36. Frontiers by Journey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LatorN4P9aA&list=OLAK5uy_kve61SToeMDTxIrG__bH39SA4QAkdy-II
Both "Separate Ways" and "Back Talk" were on my Top 200 songs list, so it is no surprise that Frontiers makes it onto my Top 60 albums list. Ruth bought it, but I basically turned it into my record, playing it whenever I wanted at full blast in the basement while lifting weights, vegging out on the couch, or laying on my bed with the stereo speakers placed on two night stands on either side, and my head placed perfectly in between them so that I got the best stereo sound I could.
This album was just about the perfect thing to listen to whenever I felt pissed off during my senior year, which covers basically all the time between November 1983 through May 1984. Ironically, it contains two slow-dance songs that reminded me of dates with the girls that made me perpetually pissed. the album did double-duty in dredging up painful memories. I'd torture myself listening to "Send Her My Love" and "Faithfully." But then the other songs would give me the psychological salve of driving rock guitars to accompany my angry weight-lifing workouts. "Chain Reaction," "Edge of the Blade," and "Balk Talk" were especially energizing. But the rest of the songs provided plenty of acoustic fuel to keep the workouts going for a couple of hours at a time.
The 2006 reissue of the album includes four more songs. "Only the Young," "Ask the Lonely," and "Only Solutions" had been originally recorded to be included on the Frontiers album, but then the record label guys wanted to save those songs for movie soundtracks instead. These are all quality songs that I think would have made the album even better than it was. "Ask the Lonely" and "Only the Young" both hit #3 on the Billboard charts when they were released after Frontiers. If they had been included on Frontiers, the album would have had had the following Top-40 charting songs:
Separate Ways
Send Her My Love
After the Fall
Faithfully
Ask the Lonely
Only the Young
Another song titled "Liberty" was cut from consideration, and frankly, I think it was wise to leave it off the original album.
But there you have it. Frontiers was a great album when I listened to it back at the end of high school, but it could have been even better if it had included the stuff that was rather thoughtlessly cut out just because someone thought their future would be so much better without me them.
Nardo
I thought, “Ha, ha, likely story.” And then I had a nice, lengthy comment that I tried to post, and the Blogger Comment Bot ate it and it disappeared into the webly places of the interwebs. (I hope it showed up as a comment on someone’s cooking blog. “Rubicon? What’s a rubicon? Is it anything like radicchio?”
ReplyDelete#36: Journey—Frontiers. How many times have I seen Journey in concert? (One.) How many times have I been stuck in traffic for ten or fifteen minutes longer than I would have wanted to? (I’m not sure, but I feel confident that the number is more than 72 times.) If I had it to do over again, would I stay for the last few minutes of the Journey concert, or would I make sure I left early so I could get out of the parking lot quickly and not have to face that notoriously bad Pocatello Mini-Dome traffic?
ReplyDeleteWhen I hear “Separate Ways” I remember walking out of the Journey concert early, and this song reverberating through the metal frame of the Mini-Dome. And, much like Steve Perry at the end of the song, I want to scream, “Nooooooo!!!”
This album is yet another album I originally owned on cassette, but didn’t make the cut when I transferred my music collection to cd, mostly because many of the songs on it were already on a Greatest Hits compilation. (Curse you, compilations!) Listening to it again, the three songs I missed most are “After the Fall,” which, while a radio hit, did not make the cut for the Greatest Hits album, “Back Talk,” which is one of the greatest diss tracks in the history of all the girls who never actually dissed me, and “Rubicon.” I always really liked “Rubicon,” even though I had no, and still have no idea what exactly a rubicon is, other than something that needs to be crossed.