No, you're an open book.

"The drink contains neither eggs nor cream."

The excellent oral history I Want My MTV has an entire chapter about this video, and it's quite instructive. I personally think it was a number of things. The effeminate choreography didn't help (the director was Kenny Ortega), but it wasn't that alone — check out a Wham! video sometime. It was more the fact that…

That Bowie prediction was short-sighted no doubt, but it helps to understand that Bowie really was at a creative nadir at that time. His immediate post-Let's Dance output gave no one any reason to doubt that Bowie would follow the Stones, the Who, etc. into a retirement of forced mediocrity and self-caricature. His…

Funny, I associate Third Stage strongly with the beginning of the digital age. It was one of the first major releases on compact disc to really take advantage of the new medium's crispness. I remember playing it on the nice stereo of my friend whose parents could afford big amps and the 100-disc changer — it sounded …

Pretty sure "My Destination" was deliberately intended as a partial melodic reprise of "Amanda" (they're both on Third Stage).

This logo is atrocious. It looks like the original Trek logo after my cat's gotten done with it.

What? You mean if I want to have a harmless contretemps with a virtual facsimile of the acquaintance of my choice, without the original ever knowing — well, isn't this just an imaginary extension of my own mental fantasies, my own private thoughts? (as long as I lock my holodeck program with a code so no one else…

Thanks, that's so nice of you. Here is some fudge in return.

Agreed that Journey did well in the '80s generally, but that was as much in spite of the influence of MTV, as much as helped by. MTV and Journey accommodated one another but not comfortably; "Separate Ways" was the closest thing they ever did to a conceptual video. ("Faithfully"'s behind-the-scenes footage was…

There is a lot of relativity in that "relatively unfazed". Journey's real career as a rock band was almost over at that time; "Separate Ways"'s Frontiers was the next-to-last Journey album of that era. The video era did kill them off as mainstream rock artists as it did many others; they've only emerged since as a…

Agreed. To be fair, sometimes Rachel's recipes call for grated cheese.

"Feeling That Way/Anytime" is exactly the song I was thinking of, because both of them share frontman duties — Rolie on the verse/chorus, Perry on the bridge. Rolie sings the main part of the song perfectly competently, but then Perry comes in after, and it's like, swooooooossh!

The Filipino guy (Arnel Pineda) is much better than the other soundalike, guy-whose-name-rhymed-with-Steve-Perry (Steve Augeri).

And Jim Steinman without Meat Loaf… ?

Carl Brutananadilewski will be so disappointed to hear you say that they were never really Camaro-rock.

Scholz was definitely a technical pioneer. He invented the Rockman effects amp, which is still sold by Dunlop, and his Boston albums sound like glittering rock-and-roll machines. I do still wonder if he was in the wrong place somehow — an obssessive studio wizard as the mastermind of an arena RAWK band?

Numerous arena-rock bands (Kansas, Boston) had pretensions towards prog, and I think this carried over to the album art more than most places. Journey itself began as a psychedelic blues-rock Santana spinoff, so the sci-fi conceit of their covers actually predates their arena-rock sound.

1999's "MTV's TwentyFive Lame" — hosted by Stewart, Garafalo, Kattan and Denis Leary! Pretty hilarious, I wish I still had my VHS copy.

It had something that was both a spaceship and a bug — Journey's signature scarab-craft from their Escape album cover. (See also: Boston's guitar-saucer, ELO's jukebox-space-freighter, etc.)