"Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" is a song by Journey from their album Frontiers and released as a single on January 5, 1983. It peaked at #8 for six consecutive weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and spent four weeks at #1 on the Top Tracks chart.
To accompany the song on MTV, the band shot its first-ever concept video. It was a difficult experience for a variety of reasons, and the resulting clip has been widely ridiculed. Beavis & Butt-head made fun of it, and it has been described as among the worst videos ever.
"Separate Ways" was the first single for which the band shot a choreographed music video: previous videos were performances that were taped and edited, expanded with "Faithfully" to include the montage of the band on tour shot by a crew from NFL Films. Steve Perry had been very opposed to making a choreographed video. "He'd always say 'We're performers, we're entertainers, but we're not actors'" recalled Cain. "And we were not a very photogenic band."
In the video, the band performs the song as a young woman in a fashionable white jacket and black leather skirt walks along the wharf. At some points, Perry and the other members of the band perform right next to her, and he seems to be singing to her, but she remains oblivious. At the end she is seen in a bed, wearing headphones and waking up. John Diaz, the producer, explains that the idea was that she had dreamed the video after falling asleep while listening to the song. "Our concepts were so inane".
It was directed by Tom Buckholtz and featured the band playing at the Louisa Street Wharf in New Orleans. It is now infamous for the scenes where the band is pretending to play non-existent instruments, although they do also play their real instruments (including Cain playing his Roland Jupiter-8 "up-the-wall"). It features over 50 camera moves with full choreography by Columbia Records Art and Creative Services.
It was reported that on the first day of shooting, there was a cold breeze coming off of the Mississippi River, which the wharf was located next to. This made filming all the more difficult on the band and Perry, who was seen retreating to his camper on-site to keep warm. This state of affairs was complicated by the presence of Perry's then-girlfriend, Sherrie Swafford, on the set. Not only had the band been told that they could not bring wives or girlfriends to the shoot, the other members disliked Swafford and her effect on Perry, creating considerable tension. She was reportedly extremely jealous of the model in the video, and kept demanding she be taken out of it. "There was a big kicking and screaming session", Cain recalled later. "Sherrie was giving Steve a very bad time about that girl." Perry had also just gotten his hair cut short, which Cain found inexplicable since the singer's previous hairstyle had been "rockin'".
"Here's a band at their commercial peak", says Adam Dubin, director of many well-received videos, "and some idiot decided to film them on a wharf and—here's the worst part—instead of giving them instruments, let them mime playing imaginary instruments. The director should be shot. And the manager should be shot for allowing his band to be put in this position."
A decade later, it was heavily ridiculed by Beavis and Butt-head. This greatly upset Cain, since he felt Journey's videos had helped make MTV. He called the band's manager repeatedly to ask how they could stop the channel from reairing the segment. In 1999 MTV chose it as 13th on its list of the 25 Worst Videos of All Time.
In 2011, Dave Bahan of Peoria, Illinois, radio station WIXO-FM named the video the worst of all time. He suggested it did not look like the band had put much effort into the video, and criticized their appearance in clothing that, in perspective, seemed to embody the failings of early 1980s popular fashion. However, he allowed that "they looked normal for 1982-83. They likely didn't think they would be judged for their video efforts almost thirty years later." "I'm at a loss to explain that video," says Cain. "I will never live down those air keyboards. No matter what else I've done in my career, sooner or later people find a way to ask me about the 'Separate Ways' video
Journey - Separate Ways
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