The Spinning Keyboard Pedestal

Lawrence Gowan / photo: Styx

Cris Cohen: Again, going to your showmanship on stage, I’m curious about what gave you the idea and when did you start using a keyboard pedestal that can revolve and spin… quite fast actually?

Lawrence Gowan of Styx: We're going to go right back to the last answer funnily enough. I had a song called “Lost Brother” that has a very kind of a cool little piano intro to it. Alex Lifeson plays guitar on that song, the title track from “Lost Brotherhood,” 1990. I called him and said, “They're giving us a budget to do a video for this song, and I’d like you to be in it.” And I’d written up the storyboard. I said, basically it'll be a bit like “Animal Farm”. It takes place in a barn, and the song is about gang mentality. We're in the barn and we're using the metaphor of gangs and very much like the animals in “Animal Farm”.

And Alex, when he plays his solo, breaks out of the barn. So the barn's kind of on fire and smoking. He breaks out of the barn, blows the solo as a soloist. Alone. Great moment, because he's apart from any gang affiliation, let's call it that.

I then realized, I’m going to look really boring in this video, because I’m going to be stuck behind the piano, playing this bit, and I’m going to be basically there with the piano player's dilemma, being behind “the desk,” trying to make it look like I’m physically involved.

And with the lighting company, we were having a meeting with them about it. And I said, I wish we could come up with a way of the keyboard moving. So we had a quick talk about putting it on a track, like a dolly track. And I thought, what if I could turn it? Like a guitar player can always turn and face different parts of the audience, and that's part of the great way that they can engage people. And as a singer, when I get off the piano, I can do that.

But I wish you it could move, and what if we had it spin? And that was like a great moment because the lighting guy suddenly goes, “We could do that.” And he started pulling together lighting pieces from their lighting rigs. He said, “If this part here could pivot on there, it would have to be heavy. Let's make it out of stainless steel.” We had the proverbial napkin-type drawing of what it would what it would do.

When we did the video, the thing turned out to be great, and I got really into using it in the video. Alex and everyone on the crew and my band were kind of like, “You're getting pretty good on that. Are you going to take that on stage?”

And I said that was never the intention. It was just to be in this video, a prop for the video. But I did realize this could be a really good stage piece. We started using it. I maimed myself several times on it in the first year. Pretty badly at first, but then I got more adept at using it.

And when I joined Styx, the very first rehearsal, we had the big multi-keyboard set up and I went on stage to play that. And they went, “Hey, where's the spinning thing that you were playing?”

I said, “I’m so glad you asked. I brought it with me.”

And so it's been with us on stage now 23 years.

Watch the full interview