Black Jacket Symphony journeys to Tivoli for ‘Escape’ performance

There are few albums that produced so many memorable high notes and chart-topping singles that they practically ascended to greatest-hits status as soon as they hit store shelves.

In that sense, “Escape,” the seventh release by Journey, is in rarefied air. After its debut on July 31, 1981, the album produced four Top 100 singles, three of which – “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Who’s Crying Now” and “Open Arms” – crested in the Top 10. Of the 47 million albums the Recording Industry Association of America credits Journey with selling in the last four decades, more than 9 million were thanks to “Escape.”

For all the slickness of its production and the seeming simplicity of its catchy, anthemic choruses, “Escape” conceals a technical complexity that caught Black Jacket Symphony founder J. Willoughby off-guard.

“It was one of the hardest ones to work up, just musically. It’s a chops-fest, to say the least,” laughs the founder of the Birmingham, Ala.-based rock cover act.

On Saturday, Jan. 23, members of Black Jacket Symphony will perform the entirety of “Escape,” as well as deeper cuts from Journey’s catalog, during a performance at the Tivoli Theatre.

Black Jacket Symphony has established a reputation for performing note-for-note perfect renditions of legendary rock recordings, such as Led Zeppelin’s “IV,” Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” and The Beatles’ “Abbey Road.” Growing up in the ’60s, Willoughby was a devoted fan of those artists, but the transition in the ’80s to rockers such as Journey, whose music had a thicker sheen of studio polish, didn’t resonate nearly as well with him.

As he began dissecting “Escape” to prepare to perform it live, however, Willoughby discovered that the album still retained hints of Journey’s origins as a progressive-rock act formed by one-time members of groups such as Santana and Frumious Bandersnatch. It wasn’t nearly as “slick” as he thought, he says.

“There is a feel to it,” Willoughby says. “That was my biggest surprise, my biggest come-away from it. There’s a lot of feel to it. You know, these guys they rocked.”

One of the greatest challenges of preparing for “Escape,” he says, was finding a vocalist who could emulate Perry, who Rolling Stone once ranked as No. 76 on its list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. He stumbled across his Perry-alike, Chris Mitchell – lead singer of Nashville-based Journey tribute band Trial By Fire – while combing YouTube for guitarists who could match Neal Schon.

With Mitchell on board and guitar duty being handled by Ben Owens and Allen Barlow, tackling “Escape’s” many technical complexities suddenly seemed doable, Willoughby says.

“Sometimes, it’s just waiting to find the right players,” he says. “Nothing is out of the wheelhouse as long as you’ve got the right players. It was almost a meant-to-be kind of thing. When we had [Chris] and I knew I had the right guitar player, it was off to the races.”

Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.