Don't Stop Believin': The Untold Story Of Journey

For Emma Kilgannon …

Copyright © 2011 Omnibus Press

This edition © 2012 Omnibus Press

(A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

EISBN: 978-0-85712-821-8

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Contents

Information Page

Foreword by Andrew McNiece

Introduction

Chapter One:    The Journey Begins: The Early Years (1973–1976)

Chapter Two:    Journey’s Evolution: A New Musical Direction (1977–1980)

Chapter Three:  Don’t Stop Believin’: Journey’s Glory Years (1981–1983)

Chapter Four:    The Raised On Radio Era (1984–1987)

Chapter Five:     Separate Ways: Steve Perry’s Escape (1988–1994)

Chapter Six:       Can’t Tame The Lion: Steve Perry And 99 The Return Of Journey (1995–1997)

Chapter Seven:  We’ll Be Alright Without You: The Arrival Of A New Singer (1998–2004)

Chapter Eight:   All The Way: Thirty Years Of Journey (And Another New Singer) (2005–2006)

Chapter Nine:   Change For The Better: Journey’s Rebirth (2007–2010)

Afterword By Jeff Scott Soto

Endnotes

Appendix 1: Discographies (UK)

Appendix 2: Where Are They Now?

Appendix 3: Steve Perry Solo

Acknowledgements

Bibliography & Sources

Foreword

BY ANDREW McNIECE

of melodicrock.com

There’s quite a bit of musicianship and variety that makes up Journey.

Ross Valory¹

When you think Journey – you think of the songs. They seem to have taken on a life of their own and for many the songs are all they know. There is no knowledge of the personalities behind them, nor the years of hard work, endless touring and paying dues that it took to make these songs classics.

Those that are better educated know that beneath the surface lies one of the most fascinating, complicated and dysfunctional histories of any rock band of the modern era.

A myriad of individuals have been part of the Journey machine over the years, from the various members of the band who have come and gone, to those that guided their way and the various crews that kept them on the road.

Journey have always engaged tough management. In the early days Herbie Herbert was a pioneer, a groundbreaking hands-on manager. No one ever said no to Herbie, and decisions he made then still influence the music world today. In more recent times the equally infamous Irving Azoff has guided the band and kept them going when many other bands would not have made it.

At the core of Journey is guitarist Neal Schon – the founding member. And together with Herbie Herbert and later keyboardist Jonathan Cain and Azoff, he made a number of tough calls over the years. These key moments are numerous. The decision to hire a full-time lead vocalist in Steve Perry saw the band lose its early progressive fans for the new commercial direction. As Perry gained more control he brought in his own rhythm section for the Raised On Radio album and tour. Perry then departed and the band disappeared for ten years, only to reunite for Trial By Fire in 1996. Perry was unable to commit to touring due to the need for hip surgery, leaving the band with their toughest call of all. And this time they didn’t hesitate – they made the hardest call in their history and replaced Perry. These were all momentous decisions. Any one of them could have killed the band; but, in hindsight, each decision seems only to have added to the legacy of the group and allowed them to be where they are now – still creating new music, still touring and still playing those beloved classics.

And that is what it is all about – the songs. These are the songs that bring thousands out of their homes each summer as the band tours year in, year out. They are the songs that appear in countless movies and TV shows each year. They are the songs that inspire an unprecedented number of tribute bands, each adopting a song title as a moniker of their own. And Journey have written some brilliant songs that have stood the test of time. The fact that ‘Don’t Stop Believin" is the most downloaded song of all time only proves that.

And one cannot forget this band’s fans – some of the most dedicated, passionate, loving (and at times crazy) people that anyone could wish to meet. The band are their adopted family and they will at times duel to the death to protect their favourite members. It is all part of the energy that envelops this band and everything they do.

