Some random thoughts on Journey’s 1981 blockbuster LP Escape:
1. Remember that final, 2007 episode of The Sopranos with the open ending that everybody hated, the one where Tony and family are sitting in the diner and you don’t know whether Tony gets whacked or not? Well, what pissed me off was not knowing whether Tony lived or died. What bugged me was that the booth jukebox was playing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Tony’s kid, a teen from the year 2007 who had never shown any symptoms of being a congenital idiot, never said “What is this shit?” Any normal rebellious teen male from the year 2007 would have said “What is this shit?” but Tony’s kid didn’t SAY shit. Ruined the entire episode for me.
2. I don’t think Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” is shit. I USED to think it was shit, thought it was shit for decades, but then something horrible happened, I had a brain aneurysm or something, and now I love it. I love it! This has happened to me with other bands and other songs and maybe it’s a function of growing old and senile but believe me, it’s disturbing. I’ve always considered myself a person of taste, although I’ve also always liked Black Oak Arkansas and Foghat while despising the likes of Patti Smith and The Clash, so that’s debatable. But Journey? Journey is no grey area. When a person tells me they like Journey I give that person the stink eye and write that person out of the Book of Life. Journey is the enemy.
3. On a completely random note, Escape’s cover falls into the great Boston/Electric Light Orchestra tradition of album covers with spaceships on them escaping Earth because who doesn’t want to escape Earth, especially if you’re a teen and your parents are hard-ons and school may as well be Leavenworth and what’s the point of growing up anyway? To get a job? To go bald and get married and STOP smoking pot? Life HAS to be better in another galaxy!
The idea itself is best expressed by Styx in their positively epic “Come Sail Away,” in which the teen listener is actually invited to climb aboard a spaceship and get the fuck up and out! See also Sun Ra and Ziggy Stardust and maybe even Alvin Stardust and the Amazing Stardust Cowboy—they’re all aliens come to Earth to save us here! That said the Stanley Mouse cover on Escape is definitely inferior to the Boston and ELO covers because the spaceship is a boring blur and it’s hard to tell if they’re even escaping Earth because Earth doesn’t look like Earth. I wouldn’t buy Escape for its cover. Boston’s albums, different story. The cover of their debut is the best album cover ever.
4. Why do people like the songs they like? I don’t know and I’m not sure the sciences can tell us. I know people whose musical tastes I respect who love the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I find this inexplicable, and more than a mite disquieting. And I’ll never understand why EVERYONE doesn’t love Sammy Johns’ “Chevy Van,” but guess what, they don’t! But more importantly, how is it that a person can hate a song their entire life and suddenly wake up one morning and like it?
Have their tastes grown more sophisticated? When it comes to a song like “Don’t Stop Believin’” the answer is an obvious no, because if it’s SOPHISTICATION we’re talking about, shouldn’t you suddenly find yourself loving the Mahavishnu Orchestra or giving up on rock music altogether to listen to top-shelf jazz or classical music? What would Glenn Gould, say, have done if he’d awakened one morning to find himself liking “Don’t Stop Believin’”? He’d have croaked on the spot!
So it’s not sophistication, or its opposite either, populism. I’m not becoming a populist because like I said before I already LOVE Black Oak Arkansas and I think the Backstreet Boys’ “Backstreet’s Back” is a gift from God! No, it just happens, it’s scary, but IT HAPPENS RARELY. That’s the key here. It never happens to the people I know. I seem to be some sort of one-in-a-million aberration. An unfortunate freak of nature.
Because one morning I woke up and while going about my daily business I heard “Don’t Stop Believin’” and instead of turning it off in disgust I continued to listen to it in awe. Something happened to me and whatever it is that happened to me falls, so far as I’m concerned, into the realm of the supernatural. Or maybe I’m just unlucky. Maybe I’m that guy who’s going to be killed by falling space debris. Although at this juncture I would consider that an act of mercy.
5. In college I had a dorm roommate who could do a dead-on Steve Perry imitation. It was positively uncanny. I would beg him not to do it but he couldn’t help himself because he was a big Journey fan and was proud of his freakish ability. Fortunately about halfway through the second semester I was thrown out of the dorms for conduct unbecoming a human being. I left whistling.
6. “Don’t Stop Believin’”—like all the songs on Escape—is bloated corporate AOR. It sucks. It’s absolutely brilliant. It’s enough to make you sick. I could listen to it all day long. Steve Perry pours heart and soul into the damn song and for years I wanted to punch him. Now I want to give him a big wet kiss and say “Thank you, Steve Perry. You are my hero.”
7. I have a Journey poster on the wall by my bookshelves. It’s for a 9 September show in Offenbach, Germany, one of the stops on their Departure to Europe World Tour ‘80, and I put it up about two years ago as a joke. Turns out the joke was on me. And I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t a case of what English teachers like to call “foreshadowing.” Did I seal my own doom the moment I hung that poster on my wall? Did I invite evil spirits into my home? I own a Pablo Cruise t-shirt. I wear it because I think it’s hilarious. Or did. Pre-Journey. Now I intend to burn it.
