Journey, "Escape"

Ken takes the midnight train goin’ anywhere

, and

Jul 19, 2023

Ken’s Pitch:

We seem to be bored as a species. People used to invent and develop things that advanced humanity. Look no further than kid-favorite Tang, or those ridiculous mylar blankets that they hand out to the near-dead at the finish line of every marathon. Nowadays, we’re just putting quail eggs on a pizza and calling it a masterpiece. We tend to overthink things, we sometimes try too hard. It’s okay sometimes to just have a burger and fries and call it a day. And skip the truffle oil on the fries please. The only oil I want anywhere near my potato deliciousness is Wesson. I guess I’ve always been a bit of a simple man, more into Florence Henderson than Foie Gras.

In Boston (and by Boston, I mean anywhere in Eastern MA), we have a lot of burger joints, along with a lot of fine dining, and a lot of them have a burger or two on the menu. They range from relatively plain and forgettable, to a melt-in-your-mouth, run-home-and-post-a-five-star-yelp-review experience. Sometimes, the recipe for success is simply having the right ingredients and sticking to the script. As my English 101 professor used to say, “Keep It Simple Stupid”.

Journey isn’t an overly intricate band, and their seventh album Escape is as straightforward as they come. Steve Smith (even the drummer’s name fits the mold) is a competent timekeeper and doesn’t take a lot of creative liberties, a quality I admire in a drummer. The keyboard and bass work by Jonathan Cain and Ross Valory perfectly and delicately compliment the main feature, which are Steve Perry’s vocals and Neal Schon’s lead guitar.

Journey didn’t need a Neil Peart, or a Jimmy Page, or a Rick Wakeman, all among the absolutely best there has ever been. They embraced who they were as individuals and what they could be as a cohesive team. We all know the result, and we know it because Escape gave us 3 of the biggest hits of the 1980’s, including one of GenX’s most definitive tracks, “Don’t Stop Believin’”. If you take “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Simple Minds’ “(Don’t You) Forget About Me” away from GenX, all we’re left with from our childhood are the indelible scars left behind from being latch-key kids, and lawn darts…I’m not sure which hurt more.

I’m not going to defend every song on Escape, there are some questionable choices in “Lay It Down” and “Dead or Alive”. But when you throw down 10 tracks, and 4 of them crack the Billboard Top 20, and 3 of the 4 become massive hits that everyone between the ages of 35-60 knows every single word to, you have a recipe that should end up on the shelves of the Newbury St Collection. They may not have the musical equivalent of a Michelin star, but they pack the house every night and it’s impossible to get a reservation. Who’s crying now?

Mitch’s Response:

Journey's Escape was a huge record in my house. One could even say it was a smash hit.

It's almost hard to remember now, living in this era of tech-enabled overstimulation, but there was literally nothing to do when we were kids. We were always bored, or complaining about being bored, or getting yelled at (for complaining about being bored). As a result, my older brother Steve and I engaged in our favorite pastime: fight club. There was only one rule of fight club, and that was "no blood". The goal of fight club, obviously, was to get the other guy yelled at by our Mom, with some variation of "you're gonna be sorry when your Dad gets home..."

So one day my Dad gets home after about 13 hours of working and commuting, and has to deal with the two bored, little assholes in his house. This time it's Steven who's crying now, and my Dad comes to lay it down: give up your favorite record for a week as punishment. Steven adamantly refuses to let go of Journey's Escape, so with open arms my Dad fakes left and goes right to grab the record. Steven tries to change the momentum with a Marcus Smart-esque flop and still they ride, fighting for possession, and they both drop to the floor like a stone in love. Boom! Crash! Smash! The record suddenly breaks into countless pieces, looking like its shattered bug alien cover art, and I keep on runnin', and I don't stop believein', that I can escape the scene of the crime before our Mother, Father demands to see us both dead or alive.

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Is the music on Journey's Escape worth so much drama and trouble? I'd say yes. Sure, there's plenty of filler on this album, but the good stuff is really, really good. Not many albums have four songs as incredible as "Don't Stop Believin'", "Stone in Love", "Who's Crying Now", and "Open Arms". Steve Perry and Neal Schon are both at the top of their game, and the album's sound is big, bright, and anthemic.

Best of all, it's the official soundtrack to the Blum Family Fight Club.

Pitch Successful (sending good vibes to legendary cover artists Stanley Mouse)

CJ’s Response:

Self-awareness is a rare thing among rock bands. Success can do that to you. You make millions of dollars, people fawn all over you and guilt-free sex is offered to you on a nightly basis. When people ask if you prefer the black or the red caviar on the pre-show buffet, you begin to think that you are magical. That whatever you do will somehow work. That if your lead singer takes off, you’ll still be the same hit-making machine. Journey is the rare band who realized what they had and clutched onto it, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, like “grim death”.

Oh sure, they dicked around with a few other lead singers when Steve Perry left. But then Neal Schon came to his senses.

“Neal”, he thought to himself, “you’ve got mortgage payments on a couple of houses, a fistful of alimony payments and a bunch of kids (and maybe a few mistresses) to put through college. If you find a guy who sounds like Steve Perry, you can play the same ten songs for the rest of your natural life and people will pay handsomely to see you do it.”

So Neal dialed up the YouTube, found himself a young man named Arnel Pineda doing a note-for-note cover of “Faithfully” and began stuffing his Roth IRA like a Thanksgiving turkey.

Now, as Neal, Arnel, Jonathan Cain and maybe Randy Jackson (whom I met in the parking lot of a recording studio in Culver City at 3am–good story for another time) criss-cross the country playing fairs, festivals and Freemason picnics, they can lean heavily on the meaghits from Escape to fill their setlist.

I can’t deny this album even if I tried. “Don’t Stop Believin’” is so huge that it almost destroyed The Sopranos franchise just as it faded to black. “Stone in Love” is still one of my favorite summer songs. And “Open Arms” duked it out with “Stairway” and “Best of Times” as the preferred high school dance close-out song for most of my wonder years.

I will say that the difference between the highs and lows on this album is akin to the difference in altitude between Mt. Everest and the Mariana Trench. If “Don’t Stop Believin’” is the pinnacle, then surely “Mother, Father” is the nadir. It may be the worst song we’ve covered to date. And that includes all of Mitch’s country albums.

No matter, though. Escape is safely enshrined on Newbury St.

Keep on runnin’, Arnel. Neal has a balloon payment on his Maybach coming up.

Pitch Successful (Randy actually called me “dawg”.)

Ken’s pitch was successful, and Journey will finally reach the culmination of their career journey with enshrinement in the Newbury St. Collection. What’s your take on Journey, Escape, and tuxedo jackets? What Top 20 album from 1982 would you have pitched? Please let us know in the comments.

Exile on Newbury St.

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