1981 - Grandma Helps The Journey Again (Pun Intended) - SOML Post 13

In 1981 my grandmother handed me a cassette she had received by accident from her record club. The little cassette case had a picture of space or something and beetle-like spaceship thing bursting out of some sort of space cocoon. It looked cool and it was free. Mt grandmother said she thought it was probably rock n roll. Times were changing. LP albums were still my standard fare, but now this new way to package music, the audio cassette, was making waves. My dad had given me a single-speaker cassette recorder for Christmas, so I knew I could listen to this one at home. It was incredible. There were no bad songs on this album. Every song rocked. Even that song about divorce or something was great. Then there were these guys writing or riding or something. It was all very confusing and delightfully exhilerating. I soaked in the intoxicating sugar that was Journey. The album was Escape. I could almost see Steve Perry "in the heat with his blue jean girl", but I wondered what it meant to be "stone in love". The phrase didn't make any sense, but I figured it meant he liked her. This was rock n roll unlike anything I had heard so far. The singing wasn't all flat and nasally like Black Sabbath or high and warbly like Led Zepplin. The guitars moved a lot and did cool things, and the melodic tones were so passionate and earnest. I could just steep in the emoting goodness. It was like eating lots of pancakes with extra syrup. But the song about "don't stop believing" was a notch above the rest. Some boy from the city and some girl from the small town go to the big city where they see lots of things that I couldn't understand in my ten-year-old mind. But the ambience of the song just exudes mystery. I always wondered who "streetlight people" were, and I could never understand half of the lyrics, but the song has earned a permanent place in my heart.It is total American cliche today, and viewed as one of the cheesiest pop songs ever written, but every time I go to play a melodic guitar solo, in truth, I am only trying to sound like Neil Schon on "Don't Stop Believing". Enjoy.