Reaching for the Stars
The San Francisco Chronicle salutes the 25th anniversary of Journey’s Escape album (via Waxy.org). Although I never cared much for Journey, I can remember loving the airbrushed art on that album cover — especially the type treament where the letterforms were rotated and stylized so that they looked like some sort of weird alien alphabet. Undoubtedly it led me to draw pages of rotated, spacey type in my school notebooks.
Comments
San Francisco has some sort of weird, non-ironic fondness for the band Journey. Honestly, It's sort of embarrassing.
Posted by: Eric | April 26, 2006 05:15 PM
I loved Journey. For a young teen boy, they were the perfect combination of bombastic power rock. Plus I had a girlfriend who was the world's biggest Steve Perry fan. I, too, loved the art, and I loved the alphabetical naming convention they used for a few albums: Captured, Departure, Escape, Frontiers.
Posted by: J.D. | April 26, 2006 07:05 PM
Journey is (along with Bon Jovi and Styx) one of my prime 80's guilty pleasures. Good article!
Posted by: Nancy | April 27, 2006 07:29 AM
And let's not forget that this album led to Journey: Escape the video game, which was in the convenience store across the street from my house and which consumed by entire allowance for weeks on end. How many bands are immortalized in video games? This album rocks.
Posted by: Vince | April 27, 2006 11:10 AM
Weird...some friends and I were discussing the merits of Journey over coffee (lots of it) the other day. I recall that the first few Journey long players were quite experimental and jazzy in a Spyro Gyra or Weather Report kind of way.
Late last summer I spotted Steve Perry at a hamburger joint in Sherman Oaks...he was sporting his classic "David Cassidy rockstar hair-do" and was wearing a long, flowing pajama top. He was having a burger with (what looked like) a couple of members of his family.
I didn't have the nerve to flag him down and ask for his autograph. My girlfriend was staring at me and asking: "Who's Steve Perry?"
Some of those mid-period Journey album covers look like they were designed by Rick Griffin, but they probably weren't. Who DID design them? The amazing thing is that all that shading and futuristic lettering was done PRE-Photoshop...by hand!
Posted by: Kurt | April 27, 2006 11:24 AM
I bought the single of "Don't Stop Believin'' because I didn't have enough cash for the entire "Escape" album AND REO Speedwagon's latest, which I think was "Permanent Vacation".
I was a dick in high school.
Bygones!
Posted by: Mass Bradley | April 27, 2006 11:31 AM