Most of the band’s most memorable and popular songs came from the Steve Perry years. The chemistry between vocalist Perry, guitarist Neal Schon and keyboardist Jonathan Cain was undeniable. Despite the dysfunctional nature of their personal relationships with each other, or perhaps because of that creative tension, the trio created a legacy that lives on today, more than thirty years since ‘Don’t Stop Believin" was committed to vinyl. This book details some of the personalities behind the band and some of the countless stories that make up everything that is Journey.

Andrew J McNeice

October 2010

www.melodicrock.com

Introduction

They [critics] were critical of Journey being corporate and the money orientation and so forth; shit, try that nowadays. Nowadays, if you’re not making money you’re just not hip.

Herbie Herbert²

In 2009, a quirky musical comedy set in a high school called Glee aired in the United States, and before long the show’s critical and commercial success spread around the world. The format takes well-known popular songs – often classic rock tracks – and reworks them according to the premise of the show. Without question, Glee’s most popular and widely-travelled song is ‘Don’t Stop Believin", from Journey’s classic mega-selling 1981 album Escape. The song – both the Glee version and the original Journey cut – became significant chart successes the world over and Journey, a band barely known among British teenagers, became popular all over again. The song took on a life of its own: not only was a version played on Glee, but also on the UK talent contest The X Factor, run by the music mogul Simon Cowell, and Channel Five in the UK even took the big step of naming a TV show after the song. Once rock dinosaurs, Journey quickly became anything but has-beens. Indeed, Journey’s Greatest Hits – surely one of the finest collections of rock tracks ever assembled on one disc – re-entered the charts in both their native America and many foreign territories, including the UK where their career has often been haphazard.

The enormous success of Glee was perfect timing for the band. In late 2007, Journey hired a new singer from the Philippines named Arnel Pineda after guitarist and co-founder Neal Schon had seen him perform Journey tracks on YouTube. So impressed was Schon with Pineda’s vocal abilities that he had the singer flown out to San Francisco to audition for the band. The band had experienced years of relative obscurity following the second – and ultimately final – departure of Steve Perry, Journey’s most iconic singer. It had hired (and fired) two singers, Steve Augeri and Jeff Scott Soto, who, although popular with long-term Journey enthusiasts, brought the band no closer to the mainstream success which had eluded them for years.

In many ways the hiring of the diminutive Pineda would either make or break the band. Ticket and albums sales were down on their early Eighties heyday, a fact most put down to Steve Perry’s absence. In the event, though, the hiring of a frontman from a foreign country turned out to be a masterstroke, since it gave them more publicity than they had had since Perry reunited with them for the Trial By Fire album in the mid-Nineties. In many ways it echoed Judas Priest’s hiring of former Priest tribute singer Tim Owens after the departure of Rob Halford.

With Arnel Pineda, Journey released their thirteenth studio album Revelation, which became their biggest selling album since Trial By Fire. Suddenly, Journey were popular again and their success spread over to the UK where they played sold out tours in 2008 and 2009. Journey’s appeal in the UK has never been as high-profile as in the US or Japan, where they can walk on water, and, prior to their short UK tour in 2006, the band hadn’t played a concert in England since 1980. Journey fans were so keen to have the band tour the UK again that a petition was launched on www.journey.co.uk to entice promoters to invest in a Journey headlining road jaunt. It certainly helped as the band played the UK (with different singers) in 2007 through to 2009 before taking a year off from the road.

The hiring of Arnel Pineda has begun a new epoch in the band’s career and has seen their name rocket to international status for the first time in well over a decade. They have been seen regularly on major American TV shows and are featured in the popular press. Nevertheless, though Robert Flesichman, Steve Augeri, Jeff Scott Soto and Arnel Pineda are excellent singers in their own right, nobody has ever – or indeed will ever – better the vocal perfection of Steve Perry. Rolling Stone included him in their ‘100 Greatest Singers Of All Time’ poll for a reason.

At the time of writing, in mid-2010, as the band are working on their fourteenth studio album with producer Kevin Shirley, there is not a single book on Journey despite their having sold over seventy million albums worldwide and having broken the record for the most downloaded song in the history of iTunes with ‘Don’t Stop Believin". The only book published on the band was by Robyn Flans back in 1985.

