Song #23: "Too Much Time on My Hands" by Styx

 

Styx — “Too Much Time on My Hands”

The Card

Year: 1981
Random draw: Song #23
Selected era bucket: 1980–1989
Verified remaining eligible population: 9,052 songs before today’s selection
Selection method: Equal-probability era draw, followed by uniform random selection from the remaining eligible songs in that era

Chart performance

Billboard Hot 100: #9
Billboard Top Rock Tracks: #2
Billboard R&B: N/A
Billboard Country: N/A
Canada RPM Top Singles: #4
UK Singles Chart: Did not chart
Yearly rank: #67
Weeks charted: 19
Weeks in Top 20: 13
Weeks in Top 10: 3
Weeks at peak: 2

Hot 100 chart run: 60-33-29-26-24-19-15-12-10-9-9-15-18-37-45-56-66-79-97

Styx at this point

Charting record: 17th of 23
Top-20 hit: 6th of 9
Top-10 hit: 5th of 8
#1 pop hit: N/A (Styx's only #1 was “Babe”)
Previous Top-20 hit: “The Best of Times” (#3)
Next Top-20 hit: “Mr. Roboto” (#3)

Retrospective standing

GOAT overall: #3,805
Among Styx songs: #8 of 23
Among Styx Top-20 hits: #8 of 9
GOAT points: 269,024
Hot 100 portion: #9 peak, 19 weeks

Only “Renegade” ranks below it among Styx’s nine Top-20 hits in my retrospective system.

The record

Entered the Hot 100: March 21, 1981
Released: March 1981
Recorded: 1980, Pumpkin Studios, Oak Lawn, Illinois
Single: “Too Much Time on My Hands” / “Queen of Spades”
Album: Paradise Theatre
Songwriter: Tommy Shaw
Lead vocal: Tommy Shaw
Running time: 4:31
Label: A&M Records
Catalog number: A&M 2323
Recording to use: Original 1980 Styx studio recording from Paradise Theatre

Listen / watch / read

Recording: Original Paradise Theatre version
Video: Original 1981 promotional video, recreating the neighborhood-bar setting that inspired the song
Lyrics: Standard published lyrics for the original recording

Versions / title history

Original or cover: Original; written by Tommy Shaw for Styx
Notable later version: Styx made a new studio recording for Regeneration: Volume I & II in 2011
Same-title unrelated Top-20 hits: None identified
Streaming note: Use the approximately 4:31 Paradise Theatre recording, not the later Regeneration rerecording.

My rating: 70/100

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I've never considered myself much of a Styx fan.

After spending a day with “Too Much Time on My Hands,” I think I need to qualify that. I'm not much of a Styx-ballad fan.

Give me Dennis DeYoung at his most theatrical, and I'm probably looking for the exit. Give me Tommy Shaw with a guitar, and apparently I'm considerably more receptive. My favorite Styx song has always been the bizarre and relatively obscure “Music Time,” which peaked at only #40 and therefore will never appear in this project. “Too Much Time on My Hands” might now be number two.

It helps that the song still rocks.

It also helps that, despite being released in 1981, it doesn't sound especially dated to me.

That's interesting because almost everything surrounding it looks extremely dated.

Watch the promotional video and there is no mistaking when you're living. James “J.Y.” Young has a magnificent head of hair and shoulder pads wide enough to require clearance from air-traffic control. Everybody pulls faces at the camera. The comedy in the bar scenes is broad enough to survive without dialogue. At one point, a guy sitting at the bar is reading a copy of Billboard, which seems almost suspiciously designed for a project that would rediscover the video 45 years later because the song made the Billboard Top 20.

Tommy Shaw later described the video-making process simply: “It’s just goofy stuff.” They tried to cram in as much goofy stuff as possible.

That seems about right.

The record itself has aged much better.

It begins with a strange pulsing keyboard figure. For a few seconds, you could imagine the song heading somewhere considerably more electronic. Then the guitars arrive and immediately establish the terms: this is a rock song.

