Released: 1980
Tracks: Of a Lifetime; Topaz; Kohoutek; On a Saturday Night; It’s All Too Much; In My Lonely Feeling/Conversations; Mystery Mountain; Spaceman; People; Anyway; You’re on Your Own; Look into the Future; Nickel & Dime; I’m Gonna Leave You
Best track: either It’s All Too Much, Kohoutek, In My Lonely Feeling/Conversations, or Nickel & Dime
Track to skip: Anyway
This is the only Journey album never released on CD and it’s one that most people don’t know about. It’s pretty useless if you buy all the studio albums, but I guess it served some sort of purpose. In the Beginning was released in January 1980 with a dual purpose of holding the fans over until Departure came out a few months later and also to remind people that Journey made 3 albums before Steve Perry joined. I do wish they’d put this on CD, as the tracks total 76 minutes so it’d definitely fit on a CD and might be a good introduction to current listeners who also don’t know that the band existed before Steve Perry. The album draws 5 of the 14 tracks from the first album, 6 from Look into the Future, and only 3 from Next. It’s been many, many years since I listened to Look into the Future and Next…maybe 15-20 years, so I’m not totally sure if they put the best tracks from those albums on here. I’ll trust Columbia’s judgment on this. I think it would’ve been nice (and would have sold more copies) if they had put the unreleased Cookie Duster (an outtake from Next that didn’t surface until the Time Cubed box set in 1992) on here instead of Anyway, which isn’t too hot of a song. Maybe it works better in the context of Look into the Future, but on here it doesn’t sound that good.
I don’t particularly care for the sequencing on this album; I think they could have done it better. The first disc (I’m reviewing my vinyl copy here, so I actually had to flip the records! What fun!) is a mixture of the first two albums, while disc 2 is a mixture of the 2nd and 3rd. I don’t know why they set it up like this, but it’s not something I would have done. It was nice hearing this again, after years of not having a record player. There were some songs I had forgotten about, like Look into the Future and specifically the band’s reworking of the forgotten Beatles song, George Harrison’s It’s All Too Much, originally from Yellow Submarine. They really did a whole new arrangement of it and it turned out quite nice. It’s funny, Journey’s version points to how the band would sound in certain songs of the Steve Perry era. Another Beatles part of the album, this time that doesn’t work is on You’re On Your Own, which is only a decent song, but it features a part that sounds WAY too much like I Want You (She’s So Heavy).
All in all, this is enjoyable, even if it’s a little disjointed. Obviously if you have the first 3 albums then it’s stupid for you to seek this out on vinyl since there is no new material. I still think Columbia should put this out on CD, price it at around $10 and maybe it would lead some Journey fans to the albums this is taken from. Hell, it couldn’t hurt.
Rating: 84
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