I don't know, I think the crowds are even more responsive now because the audiences are skewing younger.

So, We're really L.A. based with a secondary base in Chicago.

Seeing our VH-1 Behind the Music shows just how dysfunctional some of the moments of the band were but this new line-up has put the fun back in dysfunction.

There are a lot of people using technology that are playing to a click with backing vocals already stuck in there on some computerized thing that runs along in time to the show so they have these amazing vocals that are only partly the guys on stage producing them at the time.

So, maybe you don't see blues so much in Styx's music but it is definitely part of Tommy's early music.

And in an era where radio stations that are inclined to play Styx music are your classic rock stations and the stations that play current music look at us as dinosaurs - the only way we could reach people with our new music, generally, is to perform live.

Ten years ago, in 94, we thought maybe nobody would ever care about Styx again.

People tell us they have been inspired by our music to do great things.

The studio that we mix in is still in Chicago.

But, there was a time when we all had a great thing going but one person just became very uncomfortable with it and he had to try to change it around to suit him more and then it suited no one else but him.

It is something we have always excelled at and prided ourselves at - the excellences of our stage performance.

Being in a rock band is about touring. It's about writing songs and it's about making records but it's also about taking a wonderful smile onto that stage and making the people feel good about themselves.

Yes, indeed, in fact I would tell you that we go out of our way to be true to the original feeling and sort of sonic and musical pallet that we painted with back then.

But there are rock and roll fans all over this continent and all over the globe, really, and we're just set at marking the planet with Styx music until the day we die.

We always got a strong response but I think in this day in age there is less of a marijuana fog at concerts and more of people just more naturally exuberant - it seems to me.

I'll play until they have to scrape me off the stage.

In my own mind, we are a much happier and much more functional family and a much more well balanced group of individual s both off and on the stage - in the current incarnation.

People like to let loose at rock concerts and it gives them an excuse to do it in a way that is not destructive to others and not really destructive to the band.

And for REO - they get to play for some Styx fans and then we get to play in front of some REO fans. It helps spread the new music to the following of other bands.

The band we have now on stage is the band I always wanted to be in.

Sometimes that mantle is hard to adjust to wearing but we are at a stage that we are comfortable with it and we recognize how we are perceived and how the real core individual that each one of us has apart from the facade that the public believes that we are.

Whereas with us - what you hear is what's happening right then and there on the stage - so we don't need no stinking technology.

Being in the studio is okay but sitting in a room by yourself composing is a discipline that takes a certain type of mind set and Tommy has a great gift for that as did the previous guy.

I don't quite have the energy for extra curricular activities. I have to pace myself a little bit more.

You know the puritan ethic that started out four centuries ago in this country, needless to say - at least for the moment - a thing of the past - from what I can tell.

I don't know, I think the crowds are even more responsive now because the audiences are skewing younger.

So, it's a matter of that I want to take our music around the globe.

We're gonna release a studio album probably a year from now and we've got these recordings that we did with Coco Taylor and Johnny Johnson, who was Chuck Berry's piano player.

And I said - Styx - as a musical group it is our place to reflect the light that is shining on us back onto this place and say - this is where so much great stuff started.

We're making a commercial Hindi film catering to all types of audiences.

I wonder if that's hurt me at the box office. Maybe audiences these days want to know exactly what to expect when they go into a movie, and my movies are hard to explain in just one way.

Audiences always sound like they're glad to see me, and I'm damned glad to see them.

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.

We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there's some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You're making it too complicated.

Sylvester has a great popular sense, as good as any writer I've ever worked with. He knows what audiences want to see, and what they don't want to see.

Phish and Dave Matthews really know their audiences and really treat them well.

We were tremendously encouraged by the testing of Analyze That. Audiences loved it. They were telling us that they liked it as much as the original. We recorded the laughs in the theater.

Anyway, I collapsed in France in the middle of a tour. I hadn't been eating properly, I was getting very phobic about audiences, and I collapsed in pure fright.

Though I am still very vulnerable to audiences - and it happens all the time - where for some reason the energy doesn't connect and, since the film is very personal, obviously I am made to feel very vulnerable by that.

I don't pay attention to target audiences and therefore I often hear that I am a ratings killer, somebody who fundamentally doesn't care whether one person is watching or an entire soccer stadium.

I want to do what I want when I want to do it not be dictated to by audiences.

I also want to return to doing stand-up. I've become frightened of live audiences. This is a really telling sign that I need to go back on the comedy circuit again.

For me to go back and to play for audiences some of whom have been following me for thirty years and some who have found me in the last five or six years, that's really an interesting thing. I have an audience that goes from kids to seventy year olds.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.

I like cinema audiences. I respect them, and I talk to them just like I would anybody I know.

The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.

Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.

The sound is the key; audiences will accept visual discontinuity much more easily than they'll accept jumps in the sound. If the track makes sense, you can do almost anything visually.

Those two songs condense the two albums. They also show what the audiences wanted. I was desperate to keep the band together and find something that the public would like.