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Journey: The Great Escape

It’s not just the greatest AOR album ever made, Journey’s Escape also flies high outside the genre as one of the greatest albums in rock

Journey in 1979

Don't Stop Believin' Stone in Love Who's Crying Now Keep On Runnin' Still They Ride" Escape Lay It Down Dead or Alive Mother, Father Open Arms

Almost every album that comes to define its genre feels in a way like it has always existed. It coalesces various elements – a sound, a feeling, a particular moment in time – and makes them solid. Think of Nevermind or Appetite For Destruction or T he Dark Side Of The Moon , and they seem to hold within them the seeds of what the genre is and where it might go. 

It’s the same with Escape . You can argue forever as to whether it is AOR’s greatest album, or even if it’s Journey ’s best ( Raised On Radio is superior in many ways), but it is inarguably the genre’s defining record. Its grip on the culture has grown stronger through the years. 

From the moment that Don’t Stop Believin ’ was used as the final piece of music in The Sopranos to the endless cover versions of Open Arms on American TV talent shows, Escape has become a piece of music that Jonathan Cain said “has lasted somehow. The songs are bigger than we are.” 

Cain, formerly of The Babys, was Journey’s missing piece. When he replaced Greg Rolie, the band left behind their vestigial jazz-rock leanings and refocused on the songs. For a record as apparently seamless as Escape , Journey were an interesting factional mix, cliquey and at times suspicious of one another. 

They were held together by the force of personality of Herbie Herbert, the manager who had brought Steve Perry to the group almost four years before. Ever since, Perry had been engaged in a battle for the spotlight with Neal Schon, around whose guitar playing Journey had originally been built. The addition of Cain, who quickly fell into a writing partnership with Perry, increased the creative tension: “The friction brings the heat,” as Perry described it. 

“When I joined,” Cain said, “I was able to help put the pieces more solidly together. “I think I maybe oiled it and everything flowed better. It was that mix of different personalities – they had a kind of swagger to what they did that I really liked. Neal’s guitar playing was incredible. Perry’s voice was in its prime. Steve Smith and Ross Valory laid it down. They were a machine. 

"I remember they had this rehearsal warehouse they used in Oakland, and the first time I went there all of my gear was set up. I’d never had that before. The band sounded like a rocket taking off.” 

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Cain was a conduit between Schon and Perry. “Neal had a lot of rock’n’roll ideas that I would go through and maybe tweak a little and present them to Steve in a more nuanced way. Neal had a lot of unstructured melody in his head. I could sometimes add to those melodies and all of a sudden Steve would know what to do with them.” 

On their first day of writing together, in the attic of their road manager’s apartment in San Francisco, Perry played the melody for Who’s Crying Now on a cassette he’d been storing his ideas on, and within an afternoon the song was written. 

“We had an instant chemistry,” said Cain. At Perry’s house they came up with Open Arms from a piano part that John Waite had rejected for The Babys. 

“Too bad for John Waite,” Perry remarked after hearing it. 

“I think it was probably emotionally not so comforting for Neal to see us writing together,” says Perry. “But then we wrote with Neal, too. The Don’t Stop Believin ’ stuff we all came up with together. There was a lot of stuff he was involved with co-writing – Stone In Love, with that great guitar riff, that one came from Neal.” 

“Neal brought the fire and attitude,” Cain said. “I wasn’t conscious of just writing with Steve or just with Neal. It was about the three of us. Together we made it Journey.” 

Journey rode their creative high, yet even the most cursory listen to Escape reveals the aural perfectionism that Perry in particular obsessed over. They were all sound freaks, none more so than the singer, whose knowledge of recording techniques and reproduction were matched only by his desire to get down on tape the things he was hearing in his head. 

He recalled spending two days in the studio getting the right ‘A’ sound on the ‘arms’ line of Open Arms , and trying to keep his spectacular longer notes on Don’t Stop Believin’ exactly in tune.

Perry dictated the type of vinyl used for the first pressings of the record, which came out in July 1981, just two weeks after Foreigner’s 4 . Tied by serendipity, those two albums would produce AOR’s high-water mark.

Journey were touring America by private plane and selling out football stadiums years before Bon Jovi and Guns N’ Roses surfed the same wave, and they encountered all of the same rock-star strains and excesses. I once asked Jonathan Cain how Escape had affected them.

“Well,” he said, “I got divorced, Steve broke up with Sherrie [Swafford, the Sherrie of Oh Sherrie ], families started having an impact, people wanted to do different things. Frontiers [released 20 months later] was great – I call Escape and Frontiers ‘the twins’. But it became all-consuming. It couldn’t sustain.”

History has been kind to Escape . As far back as 1988 the readers of Kerrang! voted it AOR’s greatest album, and there it remains, probably in perpetuity. But beyond the confines of genre it has enjoyed an afterlife bathed in nostalgia for the version of American youth that it captured, a time long gone except in the memory.

There, Escape lives.

