I like to think everybody has an album or three like this tucked
\naway on their CD shelf — you know, the ones that take about five
\nseconds to put you back in 10th grade, casting nervous glances
\naround the gym\/dance floor, hoping against hope to avoid the
\ncomplete social humiliation that is the essence of the high school
\nexperience.<\/p>\n
Thanks to my early-’60s vintage, my personal references to this
\nsort of thing all date to the late ’70s, when AOR was king (at
\nleast, everywhere that disco and punk weren’t). And while I
\nwouldn’t consider this particular album a classic by any means, it
\ndoes have some resonance for me and a lot of my peers.<\/p>\n
For one thing, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and
\nJourney is one of the quintessential ’70s SF bands. Exiting the
\n1971-72 incarnation of Santana, keyboardist\/vocalist Gregg Rolie
\nand guitar prodigy Neal Schon — who had joined Carlos’s group as a
\nlad of 16 — joined with bassist Ross Valory, drummer Aynsley
\nDunbar and rhythm guitarist George Tickner (who would leave after
\nthe first album) to form the founding lineup of Journey.<\/p>\n
Over the course of 1975-1977, the band issued three albums with
\nRolie handling lead vocals, as he had with Santana. Those early
\nJourney albums are adventurous discs, full of progressive-leaning
\njazz-rock that continually showed promise but never quite caught
\nfire. As Stephen Thomas Erlewine aptly describes it in the
\nAll-Music Guide, early Journey was “too mainstream for the
\nprogressive audience and too unfocused for the pop audience.”<\/p>\n
\nInfinity<\/i> was thus set up to be the group’s last, best shot
\nat a breakthrough. With the professional stakes raised, the band
\ntook a turn toward the mainstream from which they would never look
\nback.<\/p>\n
The first step in their transformation was the recruitment of
\nnew lead vocalist Robert Fleischman. Those less versed in rock
\ntrivia are probably going “WTF” about now, since everyone knows
\nthis album was Steve Perry’s debut as the voice of Journey, a title
\nhe would claim for the next two decades. Yes, it was, but Perry was
\nactually a replacement brought in after things didn’t work out with
\nFleischman. The transition was so sudden, in fact, that three songs
\nco-written by Fleischman made it onto the album.<\/p>\n
The greatest strength of this album — besides the like-butter
\nmeshing of Perry’s soaring tenor with Schon’s keening guitar lines
\n— is the one-two-three punch it opens with. “Lights,” “Feeling
\nThat Way” and “Anytime” are arguably three of the best ten songs
\nJourney ever recorded — tight, energetic pop-rock numbers with
\ngreat harmonies, strong guitar work and memorable choruses. (Side
\nnote: the ultimate “Lights” experience involves listening to it
\nsitting in a car at the top of the Marin Headlands looking down
\nover the Golden Gate Bridge and the city late at night\u2026 but
\nthat’s another story for another time.)<\/p>\n
“Feeling That Way” and “Anytime” actually functioned as a unit,
\nthe former ending with a Perry-Rolie call-out that flowed right
\ninto a Rolie-Perry answer. Their two voices — Perry’s high and
\npure, Rolie’s lower and more lived-in — work together remarkably
\nwell on these two cuts. The irony, of course, is that they both
\nprobably would have preferred to sing solo, yet the results of
\ntheir forced marriage were magic.<\/p>\n
Perry gets plenty of chances to shine here on rock numbers like
\nthe AOR standard “Wheel In The Sky,” which also features a dynamic
\narrangement and a particularly sharp, twisty, echoing solo from
\nSchon. Interestingly for a band that would become known for its
\nballads, though, Journey didn’t have them down yet here. “Something
\nTo Hide” and “Patiently” foreshadow the slick sentimentality of
\nlater hits like “Open Arms,” to be sure, but these cuts feel like
\nawkward adolescents, trying to make all the pieces fit and not
\nquite getting there.<\/p>\n
The group has more fun with numbers like the edgy “La Do Da,”
\nfeaturing thundering Schon\/Dunbar interplay under a nonsensical
\nlyric, and the playful “Can Do,” where Rolie and Perry take turns
\nsinging lead on an energetic cut that gives the entire band
\nopportunities to strut a little.<\/p>\n
Based on the change in direction, changes in personnel could be
\nexpected. Surprisingly, though, Rolie wasn’t the next to leave —
\nDunbar was. Rolie lasted two more albums, his role gradually
\ndiminishing until he bowed out for an intermittently successful
\nsolo career.<\/p>\n
For a transitional album,
\nInifinity<\/i> carries an impressive amount of spark, as a band
\nstill finding its feet lets loose with a sunburst of nervous
\nenergy. With a solid set of songs and the production skills of Roy
\nThomas Baker (Queen, Nazareth) on hand,
\nInfinity<\/i>-era Journey was, fittingly, a band on the move.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":26977,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5696],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-38289","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-journey","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=38289"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=38289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}