Skip to main content

Journey - E5C4P3

Journey
When Escape came out in the summer of 1981 Journey went from being big to HUGE. I first heard the band back in the summer of '78 when I was stuck in a forestry camp for the summer and one of the other kids had a copy of Infinity among his collection of summer tunes. I loved "Wheel in the Sky" even though the opening riff seemed to be an unabashed rip off of "Layla" and nobody seemed to mind or care. 

The band would follow up a year later with Evolution and then in 1980 Departure contained "Any Way You Want It" which was also featured in Caddyshack. That to me was pure ear candy. How could the bad ever top this?

insert
Escape would be the band's seventh album in as many years and would be the band's crowning achievement. Everything seemed to be in place for Journey, REO Speedwagon the year before had seemingly paved the way with their Hi Infidelity album and people were ready for what Journey was about to bring to the table. No, I'm not sleeping on Departure... that was a big album, REO delivered a HUGE record and when Escape was released it took off. I know that may not seem to make sense, but there really is a weird sort of logic that connects the dots between them. It's sort of like when Saturday Night Fever floated all those disco acts ... albeit briefly.

People tend to think of "Don't Stop Believin'" as the big hit from the record, and it was a hit and cracked the top 10 but "Who's Crying Now" and the ballad "Open Arms" were both bigger at the time. It's only a relatively recent (over the last couple of decades, but it feels recent) thing that "Don't Stop Believin'" got a second wind.

insert
This was also the record that for better or worse labelled Journey as a commercial behemoth and any street credibility was flushed down the crapper. Bunched in with Foreigner, REO Speedwagon and the other slick rock bands Journey was no longer a band to be taken seriously. It didn't help that it was the ballads that seemed to be the hits. Of course I loved Foreigner and Journey ... REO never had the legs for me, but I liked them for all that.

The reality is Journey was still taking chances and their brand of rock was still pretty cool. All you have to do is listen to songs like "Stone in Love" and the amazing "Mother, Father" to understand that Journey never really abandoned their fusion proggy roots. One could argue the success of their softer ballads led to a bit of internal strife. Styx had "Babe" and Journey had "Open Arms" and to the fans who wanted more rock these songs were the antithesis of what the bands were about.

back cover
This was the top of the mountain. After three triple platinum albums, which was already impressive, Escape would go on to sell ten million copies. This really was as good as it would get for the band. While this may not a perfect album but it's a pretty much the perfect Journey record. 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the 90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984 my (dearly departed, and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read just go back and skim it, I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off and on again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...
Post a Comment
Read more

Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell

File under: TLDR Note to the reader. First sorry, second not really, but I am sorry I don't have the ability to edit. Oh happy Valentine's day.  To celebrate let's take a gander at Meat Loaf's 1977 Bat Out of Hell. Over forty three million people disagree with me but for decades I thought this album was, and continues to be, one giant disappointment. I'll be the first to admit that despite decades of baggage the overwhelming power of nostalgia managed to erode even the hardest of convictions and I found that Bat Out of Hell was one of those albums I wanted to have in my collection, but I wasn't looking all that hard. It was an album I knew more about than I actually knew about. So at this moment in time I'm still holding firm on my long held opinion. But before I get into things, it's time for some meanderambling blurbage ... I remember seeing the cover when I was a kid and thinking it was the single greatest cover I had ever seen. What wonders were to b...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ...  It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...
Post a Comment
Read more