Music Monday (The Best of Styx)

Now this may seem out of place, but the next Styx album I am going to cover is not the next one in their discography. It is a compilation album from the Wooden Nickle years called Best of Styx.

The point to all this is to explain where I was on my Styx journey. As I have said before, I had bought Styx I, Styx II (Lady), The Serpent is Rising (Serpent), and Best of Styx at the same time, not seeing the fourth Wooden Nickle album I didn't even know it existed. By the way, my copy looked like this:

This album also had a re-issue and a new cover. I like this one so much better too. So when I played this album, I was caught by something odd...

The songs:

The first three tracks were from Styx II: 

1) You Need Love 

2) Lady

3) I'm Gonna Make You Feel It. 

Makes sense since it was their breakthrough album. The next track was the great DDY song from Styx I: 

4) What Has Come Between Us.

Next up was... was... umm, what songs are these? I looked back at the last three albums in case I had missed them and nope, they were not there.

5) Southern Woman

6) Rock & Roll Feeling

I had no clue. It was obviously JY singing both of them though. Who knows? Moving on. The next four songs featured mostly Serpent tracks, with another one thrown in from Styx I.

7) Winner Take All

8) Best Thing

9) Witch Wolf

10) The Grove of Eglantine

And then the final song on the album made me review the other albums once again. Nope, nothing even resembling this song.

11) Man of Miracles

This time it sounded like JC singing. So now I was left with two options. Either these were new songs added to a compilation album, or there was another album I didn't know about. Time for some research.

Now remember this was the early 80's and there was no eBay, or Google, or even an internet. All I could do was check out record store after record store to see what I could find. Not a thing. Not even on cassette! However, one store had one of those gigantic album guide books. So I checked under Styx in that and found... Miracles. Well at least I had a name, but I could never find this album anywhere. For a long time.

Finally in the early 90's (!), I was in yet another record store and by habit just went and peaked through the Styx cassette section and noticed one oddly colored tape. It was a tape of The Serpent is Rising which I thought was cool since I didn't have it on that format, but on the flip side was... Man of Miracles! Finally! Oh happy day!

So next week I will go into much more depth about that album. For now I just wanted you to know my back story and why this album means so much to me. As a recap, below you will find links to the albums covered so far:

Styx (also called Styx I): Side One, Side Two

Styx II (also called Lady): Side One, Side Two

The Serpent is Rising (also called Serpent): Side One, Side Two