JOURNEY
Journey is an American rock band that formed in San Francisco in 1973, composed of former members of Santana and Frumious Bandersnatch. The band has gone through several phases; its strongest commercial success occurred between 1978 and 1987, after which it temporarily disbanded. During that period, the band released a series of hit songs, including 1981’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”, which in 2009 became the top-selling track in iTunes history amongst songs not released in the 21st century. Its parent studio album, Escape, the band’s eighth and most successful, reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and yielded another of their most popular singles, “Open Arms”. A 2005 USA Today opinion poll named Journey the fifth best American rock band in history. (More from Wikipedia)
There is a long article on Trillion in Allmusic (by Eduardo Rivadavia) that starts off: “For every American progressive rock band that found increasing success on commercial radio during the second half of the ’70s – Journey, Styx, Kansas, etc. -- there were additional dozens possessing the same sonic recipe for infectious bombast but which, for some reason or other, just never made the grade, including Trillion.” It is hard to know why some albums grab listeners and others do not, but clearly, no one has the formula figured out yet.
An interesting thing about progressive rock bands is that most of them did not hit the ball out of the park with their first album, the way that King Crimson and Boston did. As I noted in my last post, the first hit songs for Yes came on their third album, The Yes Album. Journey didn’t make any real noise on the music scene until vocalist Steve Perry joined up for the fourth album, Infinity. The breakthrough album for Styx, The Grand Illusion was their seventh album. Leftoverture was the album that put Kansas on the map, their fourth album. With Trillion though, the band was never given the opportunity to develop an audience or to refine their sound.
(October 2012)
