1978 · Behind the Songs
A laid-off railroad man, a sputtering boat engine and Tommy Shaw’s working-class anthem.
The riff came from a broken boat engine. Tommy Shaw, Styx’s young guitarist, heard his motor sputtering and failing to turn over — and instead of calling a mechanic, he heard a song. “It sounded like a good riff to a song,” he said later, and he was right. That sputtering became the grinding opening of “Blue Collar Man (Long Nights),” the first single from 1978’s Pieces of Eight and one of the toughest records Styx ever made. It reached number 21 in the US that November and number 9 in Canada. But the numbers are the least interesting thing about it. The interesting thing is what the riff was carrying: the anger of a man standing in an unemployment line.
Shaw wrote the lyric for a friend — a railroad man who had been laid off and was spending his days in line at the unemployment office. “He was having to stand in line at the unemployment office,” Shaw recalled. “It just drove me nuts, because he’s like, ‘I wanna work! I don’t wanna be standing around here, asking for a handout…’ It really bugged him, and that was the inspiration for that song.” It is worth pausing on that: a rock star, at the height of arena-rock glory, writing a hit about the humiliation of wanting a job. In 1978, with the economy shuddering and the mills going quiet, it landed like a dispatch from the real world.
Pieces of Eight was Styx at full power — the follow-up to The Grand Illusion, recorded by a band that had learned to fill arenas and wanted the record to sound like it. “Blue Collar Man” was the opening shot, released as the first single in two different 7-inch formats, some pressed on translucent blue vinyl that has been tormenting collectors ever since. The title was almost literal: this was Styx in work clothes, sleeves rolled up. After the fantasy and theater of their previous records, here was something you could lean against. The long nights of the parenthetical were not romantic. They were the shifts nobody wanted and everybody needed.
The record itself is a machine. That boat-engine riff grinds through the whole song, over Dennis DeYoung’s keyboards and one of the band’s most muscular rhythm performances. Shaw sings it himself — he wrote it, after all — with a workingman’s snarl that was new for him. Styx had always been a band of two minds: DeYoung’s theater and Shaw’s rock and roll, and “Blue Collar Man” is Shaw’s side winning the argument for four minutes. It is the least fanciful thing on the album and, not coincidentally, the truest. You can hear a band that grew up in Chicago, in the shadow of the mills, remembering where it came from.
The song even got the full seventies promotional treatment: a promo video filmed by Bruce Gowers at the San Diego Sports Arena during a soundcheck. Gowers was the go-to director for bands who wanted to look like a big deal, and the clip does its job — the empty arena, the work lights, the band running through the song like it’s another shift. There is something perfect about filming a blue-collar anthem as a soundcheck. No audience, no glory, just the work. The video understood the song better than most videos understand their songs.
On the charts, “Blue Collar Man” did the respectable, unflashy business its subject would have approved of: number 21 in America, number 9 in Canada. It was not the biggest Styx single, but it may be the most respected — the one other musicians cite, the one that shows up on every serious list of the band’s best. There is a reason. Most arena rock was escapism; this was the opposite. It looked straight at the audience — the actual audience, the ones who worked the shifts and stood in the lines — and told them the band saw them. In a genre not known for its social conscience, that counted for a lot.
What gives the song its staying power is its subject’s dignity. Shaw’s friend didn’t want a handout; he wanted work. The song honors that distinction, and it honors it without condescension — no pity, no sermon, just a riff like a punch clock and a chorus like a promise. “Blue Collar Man” belongs to a small, honorable tradition of rock songs about labor, and it may be the only one whose central riff came from a piece of malfunctioning marine equipment. The boat engine didn’t know it was making art. Shaw did. That is the difference between noise and music: somebody listening.
Styx would go on to bigger hits and stranger concepts — robots, concept albums, the whole theater of the eighties. But “Blue Collar Man” remains the band’s most grounded moment, the song where the costumes came off and the work boots went on. It is no accident that it has aged better than most of its contemporaries. Fashion fades; work doesn’t. The mills that inspired it have mostly closed, the unemployment lines have moved online, but the feeling the song describes — the need to be useful, the fury of being idle — is permanent. Every generation gets its own version of the long nights.
And somewhere, the boat engine is still sputtering. That is the image to keep: Tommy Shaw, not yet a star, listening to a broken motor and hearing a hit — hearing, in the sound of something failing to start, the sound of men who desperately wanted to. “Blue Collar Man” is three and a half minutes of that listening. It begins with a malfunction and ends with an anthem, which is as good a summary of rock and roll as anyone has ever managed. The long nights continue. The riff, thankfully, does too.