It’s never a stretch to find Styx’s “Renegade” on a rock radio station or streaming playlist near you. It is, after all, part of the long-lived group’s A-list of hits.
But one place you will always hear it is between the third and fourth quarters of Pittsburgh Steelers home games at Acrisure Stadium, where it’s been used for many years as the fight song to fire up fans for the home stretch. That’s made Pittsburgh a “second home” for “Renegade” writer Tommy Shaw, who recalls that the tradition was started by team executive Mike Marchinsky at the suggestion of his wife.
“They were trying to think of something to play,” explains Shaw, who will celebrate the 50th anniversary of his joining Styx next year. ”And his wife came in and said, ‘Play ‘Renegade.’ You like ‘Renegade.’ Let’s play that.’ They played it in the next game and they were kind of in a pit and it fired it up and they won the game. So they’ve kept playing it ever since.”
And it’ll likely be heard into this year’s NFL playoffs during January, with the Steelers clinched for a spot and currently sitting atop the AFC North division.
Styx, of course, has been playing the thumping, dynamic track — which starts a cappella and explodes into furious hard rock — since it was released on 1978’s Pieces of Eight album. Ironically, though it’s filled with Les Pauls played by Shaw and bandmate James “J.Y.” Young, “Renegade” was something Shaw initially worked out on piano.
“I’m a guitar-playing piano player,” says Shaw, who’s known for playing a range of Gibson electric guitars (include a ’59 Les Paul reissue) and a Gibson J-185 12-string acoustic guitar. “I was really into Alan Parsons’ Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Edgar Allan Poe) album and there’s this song on it called ‘The Raven‘ which goes like this [sings the progression]. I’m not a piano player but I had a piano, so I figured out the notes, the triad, ’cause I wanted to play along with Alan Parsons.
“I got to a point where I could sit there and do it, and then I started messing around with it. I started moving them around like chess pieces, ’cause that’s what you do when you’re a songwriter; you take the parts and see if you can move ’em around.”
Shaw auditioned it for the band on keyboards when they began working on Pieces of Eight, at which point keyboardist Dennis DeYoung picked it up and took over. “We transposed it and it turned out to be an easy thing to play on guitar,” Shaw says.
“From that point on we just started carving on it as a song. The Styx vocal style worked out really well on it. And then somebody said, ‘Let’s rock it up when we get to the part that goes ‘the ‘jig is up.’
“And within minutes it became the song that you know.”
Forty-six years later, however, Shaw is still bit mystified about where the lyrics about an outlaw on the run came from. “I have no idea,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve never been arrested. There’s never been a bounty on my head like the guy in the song or any of that. It just felt good to sing those kinds of vowels and that sort of thing. That’s what I heard when it got to that part. My subconscious mind picked it up and ran with it, and it kinda wrote itself.”
“Renegade,” the third single from Pieces of Eight, reached number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1979 and has been used in the movies Freaks and Geeks and Billy Madison. It was also played between periods of the National Hockey Leagues’ 2011 NHL Winter Classic in Pittsburgh, while Major League Baseball pitchers David Bednar and Josh Hader used it as their game entrance music.
“There was nothing but good that came out of it,” Shaw notes, who also had an opportunity to thank “Renegade”’s inspiration in person.
“There was a party or something I went to and Alan Parsons was there and I got to meet him,” Shaw remembers. “He’s a large man, and I’m not a tall guy, so it was like a ‘How’s the weather up there?’ situation. But he was just so sweet and nice and so talented. I was really happy to meet him…and he even asked me to sing on his most recent album [2022’s From the New World].
“When I told him about ’Renegade,’ he said, ‘You know, Paul McCartney tells me I stole it from him! — ‘If I ever get out of here/Gonna give it all away,’ from ‘Band on the Run.’ If you take those pieces, you can make ‘Renegade’ too. It’s pretty funny.”
Shaw and his Styx mates are gearing up for next summer’s Brotherhood of Rock tour with REO Speedwagon’s Kevin Cronin and former Eagles guitarist Don Felder. The group is finishing up a new album — its first since 2021’s Crash of the Crown — that it plans to release during 2025. “It’s exciting,” Shaw says, adding. “It’s Styx and it’s daring and it’s emotional. It’s really interesting songs, and we have great communication within the band so once we get on a roll with something we really do get on a roll. We keep chipping away at it until we like everything about it.
“And then you just imagine playing those songs in a stadium or an arena full of people, or an amphitheater and having people like them and embrace them. It’s not a bad way to spend your time, y’know.”
