Seeing Journey in concert can be considered an extreme sport – a fact some fans will recognize when the band embraces Red Rocks with open arms on Tuesday.
Last August, the band spanned 33 years of music in a nearly three-hour show at the CityLights Pavilion. Like climbing Kilimanjaro, it was an exhausting and at times body- numbing experience. Journey had countless hits from 1978 to 1983, but even so, the odds are against the hits. The band endured a lot more misses, many of which were employed to fill 180 minutes of onstage action.
And such is the Journey dilemma.
The band is a legendary, multiplatinum rock act that defined an era and was among the first to pack stadiums.
It’s also a punch line, an anachronism, an ironic wedding-reception favorite.
But the dichotomy is easily navigated, because music fans – from the FM-loving masses to discerning indie snobs – fall on one side or the other without even knowing it. And the loyalties to a band such as Journey don’t always fall where you might expect them.
For example: This critic’s tastes skew toward independent music, but there’s also a weak spot in there for the ridiculous. I’ll dance all night to “Don’t Stop Believin’,” singing along and everything. That song is all I need to publicly declare Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain geniuses. And yet whenever I’m presented with rock standards such as “Wheel in the Sky” or “Be Good to Yourself,” my skin is crawling.
At the CityLights Pavilion a year ago, some of the songs flew by in a fit of nostalgic ecstasy, as in “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart),” which had the crowd, myself included, raising our fists and plastic cups of draft beer, singing along with nodding heads and bouncing knees.
Other songs felt as if they lasted entire days. Journey is a band of many sounds – listen to its first three records for their jazzed-out rock instrumentals – but only a couple of those sounds made them famous. More than 30 years later, Journey’s popular catalog boils down to the ballads (“Open Arms”), the power-ballads (“Who’s Crying Now”) and the ’80s-era rocker-ballads (“Any Way You Want It”).
And those songs are the band’s bread and butter – still.
It doesn’t help that Steve Perry, the voice and soul of the band, left after touring 1986’s “Raised on Radio.” Perry’s sweaty tenor was every bit as important to Journey’s aesthetic as the instrumentation that defined the band’s anthemic stadium sound. While his replacement, Steve Augeri, sounds similar in timbre, he lacks Perry’s intensity and authority.
Even so, fans were losing themselves at the Journey show of a year ago, getting swept into the guitar solos and lost amid the dramatic pauses. One of those people was Jesse Morreale, a restaurateur and former concert promoter. Morreale has a winning personality, but he was flat-out exuberant at this show – curious only because some of us were sleepy amid one of the set’s multiple lulls.
After Morreale and I caught up, the band launched into the unmistakable pop-blues guitar work of “Lights,” one of its biggest hits. And he lost it. He shot his arm into the air with a jolt that spilled his beer on our shoes.
“‘Lights!,”‘ he exclaimed. “They’re playing (expletive) ‘Lights!”‘
It was clear that Morreale and I were on different planes when it came to Journey.
“Lights” was my least-favorite track on “Infinity,” the 1978 record that started Journey’s climb to popular-culture domination. It was an earnest anthem that was more saccharine than sentiment, and while you could almost appreciate the late-’70s romanticism of it all, the ridiculous synth-inspired harmonies, the way Perry sang, “I wanna be theeere in my ci-tay” – no thanks. I’ll pass.
But even a year later, Morreale sticks up for his impassioned fan-boy behavior.
“They’re a legend, and you can’t deny that,” said Morreale, a former co-owner of concert promoter Nobody in Particular Presents, earlier this week. “I’m a lifer. I grew up with them.”
The median age of the audience that night – and at Red Rocks on Tuesday, I’m sure – tells the same story. Journey provided the soundtrack to their middle-school dances the same way the Stones did for the generation before them and Boyz II Men did for the following generation.
No matter what letter your Gen is labeled (X, Y), it’s hard not to think about generations at a Journey concert – especially since the subpar record the band released a year ago is called “Generations.” Beyond that, though, this is a band whose music spans the generations with dexterity and aplomb.
“I remember ‘Escape’ being a huge album when I was still in grade school,” Morreale said. “And then somebody turned me onto a cassette copy of ‘Captured,’ and I thought – being that I was young and I didn’t realize there were live albums – I thought it was a bootleg, somebody’s copy of the show in Detroit, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever.”
And it was. And there is something very cool, still, about “Captured” – especially because the set-list is at your every whim.
“Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’?” No thanks. “Any Way You Want It?” That’s more like it.
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
Any way you want it
You love Journey.
Or you hate Journey.
Either way, you can’t deny that Steve Perry (and later, Steve Augeri) and company touched on something significant amid popular culture. The band was one of the most successful rock groups of the ’80s, as evidenced by its CD sales and its continued live popularity.
Journey’s best-selling records, in order of popularity:
“Greatest Hits,” 14 times platinum as of January 2006
“Escape,” nine times platinum, November 1994
“Frontiers,” six times platinum, May 1997
“Departure,” three times platinum, October 1994
“Evolution,” three times platinum, April 1991
“Raised on Radio,” two times platinum, July 1989
“Captured,” two times platinum, October 1994
“Trial by Fire,” platinum, December 1996
Source: Recording Industry Association of America
-Ricardo Baca
Journey
ARENA ROCK | Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Morrison; 7:30 p.m. Tuesday with Def Leppard | $65-$85 | ticketmaster.com or 303-830-8497
