Styx guitarist James “J.Y.” Young celebrates his 70th birthday today (November 14th). “Lady” is the track from Styx’s second album became a hit after they had already released their fourth. it became Styx’s breakout hit nationally, but it sure didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it took around a year and a half, by which time they’d released two more albums. James explains how it happened.
“It became popular in Rapid City, Provo, Utah and Little Rock, Arkansas, so we went and played all those places quite a bit at the time, but it went off the radar screen for awhile. And we continued to play around the Chicago area and people would call up and request the song. And the program director, when we went to him with our fourth album to try to get him to play something at WLS, he said, ‘I’m not going to do that, but the song “Lady,” off your second record, I get requests for that and I never get requests for songs that aren’t on my playlist. So I’m going to play that song once a night until it’s a hit.’”
