Personnel:
Aynsley Dunbar: drums, percussion
Gregg Rolie: keyboards, lead vocals
Neal Schon: guitars, background vocals
Ross Valory: bass, vocals
Produced by Journey for Spreadeagle Productions, a division of Herbert& Bramy, Inc.
Associate producer and engineer: Glen Kolotkin
Recorded by Mark Friedman and mastered by George Horn at CBS Studio, San Francisco
US release date: January 1976
Highest chart position: US: 100
Running time: 41:41
The pattern that manager Herbie Herbert set for the band would repeat until the end of theFrontiers tour. Journey would perform on the road for nine months and then create an album for three months. It was a hard pace and would take its toll on each band member. The first casualty of this approach was rhythm guitarist George Tickner. He left the band in 1975 and went to Stanford to become a surgical technician. Rather than hire a new guitarist, Journey became a quartet. Band members began taking voice lessons and vowed to tighten up their songwriting for their sophomore effort. They went back to CBS Studios in late 1975 to makeLook Into The Future, this time self-producing.
A conscious decision to include shorter, radio-friendly songs led to half the tracks being around four minutes or less, crammed onto the album’s first side. Columbia wanted hits, but they had difficulty generating ad copy for the record. Telling radio stations and reviewers that Journey’s sound was ‘heavy space’ (lifted from aBillboard review) didn’t inspire much airplay.
The few critics who reviewed the album stated that it was an improvement over the debut, but their enthusiasm stopped there. One reviewer was concerned that the shorter songs on the album’s first half would not hold up in concert, predicting that ‘they will fall into prolonged guitar solos and deteriorate into crashing racket.’ If you have seen them live or watched videos from those mid-1970s shows, you’d believe that the California-based critic had seen them live, too.
The cover features blue-tinted full-body photos of the individual band members wearing matching jumpsuits. They are in a beige room with infinite rooms stretching back through doorways behind the figures, and there’s a crystal ball in the foreground reflecting all of this. The cover’s reverse is identical except that the bodies are silhouettes. Louis Bramy, Herbert’s partner in Spreadeagle Productions, created the concept to match the album title. The sleeve replicates the back cover, and the reverse is a set of four band photos taken on the same set used for the cover images.
‘On A Saturday Nite’ (Rolie) 3:57
Rolie’s piano opens this tune, which signals their commitment to recording songs to