The keyboard never really leaves, though. It keeps pulsing underneath the guitars, giving the song a nervous little engine that prevents it from becoming generic arena rock. The song sounds like it could only have been recorded in a certain technological era, but it doesn't feel imprisoned by that era.

And 1981 was a strange era.

What exactly was 1981?

Decades don't begin when the calendar tells them to.

The 1970s were over, but what we now recognize as “the Eighties” hadn't really arrived. Disco had collapsed as pop's dominant organizing force. Country crossover was thriving. Smooth soft rock and what we'd now call yacht rock remained huge. Arena rock was everywhere. New wave was bubbling around. Synthesizers were becoming increasingly prominent. For some reason, medleys of old songs became a legitimate pop craze.

Nothing seemed to have won yet.

By 1983, the picture becomes much easier to recognize. MTV has become important. Michael Jackson is reshaping the pop landscape. The Second British Invasion is underway. Synth-pop and new wave aesthetics have moved much closer to the center. Prince is ascending. The decade is developing the sound and look that future generations will identify immediately as “the Eighties.”

In 1981, all sorts of possible futures were competing with one another.

Styx was not some relic hanging around from the previous decade. They were one of the biggest bands in America.

Paradise Theatre spent three nonconsecutive weeks at #1 on the Billboard album chart, trading the top spot with REO Speedwagon's Hi Infidelity. It eventually sold more than three million copies and became Styx's fourth consecutive multi-platinum album.

This was the peak of arena rock, and Styx was squarely in the middle of it.

Even the video sits in an interesting historical crack. “Too Much Time on My Hands” reached its #9 peak in May 1981. MTV wouldn't launch until August.

Watching the already-completed promotional video, I have a hard time imagining that it wouldn't have been in heavy rotation if MTV had existed a few months earlier.

Today, its mugging and lowbrow comedy look wonderfully goofy. In early 1981, viewers weren't comparing it against several years of MTV. The visual grammar of American music video hadn't been standardized yet. Styx had already made the artifact; the distribution system that would make artifacts like it enormously important was still a few months away.

The rock song

There were multiple creative personalities inside Styx, which may explain both why the band was so successful and why I respond so differently to different parts of its catalog.

Dennis DeYoung supplied much of the melodic, keyboard-heavy and theatrical side. James Young was the band's most straightforward hard-rock voice. Tommy Shaw could move around considerably more, but many of his best-known Styx songs occupy the guitar-driven side of the band's personality.

For a long time, those competing instincts were productive rather than destructive.

“Too Much Time on My Hands” is a particularly good example.

When Styx was preparing Paradise Theatre, Shaw knew he still didn't have what he called his rock song for the album. On the final day of rehearsals, he drove from his home in Michigan toward Gary, Indiana, where Styx was working. As he approached the exit, the riff started playing in his head. Then the first verse followed.

Shaw had nothing with which to record it.

He held onto the song until he reached the parking lot, ran inside, gathered the band and began working it out.

That's a wonderful creation story, but it creates a problem.

Paradise Theatre was supposed to be a concept album.

And “Too Much Time on My Hands” didn't have much to do with the concept.

Paradise, theoretically

I didn't know Paradise Theatre was a concept album until today, so I listened to the entire thing from the beginning.

Dennis DeYoung built the album around the Paradise Theatre, an ornate Chicago movie palace whose rise and decline became a metaphor for his concerns about America and the loss of national optimism. The album opens with “A.D. 1928” and later returns to the same musical material with “A.D. 1958.”

That creates a pretty obvious expectation of chronology, so I started looking for one.

Was “Too Much Time on My Hands” the Depression? Was “She Cares” connected to World War II? Was “Half-Penny, Two-Penny,” with its Mrs. Cleaver reference and construction sounds, moving us into postwar America?

Except the album doesn't really work that way.

There is chronology in the framing—the theater opens and eventually closes—but the individual songs don't consistently function as chapters in a historical narrative. The Paradise Theatre is less a setting for a story than an organizing metaphor.

