Ok, I know this is gonna be a tough sell for a lot of you – maybe even all of you – but I want you to trust me when I say that the first couple of albums by Journey are Not That Bad. They’re really quite pleasant, in fact, if you have any sort of appreciation for prog/fusion. I’m not claiming that they’re the best example of the genre, or that they’ll change anyone’s mind about it. I like ‘em, anyway. That’s enough for me to drag you guys through the early Journey back catalog - kicking and screaming if it must be so, but this is really for your own good.
The Journey of 1975 was a very different animal indeed from the one infesting the airwaves of America ten years later. No Steve Perry, for one thing. You know, the guy who sings like a duck? He didn’t start lovin’, touchin’ and/or squeezin’ until ’77-‘78, so there was a time when the band made records with vocals that don’t make you want to pull your own ears off. Vox were originally handled by keyboardist Greg Rolie, who played that same role in the first line-up of Santana. Yep, that’s him singing “Black Magic Woman”.
Are you a little less frightened now?
Rolie and wunderkind guitar strangler Neal Schon were both ex-pats of Santana. In 1973, they hooked up with George Tickner (guitar) and the sublime Ross Valory (bass) of Frumious Bandersnatch. They borrowed drummer Prairie Prince from The Tubes and played around the Bay Area for awhile. Realizing that eventually they would need their own drummer, they recruited Aynsley Dunbar (Zappa, Jeff Beck, Bonzo Dog Band, etc.). According to wikipedia, they played their first gig with this line-up on February 5, 1974. So there’s your history lesson for the day.
Journey was released in 1975. Of the records we’ll be looking at today, it is the most straight up prog/fusion. Now, some of you might be wondering why I run those two genres together. It’s pretty simple, really: I have a hard time telling them apart. OK, prog is usually the more pompous and self-inflated of the two, but that’s not always a fair assessment. In the hands of, say, ELP or Yes, that’s very definitely the case. In other cases, I find it compelling, technically fascinating music. It’s everything punk was meant to kill, of course, yet I have found it possible to enjoy both for their very different qualities.
Back to the album. Well, let’s get this out of the way up front: the lyrics suck. Top to bottom, they pretty much stink on ice. Then again, anyone listening to fusion/prog/whatever you want to call it for the lyrics gets exactly what they deserve. It was 1975, and in those circles the cosmic trippy pseudo-deep was pretty much a given. C’mon, the name of the band’s publishing company was Weed High Nightmare. Something of a give-away, yes?
The mist is slowly lifting
The sound of life misplaced your mind
You're sitting, spellbound thru out time
I hope that you remember what you find
Singin' more of a lifetime
You put it down-all that I'm thinking
but take a long and distant search,
when all is right you take for granted
You can't look down but you're no worse.
Singin' ‘bout a lifetime, yeah
The countless visions that are drifting
The silver dreams you hate to lose.
There's no harm. We've all been waiting.
Well keep your faith. Do what you choose.
Singin' more of a lifetime
Fortunately for all concerned, the music carries the day. Sure it’s a little bombastic in places, a little overblown. Sometimes very much so. It’s headphone music, late at night one toke over the line sorta stuff. Times tend to run long (shortest cut here is also the poppiest, “To Play Some Music”, at 3:19; longest is the aforementioned “Of A Lifetime”, coming in just under seven minutes), time signatures shift, solos predominate. There are two instrumental tracks, “Kohoutek” (after the comet of the same name, billed as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see an amazing cometary body and, in the event, something of a dud) and the more introspective yet still rockin’ “Topaz”.
If there’s no room in your philosophy for the “widdly-wee” school of guitar playing, Neal Schon is not your guy and you will most likely despise these records. The influence of Carlos Santana is all over Schon’s playing, although he’s nowhere near as adept as his former boss. Schon’s solos tend to work the upper register of his fretboard, a fairly typical tactic of the time. The idea was that a lot of high, fast notes = intensity. Which, y’know… not always.
A lot of Rolie’s solos work along the same lines, really; he’ll just sorta lean on the right-hand keys at times. To his credit, though, he also adds some nice textures throughout, and keeps the whooshing synths to a minimum. Not everybody at the time could say that.