Jon Hotten

Jon Hotten is an English author and journalist. He is best known for the books  Muscle: A Writer's Trip Through a Sport with No Boundaries  and  The Years of the Locust . In June 2015 he published a novel,  My Life And The Beautiful Music  (Cape), based on his time in LA in the late 80s reporting on the heavy metal scene. He was a contributor to Kerrang! magazine from 1987–92 and currently contributes to Classic Rock . Hotten is the author of the popular cricket blog, The Old Batsman , and since February 2013 is a frequent contributor to The Cordon cricket blog at Cricinfo. His most recent book, Bat, Ball & Field , was published in 2022. 

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Ultimate Classic Rock

How Journey Tweaked Their Lineup and Went Supernova With ‘Escape’

Journey thought they were on the verge of something big in 1980. And they were – but only after a period of sudden adversity.

Their first three studio albums with Steve Perry had each sold millions, followed by another multi-platinum live project, Captured . “The band had already exploded on tour, and the Captured record was exploding and the energy on that record was something you couldn’t deny,” co-founder Neal Schon told Goldmine in 2013. “And so, I felt that at any point that whatever we came with, as long as there were good songs, it was going to be big.”

But  Gregg Rolie , who'd started Journey with Schon after both left Santana , wanted out. When it came time to add a new studio cut to Captured , they had to turn to a sessions player, Steve Roseman. "The Party's Over (Hopelessly in Love)" went Top 40, but Journey was abruptly in disarray.

Certainly nothing pointed to the successes of Escape , which arrived on July 31, 1981 after the addition of Rolie's replacement,  Jonathan Cain . Yet, it became Journey's first-ever No. 1 album amid an amazing run of four Top 20 hit singles, including "Don't Stop Believin',' "Who's Crying Now," "Open Arms" and "Still They Ride" – along with the rock-radio favorite "Stone In Love."

"I have to attribute that to Jonathan coming in and joining the writing team," Perry told the New Haven Register in 2012. "Jon had so many creative ideas, and he and I did a lot of lyrics back then, too. It just turned another corner ... though at the time it felt like we were just doing more music the same way we always had. But time has shown it to be more of a quintessential album than some of the others."

Watch Journey Perform 'Stone in Love'

Cain, who favored a modern synthesizer sound versus Rolie's sturdy Hammond B-3, had been featured on a pair of Babys albums released in 1980 before joining Journey. They met when the Babys served as opening act on a tour in support of Journey's 1980 studio effort Departure .

Something immediately clicked between Cain, Perry and Schon. Escape was made with remarkable efficiency, and cost just $80,000 in total. Perry, whose mantra was reportedly "time is money," rarely did more than two takes. Despite the dramatic shift in sound, the album seemed to glide onto store shelves.

“When Jon came in, he brought in a whole different thing,” Schon told Goldmine. “It was like, he’s an accomplished songwriter ... and an accomplished keyboardist, a classical keyboardist like on piano. Gregg was more of a bluesy guy, someone from a B3/Jimmy Smith school of organ playing, which was a completely different thing. So we went more with Jon ... and there was always more of a classical vein to what we were doing, as opposed to what we were doing with Gregg.”

They emerged with a new signature song. No, not " Don't Stop Believin' ." In fact, back then, "Open Arms" – a song that set a template for '80s power ballads – was considered the album's stand-out single. The track soared to No. 2, and remained there for six weeks in early 1982. It had followed the opening single success of "Who's Crying Now," which topped out at No. 4.

In between was "Don't Stop Believin'," a single that barely crept into the Top 10. Today, it's undoubtedly the best-known thing about Escape , a track that became the adopted anthem of not one but two World Series teams (2005's White Sox and 2010's Giants), a fixture on TV (including memorable appearances on The Sopranos and Glee ), and one of the best-selling catalog items ever on iTunes. The song actually roared back into the Top 10 twice in the U.K., almost 30 years after its initial release.

Listen to Journey Perform 'Don't Stop Believin"

"Don't Stop Believin'" had much humbler beginnings. Cain brought the chorus melody and lyric into a rehearsal for the album being held at an Oakland warehouse. “The phrase came from my father,” Cain told the New York Post in 2010. “I had a tough time trying to get down the road in the music business, and he used to tell me that stuff, 'Don’t stop believing.'" Perry asked for some "rolling piano" to get things started, and he and Schon started tracking the music. That arpeggiated guitar riff, for instance, followed Perry's suggestion that Schon approximate the sound of a train.

Perry and Cain finished the lyrics later, including a line about a non-existent place called "South Detroit." "I ran the phonetics of east, west, and north, but nothing sounded as good or emotionally true to me as South Detroit," Perry told Vulture in 2012. "The syntax just sounded right. I fell in love with the line. It's only been in the last few years that I've learned that there is no South Detroit. But it doesn't matter."

Indeed, Schon says "Don't Stop Believin'" earns Journey as much as three times the amount of any other catalog song. That belated success underscores Schon's consistent, though at-first largely unheard, assertion that there was more to Journey's tour-de-force Escape than the soaring romanticism of its blockbuster ballad.

