30 Years Ago Today: Styx Drummer John Panozzo Dies at 47

John Anthony Panozzo was born September 20, 1948, in Chicago, and grew up in the city's Roseland neighborhood with his fraternal twin brother, Chuck, born 20 minutes apart, per Wikipedia's account of his career. At age 7, an uncle gave the twins their first music lessons, and John gravitated to drums and percussion while Chuck picked up guitar. Playing together in a three-piece band through Catholic school, they were working wedding gigs for $15 apiece by age 12. In 1961, the twins and neighbor Dennis DeYoung formed The Tradewinds, John on drums, Chuck on guitar, Dennis singing and playing accordion.

By 1968, Chuck had switched to bass, guitarists James "J.Y." Young and John Curulewski had joined, and the band renamed itself TW4, then Styx, after signing to Chicago's Wooden Nickel Records. Their first albums on the small independent label didn't sell, and the quintet spent the early 1970s grinding through Midwest and Canadian club dates, building a hometown following, before 1975's "Lady" broke through nationally on the strength of heavy airplay from Chicago station WLS, per a same-day UPI wire report.

Styx's commercial peak ran through Panozzo's drum chair for the rest of the decade. 1977's The Grand Illusion went triple-platinum and is now regarded as one of the era's defining art-rock records, carrying arena staples like Come Sail Away, Fooling Yourself, and Miss America. Pieces of Eight followed in 1978, and Cornerstone in 1979, the latter home to Babe, Styx's only US number-one single. 1981's Paradise Theatre cemented the band's reputation for concept-driven rock beyond typical teenage-rebellion themes. Styx broke up in 1984, reunited without guitarist Tommy Shaw in 1990, and scored another hit with Show Me the Way, which reached number 3 on the pop charts.

Panozzo wasn't on the band's 77-city tour in the summer of 1996; the group's publicist cited health problems. In 1993, between Styx's studio records, he'd drummed on two tracks of bandmate James Young's solo album, Out on a Day Pass, per Wikipedia's liner-notes citation. He was found dead in his Chicago apartment on July 16, 1996. Cook County officials attributed his death to a gastrointestinal hemorrhage and cirrhosis of the liver from acute alcoholism, at age 47, and the same-day UPI report noted no foul play was suspected. Styx canceled that night's scheduled show in Rochester, New York, held a private service for him in Chicago days later, and devoted the remainder of the tour to his memory.

Panozzo's specific drum kit isn't documented in the kind of source-backed detail CYS requires before naming a setup, so we won't guess at a brand. What's well established is the era: late-1970s arena rock drummers overwhelmingly reached for a chrome-shelled snare with serious crack and volume to cut through a PA built for 20,000-seat venues, and Ludwig's Supraphonic is the standard-bearer of that exact sound.