8. I haven’t been entirely truthful. “Don’t Stop Believin’” isn’t the first Journey song I suddenly found myself liking. That honor goes to “Wheel in the Sky.” But the circumstances were completely different. I’m a huge Killdozer fan, and in their song “The Pig Was Cool” a guy finds himself at a Journey concert and just as Journey begins “Wheel in the Sky” the guy hands a joint to the guy next to him who turns out to be a cop. But instead of busting our guy, the cop takes a big toke and says, “This is good shit!” And now every time I hear “Wheel in the Sky” I think of that cop and instead of turning off “Wheel in the Sky” I say “This is good shit!” It’s a case of liking by association, which is not the case with “Don’t Stop Believin’.” I will say something similar happened to me with Rush’s odious “Closer to the Heart,” but that’s a story for another time. All I’ll say for now is you may want to avoid Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube” video.
9. I turned on Escape expecting to hate every song on it except “Don’t Stop Believin’,” but that’s not what happened. It turns out that once you open the door, just a crack, on the Journey musical omniverse, you’re fucked. Whatever I’ve come down with, it seems to apply to Journey as a whole. In for a penny, in for the band’s whole goddamn oeuvre, that seems to be the way it works.
I anticipated death by treacle, but Escape is a goddamn hard rock masterpiece. Okay, so “Mother, Father” is full-on shlock and somehow manages to be even worse than you’d expect given that title, and “Still They Ride” is a slow crawl through the corporate rock sewer that will take you days to scrub off, and I’m talking about with one of those scrub brushes with the steel bristles that will leave you as pink and raw as a flayed pig. And power ballad “Open Arms” is nauseating, a belch from a mass grave of every terrible power ballad ever recorded that will send you running to the toilet to blow chunks of Steve Perry wimpitude. But otherwise, Escape is more fun than throwing a jury duty notice in the trash. And I never imagined you could have more fun than that.
10. The only non-rocker besides “Don’t Stop Believin’” that doesn’t make wish I’d gotten scalped at the Alamo (and nobody got scalped at the Alamo, that was the Battle of Little Bighorn) is “Who’s Crying Now,” which has some intangible factor that I associate with Fleetwood Mac that saves it from total bathos. The lush vocals should repel and would have repelled me before my transformation into Journey fan, but the guitar solo really is Fleetwood Mac soft rock of a superior order and while my mind is going “horseshit, horseshit, horseshit” my heart, the duplicitous bastard, is saying “Pretty, pretty good.” I obviously need a heart transplant.
11. As for the rockers I expected nothing, or make that less than nothing, from them, because Journey are from San Francisco and San Francisco is not a hard rock town but a corporate rock town and even the power chords of San Francisco are junior executives of major labels who go out for three-martini lunches and wear t-shirts that read “AOR Power.” In 1988, Kerrang! readers voted Escape the greatest AOR album of all time. This could easily be the biggest backhanded and most dubious compliment in the history of the world, but I doubt the voters saw it that way.
12. But the title track has these humongous power chords and if the drumbeat is “Eighties Standard” and the vocals are all wrong, too layered and feathery and overproduced and wimpy to boot, just as they are on all the rockers, the fact remains that the hard ones on Escape are hard indeed. “Dead or Alive” tears around the track faster than the Sex Pistols ever did, and if you don’t believe these bozos are wanted dead or alive for a minute (they’re not outlaws, they’re clock-punchers, and Perry shoots a man in PARIS of all places) so what?
Replace Perry’s vocals in “Stone in Love” and what you would have is mighty, mighty, because the guitars are righteous! Wild-eyed preachers warning of the End Times! “Keep on Running” is as good as Van Halen. Sure David Lee Roth has been castrated, and Eddie doesn’t play any gonad-twisting solos, but the solo you do get won’t attract horseflies! And “Lay It Down” is the best Smurf metal song I’ve ever heard this side of Bon Jovi or Def Leppard, and comes complete with lots of REAL GUITAR MAYHEM that if any other band had played it would have people like the old me swooning. And it never lets up!
13. Don’t even think of buying this album. You run the risk of listening to it and liking it and bursting into tears. I’m miserable, but in this case misery does not love company.
14. Intrigued (to say nothing of frightened) by what’s happened to me, I contacted Joseph Frang of the American Ear Sciences Institute in Borf, Iowa to discuss my case and to find out if it’s happened to others. “It happens, in very rare cases, yes,” he told me. “We’re still trying to figure out why. There could be neurological factors, still not understood, at work. Bad taste in a dormant state, just waiting for some unknown trigger to activate it. We had a woman come in who literally overnight found herself in love with the music of Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Tragic case. Lovely woman. Good as dead. Have you received a blow to the head? Kid shoot you in the ear with a bb gun recently? Drink a lot of Kombucha? Any travel to Liechtenstein? No to all of the above? Well then I’ll tell you what I told her. You’ve lost your goddamn mind. Nobody should be able to listen to Journey, much less ENJOY listening to Journey. That song of theirs ruined the final episode of The Sopranos for me.”
“Is there no hope?” I asked desperately.
“My expert opinion? You’re fucked,” he told me. “But don’t stop believin’.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
