Steve Perry - Rolling Stone, June 1978

JOURNEY'S RECENT performance at New York's Palladium theater was the kind of show careers are built on. Led by Neal Schon's searing, lightning-fast guitar work, the group pounded out a relentless attack while three-and four-part harmonies sailed over Gregg Rolie's organ and synthesizer playing. Bassist Ross Valory subtly grounded the band, and Aynsley Dunbar coached everything with his superb drumming. After hearing an hour-and-a-half set and three encores, the audience still wanted more, but the claps and stomps for a fourth encore were in vain.
The next day Pat "Bubba" Morrow, Journey's burly, jovial roadie-turned-road manager, sat backstage at the Calderone theater in Hempstead, Long Island, with an ecstatic grin stretched across his broad Irish face. Holding a bottle of Heineken in one hand, Bubba was still celebrating Journey's triumph the night before.
"We knew it would happen eventually," he laughed. "We've worked too hard to give up easily. Everybody in this organization gets treated like a brother because from the top down everybody cares. Herbie [Walter Herbert], the manager is from the back of the truck

himself. When we started, Herbie helped set up the equipment and we worked for ten dollars a night per man, just a per diem for band members and crew alike."
    "It's showing now that we didn't do it in vain," added Gregg Rolie. "We don't owe anybody any money. We own all our own stuff, we have a great road crew, the whole thing is welded together very well and a lot of that has to come from Herbie."
    Walter Herbert was originally Santana's production manager, and when that band broke up amid drug problems, spiritual faddism and musical incoherence, Herbie quit with the expressed purpose of building a band around Schon and Rolie. "I should have realized what was happening when the band played without Carlos and Neal played all his solos so well nobody even noticed the difference. Then the percussionists walked out, and in effect you had Journey right there."
    The band was a red-hot instrumental outfit from the start, but the breaks came slowly and it took a long time to get off the ground. "It was a political situation as always," Rolie explained. "We formed during the supergroup era, and there was a lot of bad feeling

because so many of those groups were signing for big advances and not putting anything back into the business. It took a while for people to realize we were stayers.
    Rolie looked particularly tired after the band's latest grind, a six-day marathon through Utica, Albany, Buffalo, Philadelphia, New York and Hempstead. But he was elated by the response the band was getting. "Everything's falling into place this time around. We always complained before about the amount of attention we got from Columbia, but this time they're been great; they're working really hard for us."
    Several factors have contributed to Journey's recent break-through. The most obvious move was the addition of vocalist Steve Perry, freeing Rolie to concentrate more on playing and anchoring a harmony style reminiscent at times of Chicago. Perry contributed heavily to the band's test album, Infinity. The songs on Infinity are more nelodic, and Roy Thomas Baker's production sound is crisp and well articulated. Baker is best known for producing Queen, but group members insist that hiring him had nothing to do with an image change. "We were after the sound that Roy got more than anything else," Dunbar noted as he pounded away at his practice pad. "He didn't produce the album by telling us what to play or anything. He just made the album colorful by getting the sounds out on the record. I like his drum sound. If I'm going to play simply it has to be big."
    Dunbar's recent change in playing style may be the most important modification in the group's sound. "I decided now it's time to start playing like Mick Fleetwood and everybody, and that's what I did on this album. I tried to play as simply as possible. And it certainly paid off, didn't it?"