If I know I'm listening to a concept album, listen carefully to the entire thing in order, and still need someone to explain what the concept is supposed to be, I'm not convinced the concept is doing its job particularly well.

“Too Much Time on My Hands” certainly doesn't help.

Asked years later how it belonged on Paradise Theatre, Shaw said it had essentially been “shoehorned in at the last minute.” He liked DeYoung's concept, but he wasn't coming up with songs for it.

In other words, the problem I encountered while listening wasn't entirely mine. Shaw needed a rock song. He wrote a very good one. They put it on the album.

Sometimes creative tension works.

Mark's Bar

The song's actual inspiration was much smaller and more interesting than the grand Paradise Theatre concept.

At the time, Shaw lived near Niles, Michigan, in the southwestern corner of the state. That's not far from where I grew up outside Kalamazoo.

Near Shaw's home was a little neighborhood tavern beside a Catholic church. Its official name was Mark's Tavern, although Shaw says everybody called it Mark's Bar.

“The drinks were good, and the drinks were cheap,” Shaw remembered. Twenty dollars could make you a hero buying rounds, and you could reliably expect to run into somebody you knew.

“That was the basis of the song.”

I know this bar.

Not literally Mark's Tavern, but this kind of bar.

I worked in a bar throughout college in the '90s, while also playing pool league in plenty of places that looked like they could have been Mark's cousins. If you've spent enough time in neighborhood bars, you recognize the guy Shaw is writing about.

He's always there.

He knows everybody. He buys some drinks. He talks. He watches people come and go. He holds court from his usual spot, and after a while you start wondering whether this man has anywhere else to be.

Shaw's portrait feels more affectionate than judgmental. There is clearly some mockery in it, but the guy seems harmless. The music isn't desperate or depressing, and the narrator doesn't seem especially miserable about his circumstances.

One line had been stuck in my memory long before today's draw: the observation that the fun with his friends never ends—at least while he's the one paying.

I always thought that was a good line.

There's a little sadness available there if you want it. Are these really his friends? Is he wasting his life? How much of his self-image depends upon being the guy buying the drinks?

But the song never insists on any of those readings.

And there's another assumption about the narrator that deserves some scrutiny.

He is routinely described as unemployed.

The song never actually says that.

More importantly, I couldn't find Shaw—or another band source—saying that he was unemployed. When Shaw explains where the song came from, he talks about Mark's Tavern, cheap drinks, familiar faces and the people who populated the place. His account doesn't identify the character as unemployed.

Maybe he is.

Or maybe he's a single guy who spends an extraordinary amount of his free time at the bar.

If you've ever worked in one, you know that guy too.

The distinction matters because calling him unemployed changes the window through which we see him. Suddenly he's a victim of economic circumstances, drinking away his days because he has no job. That interpretation also conveniently turns him into a symbol of the economic malaise supposedly lurking inside DeYoung's Paradise Theatre concept.

Take away the assumption, and he becomes something simpler: a neighborhood-bar regular who has arranged an awful lot of his life around being at the bar.

Maybe he even likes it that way.

Too much time

The song has one final little production joke.

As the record fades, an alarm clock punctuates a song obsessed with time. It's an obvious idea that somehow doesn't feel gratuitous. The record doesn't stop to make sure we got the joke. The clock simply joins the fade.

Our narrator may have too much time on his hands.

The clock is still running.

I went into today's draw with the vague belief that I wasn't much of a Styx fan. I came out realizing that my problem is probably more specific. The giant Styx ballads generally don't do much for me. The rocking version of Styx works considerably better.

And “Too Much Time on My Hands” is a pretty fun song.

It's not profound, and it doesn't need to be. There's a sense of humor running through the record that the ridiculous video only reinforces. The song doesn't sound 45 years old to me, and now that I've paid attention to the lyrics, there's a recognizable character living inside it too.

If this came on during my drive home tonight, I'd leave it on. I'd sing along. I'd tap the steering wheel.

That's probably the simplest explanation for the score.

70/100