“I listen to it now and it’s a great record, but it’s all over the map,” Schon told Goldmine . “You’ve got a song like ‘Dead or Alive’ on it, which is like really musical punk. I don’t know what you’d call it. It had tight time changes and drum lines that Steve Smith had to sort out. And then you have ‘Open Arms’ on the other side of the spectrum, and so it was like everything between A and Z and everything in the middle.”    

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Escape (2022 Remaster)

Like any good time capsule, 1981’s Escape doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the moment it came from, but what it does tell you couldn’t be said about any other. At a time when punk was still rippling through rock culture, Escape offered a blockbuster optimism that played into the needs of an America shaking off the darkness of the 1970s while also remembering the sweetness of Motown (“Open Arms”) and early rock ’n’ roll (“Stone in Love”). They know the complexity of prog-rock, from Pink Floyd to Jethro Tull (“La Raza del Sol”), but here they keep it simple. Welcome to the 1980s: Journey wants you to win big and feel bigger. “Don’t Stop Believin’” wasn’t even the album’s most successful single—“Who’s Crying Now” did better, and so did “Open Arms.” But if you’ve been to a bar, drugstore, or sporting event in the past 40 years, you know how it sounds and the feeling it inspires. Like the Steven Spielberg movies it came out with hand in hand, Escape gives the old hero’s narrative a spit-shine and a good name. Singer Steve Perry famously held out on giving it to The Sopranos for the show’s finale because he didn’t want to see his voice paired with violence. Listening to Escape, you get it: As big as their budget lets them be, they’re still innocent.

July 31, 1981 10 Songs, 42 minutes ℗ 1981 Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment

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COMMENTS

  1. Escape (Journey album) - Wikipedia">Escape (Journey album) - Wikipedia

    Escape (stylized as E5C4P3 on the album cover) is the seventh studio album by American rock band Journey, released on July 17, 1981 by Columbia Records. It topped the American Billboard 200 chart [6] and features four hit Billboard Hot 100 singles – " Don't Stop Believin' " ( No. 9), " Who's Crying Now " (No. 4), "Still They Ride" (No. 19 ...

  2. J o u r n e y - Escape - 1981 /LP Album - YouTube">J o u r n e y - Escape - 1981 /LP Album - YouTube

    0:00 / 42:44. •. Chapter 1. J o u r n e y - Escape - 1981 /LP Album. NaHg. 49.5K subscribers. Subscribed. 19K. Share. Save. 2.7M views 7 years ago. 1981 CBS. ...more. ...more. 1981 CBS.

  3. Escape - Journey | Album | AllMusic">Escape - Journey | Album | AllMusic

    Escape by Journey released in 1981. Find album reviews, track lists, credits, awards and more at AllMusic.

  4. Journey - Escape Lyrics and Tracklist | Genius">Journey - Escape Lyrics and Tracklist | Genius

    Journey. Released July 31, 1981. Escape Tracklist. 1. Don't Stop Believin' Lyrics. 3.1M. 2. Stone In Love Lyrics. 208.4K. 3. Who's Crying Now Lyrics. 126.7K. 4. Keep On Runnin' Lyrics. 6.6K. 5....

  5. Journey's Escape: How Journey made the Escape album | Louder">Journey's Escape: How Journey made the Escape album | Louder

    For a record as apparently seamless as Escape, Journey were an interesting factional mix, cliquey and at times suspicious of one another. They were held together by the force of personality of Herbie Herbert, the manager who had brought Steve Perry to the group almost four years before.

  6. Journey - Escape (1981) - YouTube">Journey - Escape (1981) - YouTube

    8.4K views • 6 years ago. Escape is the seventh studio album by Journey released in 1981. Official site: http://www.journeymusic.com iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/escape/i...

  7. Journey Tweaked Their Lineup and Went Supernova With 'Escape'">How Journey Tweaked Their Lineup and Went Supernova With 'Escape'

    Today, it's undoubtedly the best-known thing about Escape, a track that became the adopted anthem of not one but two World Series teams (2005's White Sox and 2010's Giants), a fixture on TV...

  8. Journey - Escape (Full Album HQ) - YouTube">Journey - Escape (Full Album HQ) - YouTube

    Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

  9. Escape (2022 Remaster) - Album by Journey - Apple Music">‎Escape (2022 Remaster) - Album by Journey - Apple Music

    Apple Music. Listen to Escape (2022 Remaster) by Journey on Apple Music. 1981. 10 Songs. Duration: 42 minutes.

  10. Escape (Journey album) - Wikiwand">Escape (Journey album) - Wikiwand

    Escape is the seventh studio album by American rock band Journey, released on July 17, 1981 by Columbia Records. It topped the American Billboard 200 chart and features four hit Billboard Hot 100 singles – "Don't Stop Believin'" , "Who's Crying Now" , "Still They Ride" and "Open Arms" – plus rock radio staple "Stone in Love".