYoung. He was an accordion player. They started a band in 1961 called The Tradewinds (not a bad name for a bunch of kids) and started playing little local events and the like. The accordion really didn’t last too long. They moved toward rock and roll and moved up a little bit in the Chicago garage rock scene, playing clubs and parties. DeYoung switched to the keys, Chuck switched to bass, John stayed on drums, they hired a couple of guitarists, and changed their name to Styx in 1972.

Now, Styx is a terrible band. I mean, really, if you want stupid shitty rock bands of the 70s, you are not going to get stupider and shittier than Styx. Their dominance on classic rock radio–at least when I was listening to a lot of that in high school and the first couple of years of college–somewhat belies the fact that they weren’t really that huge. They had some minor hits for the most part. Classic rock radio can easily skew what was popular at the time, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But no one in the 70s would have said that Styx is even a minor defining band of the era.

In any case, Styx started releasing about an album a year in 1972. The albums tended to do pretty OK on the charts. At least they were making money. They replaced one of the guitarists with Tommy Shaw in 1975, which gave them an even greater pop sheen on their music that attempted to bridge the gap between the hard rock of much better bands such as Led Zeppelin and the acoustic cheese that dominated the burgeoning soft rock scene in these years. They would have quite a few songs that would be remembered, though only “Babe” would hit #1. “Mr. Roboto,” an incredibly stupid song, and “Lady” are among the songs that became ensconced on classic rock radio. But over time, they got more and more popular at least in the AOR world. Between 1975 and 1984, they would sell a total of 20 million albums, which is a lot. Some of that is that they churned out a lot of product, but it all sold between pretty good and really good.

Now, there’s not that much to say about John Panozzo. Have you ever listened to a Styx song on the radio (I am being really charitable and assuming no one actually listens to Styx intentionally at any point this century but of course you can’t totally escape the band) and thought, “damn, what a drummer! Is that Keith Moon or John Bonham? No, it’s John Panozzo, what a legend!” No, no you have not.

In any case, Styx would break up and reform and do the reunion tour thing but by the mid 90s, Panozzo was quite busy drinking himself to death. His liver gave out in 1996 and he died of cirrhosis, at the age of 47.

John Panozzo is buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois.

Styx may be the last guitar rock band out there from the 70s not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At least some standards have been maintained.

If you would like this series to visit other drummers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. When Rolling Stone created a list of the top 100 drummers of all time, Panozzo was nowhere near the list. Gene Krupa (#7) is in Calumet City, Illinois and Al Jackson (#9) is in Memphis. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.