WCSX Classic Cuts : The Best of Times
WCSX Classic Cuts
Styx: “The Best of Times”
The Hook: A look back on childhood, inspired by the then-recent Iranian hostage crisis.
Album: Paradise Theater
Year: 1981
Writer: Dennis DeYoung
Stats: Peaked at number-three on the Billboard Hot 100 and number-16 on the Top Album Tracks chart
Background: Former Styx singer and keyboardist Dennis DeYoung wrote “The Best of Times” for the Paradise Theater album. He explains what inspired it.
Former Styx singer-keyboardist Dennis DeYoung on why he wrote “The Best of Times.” OC:…the ‘seventies. :26
“In 1980, when the album was constructed, we’d just come through the Iranian crisis – remember when they held the hostages. We’d just come through, really, in my mind, the end of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the oil embargo, and now we had taking hostages. And ‘The Best of Times’ was a song about trying to rationalize in my own mind, having grown up, really, in the late ‘50s-early ‘60s in probably the greatest time to be alive in the history of mankind – to be in this country at that time — and then to go through the turmoil of the late ‘60s and all through the ‘70s.”
