1981 · Behind the Songs
Tommy Shaw’s barstool philosophy — and the video that rode the MTV wave.
The song was born in a bar in Niles, Michigan. Tommy Shaw has never made a secret of it: the inspiration for “Too Much Time on My Hands” came from his experiences nursing drinks and watching the hours dissolve in a Michigan barroom. The lyric sketches its hero in two lines — a man who has “given up hope for the afternoon soaps / and a bottle of cold brew” — unemployed, unmoored, with nothing to spend but time. It is the most ordinary subject in the world, and Shaw turned it into the biggest hit he ever wrote for Styx: number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the week of May 23, 1981, number 2 on the Top Rock Tracks chart, number 4 in Canada.
The song was the second single from Paradise Theatre, Styx’s tenth album — the grand concept record about a Chicago movie palace, and the band’s fourth consecutive multi-platinum LP. Dennis DeYoung’s vision dominated the album, but “Too Much Time on My Hands” was Shaw’s moment: he wrote it, sang it and played the stinging lead-guitar solo. It remains his only Top 10 single as a writer and vocalist with Styx. In a catalog full of DeYoung’s theatrical epics, it stands out for its modesty — no concept, no costume, just a man in a bar with too much time. Sometimes the smallest frame holds the biggest picture.
Then MTV happened. When the music-video channel launched in August 1981, “Too Much Time on My Hands” was one of the few videos actually available to play — and play it they did, in heavy rotation. The song found a second life as a visual object: Shaw and the band mugging through a surreal, slightly deranged clip that matched the lyric’s woozy boredom beat for beat. For a song about having nothing to do, it suddenly had everything to do — it was on television all day. The video didn’t just sell the single; it introduced Styx to an audience that had never bought an album, and it kept the song alive long after the charts moved on.
The critics heard what MTV saw. Record World praised “Tommy Shaw’s vocal” as “a perfect vehicle for this message about modern man’s boredom,” and noted the track’s “brisk beat and winding guitars.” It is a precise description. The song moves — it never drags, never wallows — and that motion is the joke and the point: a song about stagnation that refuses to stand still. Shaw’s guitar winds through the whole thing like a man pacing the length of the bar, and the chorus lands like a shrug that means everything. Boredom, it turns out, has a beat. You can dance to it.
The bar in Niles, Michigan, deserves its footnote in rock history. In 1981, the industrial Midwest was hurting — plants closing, shifts vanishing, men with too much time and too little money. Shaw didn’t write a protest song; he wrote something truer, a character study of the hours themselves. The afternoon soaps, the cold brew, the slow dissolve of a day with nowhere to go. It is the same territory Bruce Springsteen was mapping on Nebraska, rendered as a pop single. Styx, the theater-rock band, had accidentally made the most realistic record of their career — in a bar, in Michigan, between drinks.
The song’s afterlife has been almost as strange as its birth. In 2016 — thirty-five years after MTV put it in rotation — Jimmy Fallon and the Roots performed a shot-by-shot reenactment of the video on The Tonight Show, with Styx’s blessing and participation. It was a loving joke and a genuine tribute: the clip had become iconic enough to parody, which is another way of saying it had become part of the language. A song about boredom, born in a Michigan bar, had achieved immortality twice — once on the charts, once on television. Not bad for a slow afternoon.
For Shaw, the song must carry a particular sweetness. He joined Styx as the young gunslinger, the new guy with the rock and roll heart, and for years he watched DeYoung’s epics define the band. “Too Much Time on My Hands” was his answer — not a concept, not a suite, just three and a half minutes of observed life, and it became his biggest moment with the band. There is a lesson there for every songwriter: write what you see. Shaw saw a bar in Niles, Michigan. He saw the men in it, the hours in it, himself in it. He wrote it down. The rest is rotation.
And so the song plays on — in the bar in Niles, wherever it is now; on classic-rock radio, where it has never left; on YouTube, where the video’s strange images keep finding new eyes. “Too Much Time on My Hands” is that rare thing: a hit about nothing happening, written by a man watching nothing happen, that made everything happen. It gave Tommy Shaw his Top 10. It gave MTV one of its first staples. It gave the rest of us a phrase for those afternoons when the soaps are over, the brew is cold, and the hours won’t move. We have all been in that bar. Shaw just had the sense to bring a guitar.
The Paradise Theatre — the real one, the Chicago movie palace the album was named for — is long gone, demolished like so many of the era’s grand rooms. But its namesake album’s least theatrical song endures, playing in bars that look a lot like the one in Niles. That is the final joke, and the final truth: the concept album about a vanished theater produced a hit about a bar that could be anywhere. The theater fell. The bar remains. And somewhere in Michigan, the afternoon soaps are still on, the brew is still cold, and Tommy Shaw’s three and a half minutes are still telling the truth about it.