"I got a $1000 car and headed West", says Melissa Etheridge, revealing her first step like a real-life Dorothy leaving Leavenworth, Kansas and landing in Oz, which in Melissa's case was Southern California, a full five years before she would  top  the charts with her fourth album, September 1993's "Yes I Am" .

focusing on the  1978 release of "Pieces of Eight", former Styx member and co-founder Dennis DeYoung  confesses that, in spite of his major conceptual songwriting role on the band's 1977 breakthrough three million seller "The Grand Illusion", the highly-anticipated follow-up "Pieces of Eight" was not his finest hour. Styx guitarists/ songwriters/ singers Tommy Shaw and James Young stepped up creatively to fill the void on "Pieces of Eight", again selling triple platinum with the muscular "Blue Collar Man","Renegade","The Great White Hope","Queen of Spades", and "Sing for the Day".

Over the fifty+ years the perception seems to have become that Lynyrd Skynyrd had a date with destiny, an almost Shakespearean drama of dreams, aspirations, triumph, and tragedy to which all of us were immediately and keenly aware from the moment of "Pronounced" 's release. The late Gary Rossington dismissed that assumption as no more true than imagining Will Shakespeare did not toil, struggle, and starve in relative obscurity in his time.