You’ve heard of Journey? I advise you to stay home. That quip out of the way, please follow me to my anecdote: I spent one semester in college sharing a cement-walled dorm room with a guy who loved Journey. There are wrong kinds of love, and loving Journey is most definitely one of them.
But what really drove me over the bend was the fact that this guy could sing just like the singer from Journey, so that when I wasn’t actually listening to the guy from Journey singing Journey songs, my roomie was singing Journey songs in a voice that was like a body double of the voice of the guy from Journey. And sometimes, just to get my goat, my roommate and the guy from Journey would duet.
Ghastly it was. Every day I had to suppress an almost irrepressible urge to go Dostoevsky on his ass, and chop him into very small pieces with a very large ax. It would have taken some doing, chopping him into teensy little bits with such an unwieldy instrument, but I would have done it. He had it coming.
Anecdote over, allow me to usher you to today’s Exhibit A, Journey’s 1988 best-of collection, Greatest Hits. Please stand back. Do not let your fingers near the cage. Because Greatest Hits is dangerous. And I don’t mean dangerously awful, as I used to believe, but dangerously addictive. Once such AOR hits as “Lights,” “Feeling That Way,” and the immortal “Wheel in the Sky” caused me to retch on the record player. Well no longer. Now I sing along, just like my former roomie. I know, a sure symptom of rapid-onset dementia. Or perhaps the first sign of creeping senility. Life spares us no indignity, in the end.
Anyway. The LP. The rock snobs and pop elitists whom I’ve always clutched to my bosom are universally disgusted by Journey. Quipped my pal Rick, “The Journey of a thousand barfs beings with a single album.” While my pal Marc said, “Journey is a guaranteed bad trip.” As for my go-to rock critic pal Robert Christgau, he was reduced to looking at the positives: “… just think of how worse this might be: this top-ten album could be outselling Pyromania, or Flashdance, or even Thriller.” Small solace, that.
One might say that poking snotty fun at Greatest Hits is as easy as shooting Phish in a barrel. And one wouldn’t be wrong. They’re easy game for the likes of effete and impudent rock elitists. I’m not a true rock elitist because I love Lynyrd Skynyrd and think Foghat are horrendously underrated, but for the most part I behave like one. A friend was telling me just the other day how D. Bowie’s atrocious Let’s Dance was a good thing because it likely spurred new listeners to check out Bowie’s earlier work. And all I could say, snob that I am, was that my sort didn’t want Let’s Dance fans amongst our ranks. Trifling, the lot of them.
But back to Journey’s Greatest Hits. It includes songs from the band’s Golden Era, which archeologists date to the years 1978 A.D. to 1985 A.D. It includes, in case you’re interested, “Only the Young” from 1985’s Vision Quest soundtrack. It also includes the song “Ask the Lonely” from the soundtrack to 1983’s Two of a Kind. The latter featured John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. I mean, how can you go wrong? And you can’t go wrong with this collection either. There’s a reason it continues to sell approximately 500,000 copies per annum. People are idiots.
No, I didn’t mean that. What a meant to say is that songs that once horrified me with their well-manicured AOR sound and complete lack of humor now (1) not only amuse me with their complete lack of humor but (2) actually sound better to me, for reasons I find hard to put into words. Have they inexplicably become the tuning forks for one aged man’s pathetic nostalgia? Or did Journey actually produce some truly decent tunes that it took me years and some serious attitude adjustment to appreciate?
I suspect it’s a combination of the two. It started like this. Killdozer’s “The Pig Was Cool” reminded me of Perry, Schon, and Company with its great lyrics: “We were at the Journey show/The first three songs we were hanging low/The the band played “Wheel in the Sky”/Me and my babe started getting high.” And after that they think they’re being busted when all the cop in mufti next to them wants is a hit, but that’s largely irrelevant. The point I wish to make is that the song led to my, just as a lark mind you, turning on “Wheel in the Sky.” To laugh at, mind. But instead I liked the song. I cannot express to you the shame.
And this hair-raising effect occurred with other Journey songs as well. Listening to Greatest Hits on my stereo it occurred to me that “Lights”—a song I once hated with all my heart and soul—wasn’t so bad after all. And the same went for “Just the Same Way” and “Anytime.” On tunes with stupid titles like “La Do Da” they almost… kinda… rocked. Once you got used to Steve Perry’s annoying vocals, you… Frightened, I promptly turned off the stereo and made an emergency appointment with my psychiatrist.
But I didn’t need a rock’n’roll doctor to tell me I was suffering from a bad case of boogie-woogie pneumonia, because I wasn’t. I just had to own up to the fact that such Lovecraftian creations as “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’” and “Feeling That Way” simply didn’t nauseate me as they once did. My case was not fatal, forever. With most patients, the immune system is completely overwhelmed, and the poor dears are reduced to body-sized tear ducts by the treacle rock of “Patiently,” “Who’s Crying Now?” and (God help us) “Open Arms.” “Send Her My Love” has actually delivered several of them to that Great Journey Concert in the sky. I fortunately fall into a middle category, in which I find myself ambivalent about such schlock rockers as “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart.)”
Please don’t pity me. I’m in no pain. To echo Robert Christgau, worse things might have happened. I could be amongst those in the terminal ward. Here we have Red Cross nurses who kindly hook us up to intravenous versions of “Lights” and “Anytime.” We call them our angels. Occasionally one of us will summon the energy to climb from his bed late at night, stagger to the window, and say, and I wish I could tell you how much it hope it brings to us all, “I see it! The wheel in the sky keeps on turning!”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
C
