Journey – Open Arms (Escape Tour 1981: Live In Houston)

Neal Schon Called It “Mary Poppins” — Then The Crowd Proved Him Wrong

The performance you’re watching from Houston in 1981 captures the exact moment Journey discovered what they had. When the band first played “Open Arms” live during the Escape Tour that fall, the audience response was so overwhelming that Neal Schon — the guitarist who had spent weeks dismissing the song as something out of a Disney film — walked offstage after two encores and said, “Man, that song really kicked ass.” Steve Perry, who had fought to include it, turned to look at him. “I looked at him and I wanted to kill him,” Perry said later. The Houston crowd that night had no idea they were watching a band figure out, in real time, that they had just recorded their greatest hit.

Released as a single in January 1982, “Open Arms” peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for six consecutive weeks — blocked from the top only by the J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold” and then Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll.” It spent 18 weeks on the chart, ten of them in the Top 10, and reached number two in Canada. VH1 later named it the greatest power ballad of all time. It remains Journey’s highest-charting single — surpassing even “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which only reached number nine.

The song almost never existed. Jonathan Cain had written the melody before he even joined Journey, carrying it around on a portable Wurlitzer keyboard as a half-finished idea. He had originally presented it to The Babys, his previous band, and frontman John Waite called it “total crap” — too syrupy, too sentimental, shelf it. When Cain joined Journey in 1980 as replacement for Gregg Rolie, he nearly left the song behind entirely. Perry changed that. During a conversation at Perry’s house about potentially recording a solo album, Cain retrieved the Wurlitzer from his car on a whim and played the melody. Perry stopped him: “Too bad for Waite and good for us.” The two men finished the lyrics that same afternoon. “That particular one kind of wrote itself,” Perry recalled. “It went that quick.”

Getting it onto the record required overcoming the rest of the band. Schon called it “Mary Poppins.” The others agreed it was too far from anything Journey had attempted before. Producer Kevin Elson quietly kept it in the running. The recording sessions at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley in April 1981 captured something none of the doubters had anticipated: Perry’s vocal was so emotionally precise that engineer Elson had to dry the studio microphones with a hair dryer between takes — Perry’s voice carried so much moisture it was literally shutting down the tubes. Neal Schon’s father, Matt, arranged the string quartet that anchored the final production. Jonathan Cain recorded his piano track while ill with a heavy cold and wanted to redo it. Everyone else told him to leave it alone. They were right.

The album Escape became Journey’s commercial peak — number one on the Billboard 200, 146 weeks on the chart, over nine million copies sold in the US alone. The Escape Tour saw them open the Rolling Stones’ first North American date on September 25, 1981, in Philadelphia, then return to their own headlining run. This Houston footage sits right in the middle of that extraordinary stretch.

Mariah Carey covered “Open Arms” in 1995 for her album Daydream, reaching number four in the UK and giving the song the British chart success it had never quite found originally. Boyz II Men, Barry Manilow, and K-pop giants EXO all recorded versions. When Perry later revisited the Houston concert footage for the live album release, he said he had to keep his head down on the mixing console whenever the song came on — fighting back the lump in his throat. Twenty years after recording it, it still had him. John Waite, meanwhile, had a number one hit in 1984 — with a power ballad.

Perry summed it up without sentimentality: “I always wanted the line ‘wanting you near’ to go up and soar. I wanted it to be heartfelt.” Watch this Houston performance and you’ll hear exactly what he meant — and you’ll understand why one crowded arena in 1981 changed the mind of every doubter in the room, starting with the man holding the guitar.