Published on Mar 15, 2005
I like to think everybody has an album or three like this tucked
away on their CD shelf — you know, the ones that take about five
seconds to put you back in 10th grade, casting nervous glances
around the gym/dance floor, hoping against hope to avoid the
complete social humiliation that is the essence of the high school
experience.
Thanks to my early-’60s vintage, my personal references to this
sort of thing all date to the late ’70s, when AOR was king (at
least, everywhere that disco and punk weren’t). And while I
wouldn’t consider this particular album a classic by any means, it
does have some resonance for me and a lot of my peers.
For one thing, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and
Journey is one of the quintessential ’70s SF bands. Exiting the
1971-72 incarnation of Santana, keyboardist/vocalist Gregg Rolie
and guitar prodigy Neal Schon — who had joined Carlos’s group as a
lad of 16 — joined with bassist Ross Valory, drummer Aynsley
Dunbar and rhythm guitarist George Tickner (who would leave after
the first album) to form the founding lineup of Journey.
Over the course of 1975-1977, the band issued three albums with
Rolie handling lead vocals, as he had with Santana. Those early
Journey albums are adventurous discs, full of progressive-leaning
jazz-rock that continually showed promise but never quite caught
fire. As Stephen Thomas Erlewine aptly describes it in the
All-Music Guide, early Journey was “too mainstream for the
progressive audience and too unfocused for the pop audience.”
Infinity was thus set up to be the group’s last, best shot
at a breakthrough. With the professional stakes raised, the band
took a turn toward the mainstream from which they would never look
back.
The first step in their transformation was the recruitment of
new lead vocalist Robert Fleischman. Those less versed in rock
trivia are probably going “WTF” about now, since everyone knows
this album was Steve Perry’s debut as the voice of Journey, a title
he would claim for the next two decades. Yes, it was, but Perry was
actually a replacement brought in after things didn’t work out with
Fleischman. The transition was so sudden, in fact, that three songs
co-written by Fleischman made it onto the album.
The greatest strength of this album — besides the like-butter
meshing of Perry’s soaring tenor with Schon’s keening guitar lines
— is the one-two-three punch it opens with. “Lights,” “Feeling
That Way” and “Anytime” are arguably three of the best ten songs
Journey ever recorded — tight, energetic pop-rock numbers with
great harmonies, strong guitar work and memorable choruses. (Side
note: the ultimate “Lights” experience involves listening to it
sitting in a car at the top of the Marin Headlands looking down
over the Golden Gate Bridge and the city late at night… but
that’s another story for another time.)
“Feeling That Way” and “Anytime” actually functioned as a unit,
the former ending with a Perry-Rolie call-out that flowed right
into a Rolie-Perry answer. Their two voices — Perry’s high and
pure, Rolie’s lower and more lived-in — work together remarkably
well on these two cuts. The irony, of course, is that they both
probably would have preferred to sing solo, yet the results of
their forced marriage were magic.
Perry gets plenty of chances to shine here on rock numbers like
the AOR standard “Wheel In The Sky,” which also features a dynamic
arrangement and a particularly sharp, twisty, echoing solo from
Schon. Interestingly for a band that would become known for its
ballads, though, Journey didn’t have them down yet here. “Something
To Hide” and “Patiently” foreshadow the slick sentimentality of
later hits like “Open Arms,” to be sure, but these cuts feel like
awkward adolescents, trying to make all the pieces fit and not
quite getting there.
The group has more fun with numbers like the edgy “La Do Da,”
featuring thundering Schon/Dunbar interplay under a nonsensical
lyric, and the playful “Can Do,” where Rolie and Perry take turns
singing lead on an energetic cut that gives the entire band
opportunities to strut a little.
Based on the change in direction, changes in personnel could be
expected. Surprisingly, though, Rolie wasn’t the next to leave —
Dunbar was. Rolie lasted two more albums, his role gradually
diminishing until he bowed out for an intermittently successful
solo career.
For a transitional album,
Inifinity carries an impressive amount of spark, as a band
still finding its feet lets loose with a sunburst of nervous
energy. With a solid set of songs and the production skills of Roy
Thomas Baker (Queen, Nazareth) on hand,
Infinity-era Journey was, fittingly, a band on the move.