What keeps things interesting for me, now as it did then, is the interplay amongst the rhythm section. Ross Valory has got to be one of the greatest underrated bass players of the rock era. Seriously. Even during the cheesefest years of the eighties, amongst all the crappy bubblegum going on up front you could always count on Valory to come up with an interesting bottom line. (The next time you’re trapped somewhere with no escape from the otherwise execrable “Don’t Stop Believin’”, try, in your last few moments of consciousness, to focus on the perfect foamy bassline he laid down.) And in the early days, he could play off of the tricksy drumming of Mr. Dunbar. He plays fills upon fills upon fills, without ever once straying into Neil Peart “my drumkit’s bigger than yours” territory. Between the two of them, they’re constantly pushing the song ahead, so that when Schon steps out for yet another solo there’s still some forward motion.
By the time they released their second album, Look Into The Future, in 1976, George Tickner had left the band. Coincidentally or not, the sound of the group took a turn – actually, a couple of turns. One was toward the sort of hard rock popular in the Bay Area at the time, typified by what Montrose was doing. While there’s no “Rock Candy” here, there are a couple of approximations in “She Makes Me (Feel Alright)” and “I’m Gonna Leave You”. This was hinted at with the final track on the previous album. “Mystery Mountain” is a sort of fusion take on Black Sabbath. No, really.
The other turn, which was less obvious at the time but sticks out now like a tarantula on a slice of angel’s food (apologies to Raymond Chandler), was toward a more pop sound. That’s actually tied to the first turn, now that I think about it, since that crunchy guitar sound was very much a pop noise of the time. You could easily tie leadoff track “On A Saturday Night” to this trend, as well as the cover of The Beatles’ “It’s All Too Much”. Rolie’s heavily-reverbed piano and churchy organ (Hammond B3? Something similar, anyway) shine throughout, and Dunbar’s relentless attack gets scaled back a bit – he still does more than simply keep time, but on a somewhat smaller canvas.
The fusion elements are still in play, especially on the jazzy (with power chords) “Anyway”. What prog there still is is heavily spiced with hard rock. “Look Into The Future”, probably the best song on either of these albums, is full of portentous swelling keyboards and guit. chords ‘o doom pushing the stoned-and-alone existential lyric (“Look into the future, where will I be / Space between the lives whatever will I see, yeah / How long will I wander before I really know / What I'm here to do and where I have to go”) through the roof. That description alone will probably scare off 90% of you, and that’s my fault. Writing about music really is like dancing about architecture sometimes. I find the song a lot of fun to listen to, but to someone who’s come of age since punk I imagine it sounds impossibly baroque. “To each, their own”, said the farmer as he kissed the pig.
When I play this music for Science Girl, although she gives a tentative OK to “Look Into The Future”, for the most part all she hears is prog pomp and cliché. And that’s a fair cop, I suppose. It’s not something that’s going to appeal to everyone. When I made the transition from AM radio pop to FM in the early 70s this was the sort of thing that got played, so for me it’s a reminder of the experience of having my boundaries expanded. In our household, we heard that Top 40 pop on the radio, but the records that got played were either post-bop jazz (occasionally) or Bakersfield country (most of the time). For me, that prog/fusion axis played right into the expectations founded in both pop rock and jazz. I dunno. Perhaps if you haven’t had that same experience, early Journey won’t have the same resonance for you.
Look, I dig the Stooge-esque hard/loud/fast/leave-you-bleeding-in-a-ditch approach to rock as much as anyone, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy the occasional overblown rock epic, too. If that blows my cred, …oh well. I don’t find the term artrock to be the epithet so many other do; I think you could just as easily apply it to Wire or Mission of Burma as you could Can or King Crimson or Roxy Music. Or, to a slightly lesser extent, Journey.
With their next album, 1977’s conveniently titled Next, the prog and fusion were even more deeply buried. I’m not gonna do an actual review since I don’t have a copy of it to hand, but my memories are such that I feel confident in saying that it wasn’t too far a leap from Next to Infinity and the mediocre bubblegum crapfest of the Steve Perry era.
Perry fired Dunbar in ’79 and Valory in’85 or ’86; Rolie had bailed on his own in 1980. Art wasn’t really much of a concern by then.
What hits were on those first four Albums? Oh none that's right they didn't have a hit until Perry was the frontman.....Boy he must really suck if they hit the big time with him in the band.....Wow And they also have had NO hits since he left...YEP GREAT Band without Perry.....
Posted by: isladybug | January 29, 2007 at 05:20 PM
Well, isladybug, if "hits" were any indication of quality you might have something there. As it is...
Posted by: bmarkey | January 29, 2007 at 05:41 PM
My daughter has recently discovered Journey, and can't get enough of it...although she did ask...."How could you handle looking at that guy in those tight jeans, Mom? That's just gross!"
Posted by: Freedom Girl | January 31, 2007 at 07:34 AM