The components of Journey in 1981, the year of the 'Escape' edition, posing with the letters sent by their followers.
From left: Ross Valory (bass), Jonathan Cain (keyboards), Neal Schon (bottom, guitar), Steve Perry (vocals) and Steve Smith (drums) .Roger Ressmeyer / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images
The critic received him with reluctance and contempt. Deborah Frost rated it in
Rolling Stone
magazine
in October 1981 with two stars out of five. He argued it like this:
"Escape
is not a success because it's good, but because it belongs to a specific era where bands like Journey can't do anything wrong." Or: "They are sweet and easy songs." Or: "When heroes are hard to find, the first thing you'll see is braggarts." It was not the only publication that sharpened the knife before
Escape
, a work considered "pompous, commercial and with letters for adolescents who do not want to grow up." Four decades later (it was published in July 1981) the viciousness has turned into benevolence sometimes if not the opposite, praise and recognition.
"Escape
is the best melodic rock album of all time", the music writer Paul Elliot, a regular in publications such as
Classic Rock, Mojo
or
Kerrang!
and author of
101 iconic rock, heavy metal and hard rock albums
(Blume).
Escape
is one of those albums that many people secretly enjoyed, worried about something like: "It's not going to be that someone thinks I like it."
It reached number one in sales and shipped 20 million copies, but it remained off the radar of the musical elites.
It was given some visibility when the English term
guilty pleasure
became popular
, something that is enjoyed even if it is not considered high culture.
Since then it has been considered fun and cool for someone with sophisticated desires to expose their guilty pleasures without blushing.
Steve Perry at a Journey concert in Chicago in August 1979. Paul Natkin / Getty Images
But
Los Sopranos
arrived
and pushed the Journey album to another dimension, a category of work to be vindicated for its quality.
The final scene of the series (in 2007), when the four members of the family meet in a restaurant, is sustained with the piece that opens the album,
Don't Stop Believin '
, chosen by Tony Soprano in a small machine where songs are selected.
The creator of the series, David Chase, justified it like this at the time: “There were three songs in dispute, and
Don't Stop Believin '
was the one I liked the most.
I think it's a great
rock and roll song.
Music is very important to me in terms of the timing of the sequence, and its rhythm.
And this song dictates part of the rhythm ”.
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Journey's story has something of that of Kiss and also of Fleetwood Mac. With the former they share their obsession to succeed and, as a consequence, to compose songs for the greatest number of people to enjoy. With Fleetwood Mac they converge in their radical stylistic turn due to the arrival of new members. Journey emerged in 1973 in San Francisco (California) when two musicians from Carlos Santana's group, the keyboardist and singer Gregg Rolie and the guitarist Neal Schon decided to lead their own project. His first three albums ranged between progressive and
jazz-rock,
with long instrumental developments. After three jobs with little impact, their record company, CBS, required them to perform selling music, "or the contract is over."
They listened to the recommendations of the executives and took a radical turn: they hired melodic vocalist Steve Perry and offered commercial rock. It was called AOR (Adult Oriented Rock, Rock oriented to adults), refined rock with the filmed pythons, songs to be played on commercial stations, suitable for all audiences. With Perry's sugary voice, Journey began to climb the ranks. But the best was yet to come.
“The addition of keyboardist Jonathan Cain is critical to the success of
Escape.
The band had already proven that they could record superlative rock for radios and Cain was the missing piece. I remember an interview with Steve Perry where he described the first compositions with Cain. In a few days the two finished
Don't Stop Believin '
and
Open Arms ”,
explains Jon Hotten, an English writer and journalist, a regular on music magazines like
Kerrang!
or from
The Guardian
newspaper
.
Open Arms
inaugurated another genre that made many musicians millionaires, rock ballads. But not everything was molasses in
Escape.
Stone In Love
,
Escape,
or
Keep on Runnin 'all
sound like powerful rock, and
Mother, Father
, could win over early prog rock fans, if there were any left. The lyrics spoke of normal people chasing their desires. “She is a small town girl living in a lonely world. / He caught a train at midnight to go anywhere, ”says
Don't Stop Believin '
. Evocations of the American dream with layers of keyboards, crystal clear guitar solos and Perry's sensational tenor voice.
Escape
played incessantly on American radios and from then on the group only performed in ballparks for gigantic audiences. Other commercial station favorites, Foreigner, hit the stores with their album
4.
The AOR reigned supreme in America. Years before Bon Jovi, Motley Crüe or Guns N'Roses, Journey performed before massive audiences with a rock with many things in common with the bands that would come later.
Over time the perception of
Escape
has changed
.
“When you have a blockbuster album it inevitably gets stuck at the moment of release.
Escape
is archetypal from the early eighties.
He's had to wait until the people who bought it in their 20s turned 40 and 50 and became homesick to be vindicated.
Nostalgia is an incredibly powerful thing, ”says Hotten.
Elliot adds: “Journey, like all AOR bands, were considered uncool, not only by critics who loved punk and
art rock,
but also by fans of heavier rock like Black Sabbath.
But personally I have no problem saying that I love
Escape
and that
it is a masterpiece ”.
Journey photographed in New York in June 1979. From left to right, Neal Schon, Steve Smith, Steve Perry, Ross Valory and Gregg Rolie.
Michael Putland / Getty Images
Every success story has a failure attached to it.
After
Escape,
Steve Perry, the singer who came in to rescue the band, took control in an obsessive way, a matter that on some occasion he has come to recognize: “I wanted to control things in the group that were not within my competence, but I couldn't avoid it ”.
Clashes between Perry and one of the founders, guitarist Neal Schon, were frequent.
In 1984 the two released solo albums, a death sentence for the continuity of Journey.
In 1987 they parted ways without ads with a high degree of popularity. There was a failed reunion in 1995: After recording an album,
Trial by Fire
(1996), and with a packed concert schedule, Perry felt severe pain in his side that was diagnosed as a serious bone problem. He had to operate on the hip. Everything was suspended. A year and a half later, Schon and Cain got sick of waiting and decided to continue with another singer. Perry was against, but legally he could not do anything.
Since then, several vocalists have passed and the group continues to take advantage of the nostalgia fever today, now with Arnel Pineda, a Filipino singer who they selected after seeing him on YouTube leading a tribute band of (effectively) Journey. In 2019,
Classic Rock
magazine
summoned its specialists to select the 50 best AOR albums in history. The third with the most votes was
4,
from Foreigner; the second the Boston debut, and the first
Escape
. It is no longer ashamed to say that you like it.
