Tommy Shaw

                    To millions around the world, Tommy Shaw is best known as the former guitarist/vocalist/songwriter with the hugely successful Styx. Joining the band in 1976, Tommy quickly became a pivotal member, playing an indispensable role in their ascension into the multi-platinum stratosphere.

                    Having gone solo in 1984, Shaw now fully emerges as a major artist in his own right with his first Atlantic album, “AMBITION,” a work of rare power, grace, and depth. Marked by an expansive sound and full-throttle energy Tommy Shaw’s latest effort is a masterful new beginning.

                    “I guess I was a professional musician by age five,” Tommy says with a grin. “My grandfather used to give me a quarter to sing on the front porch.” Born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, Shaw first became seriously involved with music when his parents bought him a guitar for his tenth birthday. And at 11, Tommy made his first televised appearance on a local morning program. “I remember dedicating ‘Pretty Woman’ to my 6th grade teacher. I was on the show with two friends of mine. We were terrible, but I guess we were cute.”

                    By the age of thirteen, Shaw had indeed become a professional musician, playing clubs in his hometown. Tommy started out playing soul music with black musicians; he then moved on to what he calls “dinner music” and jazz in Montgomery’s supper clubs. “All the rest of my friends were doing Led Zeppelin covers while I was making money in the lounges,” he recalls. By the end of his high school career, Tommy had shifted into rock‘n’roll, singing and playing lead with a variety of bands as well as serving as a pick up musician for whatever recording artist happened to come through town.

                    After high school, Tommy headed for Nashville, where he hooked up with a band called M.S. Funk. He toured with them for three and a half years, including a two-year stint of constant gigging without ever going home. As the disco craze began to hit, M.S. Funk, like many other club bands at the time, lost a lot of work, and soon disbanded.

                    Tommy returned to Montgomery in 1975. He spent six months playing acoustic music with a group that he formed with some old friends. ”I did a lot of writing at that time and enjoyed myself tremendously. I wrote ‘Crystal Ball’ at the time, which ended up being the title track of the first Styx album, I was on.”

                    Later that year, Tommy received a phone call from the Styx organization. A member of the group’s crew remembered hearing him with M.S. Funk during one of their engagements in Chicago, Styx’s hometown. “They were in a kind of panic situation,” Tommy recalls. “They had new management, a new record, a new label, a tour about to start, and somebody had just quit.”

                    “When I flew to Chicago to audition, I was ready not to like them. They played me a couple of cuts from ‘EQUINOX,’ and I couldn’t believe it was them. I really couldn’t hate it. I didn’t even have to play guitar. I just sat around the piano, and they gave me the highest note from “Lady.” We sounded like Styx, right there and then. I was hired on the spot.”

                    Shaw’s distinctive voice, his instrumental virtuosity, and his consummate songwriting ability made him an essential part of the Styx sound. He went on to write and sing lead on a number of the band’s mega-hits, including “Blue Collar Man” and “Too Much Time On My Hands.” Tommy’s wiry energy and remarkable stage presence greatly enhanced the group’s live appeal, and contributed to making them a top box office attraction.

                    “I was a little baby when I joined the band,” Tommy says, looking back on his Styx tenure. “I went from playing in a bowling alley lounge in Montgomery to being in a major band with a recording contract. It was like giving the key to the ice cream store to Orson Welles, and telling him to watch everything. It was the usual story of excesses. I was the youngest in the band and I tended to be the wildest, the most rock‘n’roll. I was lucky it didn’t completely kill me.”

                    In retrospect, Tommy feels “we should have taken some time away from each other rather than go into the studio to record ‘KILROY WAS HERE.’ I was probably the most destructive force at that point, because I just couldn’t come up with anything about robots. I felt like I was back in school, forced to write about something I had nothing to say about.” Although Styx never officially disbanded, the group has not played together since 1983.

                    Summing up his feelings about Styx, Tommy declares, “I was always aware that it wasn’t cool to like them, but everybody bought the records. The band is a real part of millions of people’s pasts. It’s really nice to know that those records are still being played, that they still mean some- thing to an entire generation.”

                    Shaw began doing solo demos of his compositions during a Styx European tour in 1980. “GIRLS WITH GUNS,” his 1984 solo debut, was, according to Tommy, “all over the place, I had felt so pigeon-holed in Styx, that I wrote all styles of music.” With his second record, “WHAT IF” Tommy confesses to “having reached the darkest phase of my career. That was my bohemian period; I was playing the suffering artist. There’s one song on it called ‘Reach For The Bottle,’ which sums up everything I was going through at that stage.”

                    Tommy’s debut for Atlantic, “AMBITION,” marks the beginning of a new phase in his career. “I realized it was time to get together with a good co-writer,” Tommy explains, “because I tend to be too introspective on my own. My manager, Bud Prager, suggested I collaborate with Terry Thomas (of Charlie). The first time we met, we wrote ‘Weight Of The World’ in almost the same time it takes to play it. We immediately knew we had the right chemistry.”

                    Shaw and Thomas settled in at a farm in Michigan, where they spent the next six weeks writing songs. “We demoed the whole album there,” he says. “We had a very intense working environment, no distraction whatsoever for a month and a half. We’d leave the equipment switched on 24 hours a day. That way whenever an idea came, all we had to do was roll the tape and play.”

                    Tommy continues: “I didn’t want this record to be a pop record; wanted it to be a rock‘n’roll record. I also wanted it to show off my voice. I have been working with vocal coaches for the past three years, trying to improve my singing. The thing that Terry was good at was finding keys that were good for me. We wrote in very unusual guitar keys: E Flat, F Sharp, C Minor Sharp. But they do make my voice sound good.”

                    Recorded in London, “AMBITION” was produced by Terry Thomas and Tommy Shaw, with Tommy playing guitar, singing all leads and some background vocals. A team of top session players did the rest. A veritable tour de force in rock‘n’roll-with-hooks, the album is a collection of rare intensity and scope. It ranges from such anthems as “The Weight Of The World” and “Somewhere In The Night” to the funky “Love You Too Much” to the pure rock moves of “No Such Thing” (the first single and video). With “AMBITION,” a familiar voice becomes a new voice all over again.

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