Why Journey Stopped Making Movies Throughout MTV’s Golden Period

Journey titled their ninth LP Raised on Radio, not Raised on Video — a distinction the band members made very clear.

It was 1986, and MTV was in full swing: Rock bands have been anticipated to advertise their songs with high-budget visuals, even when they could not care much less in regards to the medium. However Journey, who’d launched loads of movies in the course of the Steve Perry period, determined to interrupt from custom this day trip — leaning on what their singer referred to as “the thriller and mystique of the fantasy of radio.”

It is not like Raised on Radio was an idea album. However the FM thought crept into the duvet artwork (that includes a lone station, JRNY) and the title observe, a type of love letter to discovering early rock songs (like Chuck Berry‘s “Maybellene” and Buddy Holly‘s “Peggy Sue”) over the airwaves.

They tried to sidestep the video element as a method to protect that feeling of discovery — of listening to a music out of the blue and never having a picture immediately tied to it.

“One of many issues we needed to do was protect the creativeness … and never give the ability to some director who we have been launched [to] for 2 hours and needed to make life choices about,” keyboardist Jonathan Cain advised Rockline.

“The principle factor,” Perry added, “is it destroys the power so that you can completely take that music and make it your individual, it doesn’t matter what which means to you. One music doesn’t imply the identical factor to 2 folks, and as quickly as you’ve seen a video, you’ve got now bought a burnt imaginative and prescient from that time on — if you hear that music on the radio, you’ll see the video in your thoughts.”

It should not have been a shock that Perry disliked the video format. His clip for 1984 solo hit “Oh Sherrie” opens with the singer on a movie set, making an attempt to shoot a scene at a faux royal wedding ceremony; discovering the thought “ridiculous,” he stops the motion twice, ultimately telling the director, “I can not do that” and “I do not want this.” Feeling stifled, he flees the set, and the remaining actual video performs out as a easy love story.

Perry’s emotions hadn’t modified by 1986 — similar to within the “Oh Sherrie” video, he felt uncomfortable handing over the music to a filmmaker and letting them shade within the imagery.

“Once we get collectively and begin to write a music, it’s a very, very — it’s perception from a distinct place,” he advised Rockline. “It’s imaginative and prescient from inside, and it’s a private factor that goes from individual to individual … and I believe it’s slanderous to the seed of the music, to the gorgeous place it got here from, to let someone take the imaginative and prescient and dictate it.”

Journey weren’t the one main rock band rebelling, if briefly and cautiously, towards making movies. Since including Sammy Hagar as their new singer, following their break with David Lee Roth, Van Halen weren’t certain the place to move visually: “We have been all saying, ‘Properly, we don’t know what sort of video we wanna make,’” Hagar mentioned in 2012. “We don’t actually know what our picture is but, we haven’t labored it out – and Van Halen had been such a video-friendly band earlier than that.”

In his 2011 memoir Purple: My Uncensored Life in Rock, Hagar defined why Van Halen did not make a video for 5150, his first album with the group. “[Manager] Ed Leffler figured he didn’t wish to compete with outdated Van Halen movies,” he wrote. “Additionally, Warner Bros. refused to pay for the movies, and so they may very well be costly. Once we put out the primary single, ‘When It’s Love,’ from OU812 with out a video, too, Warner began to freak out. They thought if we had put out a video with 5150, as a substitute of promoting 7 million, we might have bought 10 million.”

Regardless of their desire to keep away from them altogether, Journey in the end went again to movies for his or her subsequent LP, 1996’s Trial by Hearth. However it’s value noting the simplicity of “When You Love a Girl”‘s in-studio clip: no costumes, no foolish plotlines. Only a band and a music.