Unfortunately for biographers, most members of Journey, past and present, are believed to have signed confidentiality agreements that prohibit them from giving interviews for ‘unofficial’ books or any other publication without the consent of their management. In other words, like former employees of celebrities such as David and Victoria Beckham, many musicians who feature in Journey’s story have signed contracts with gagging clauses. This level of control by Journey’s management is exceptional in rock, and seems to contradict the notion of free speech that the United States proudly upholds as the First Amendment of its Constitution. Isn’t effectively banning musicians from talking about their own experiences with Journey something more associated with dictators in the Middle East or former communist countries? For God’s sake, it’s meant to be rock ‘n’ roll.

However, what this means is that those writers who go down the other route, which is to produce an unofficial book such as this, can offer a complete perspective on the band’s history without prejudice. That’s one reason why there is not a major biography of the band currently sitting on bookshelves in retail stores.

‘Don’t Stop Believin" is not only Journey’s signature song but also a motto they have lived by, and it has taken them through some hard times. This biography begins in 1973 when the band was hastily assembled in San Francisco, California and takes the reader through the early jazz fusion years, the dramatic change in sound to AOR/melodic rock, the numerous line-up changes, the hiring and firing of the band’s first frontman Robert Flesichman and, of course, the enormous success they would achieve with Steve Perry, as well as those years following Perry’s first and second departures.

The Untold Story Of Journey follows their career as they formed, matured, flourished, succeeded and failed. Their story is by no means straightforward: there are obvious lulls in their career like the periods between the release of Frontiers in 1983 and Raised On Radio in 1986 and of course, the massive gap between that album and 1996’s Trial By Fire; and then there was yet another lull while the band were waiting on Steve Perry to decide if he could (or wanted to) go on tour in support of Trial By Fire, their disappointing so-called reunion album. In the end, of course, the band hired another singer so Journey and Perry went their separate ways for the final time. For a band that formed way back in the early 1970s they have been far from prolific. Why is that? Was it down to internal politics?

It is interesting to learn what went in the creation of a back catalogue filled to the brim with beautiful, dulcet songs. The behind-the-scenes arguments and divisions between certain members – always common in rock bands – may startle some readers, as will the ego clashes of some very powerful personalities, and the stories of greed and deceit and the baggage that inevitably comes with superstardom.

The question is: do fans really want to know how the songs that have entertained them for years were actually crafted? Do fans truly want to know the stories behind those songs? It is never easy to learn that one of your idols is perhaps not as endearing as you have been led to believe. Journey’s career certainly is not as controversial or as drug-crazed or booze-soaked as the careers of other American rock bands, but neither has it been an easy ride. If you look deep enough there is still some bitterness, heartache and anger there. This is the story of the band that gave the world songs such as ‘Wheel In The Sky’, ‘Ask The Lonely’ and ‘Lights’ and whose career became synonymous with the term ‘stadium rock’.

Neil Daniels

November 2010

www.neildaniels.com

CHAPTER 1

The Journey Begins: The Early Years (1973–1976)

I would say it was … fusion rock with vocals. It was different. There was a lot of soloing, but the songs were good. The soloing was the thing that really drove it very, very high but we did write songs but they went through a lot of changes.

Gregg Rolie³

On November 5 and 6, 1981, Journey played two of their most celebrated concerts ever at The Summit in Houston, Texas. Filmed for MTV, Journey took the opportunity to cement their status as one of the biggest selling and touring rock bands in the United States. They were on fine form as they promoted their mega-selling Escape album in front of 20,000 fans and churned out soon-to-be classics like ‘Wheel In The Sky’, ‘Don’t Stop Believin", ‘Who’s Crying Now’ and ‘Any Way You Want It’. They were at the peak of their career, but getting to that point had been no easy ride. In fact, in the beginning there was a different band name, a different line-up and an altogether different sound …

The journey began in the unlikeliest of places and under the moniker Golden Gate Rhythm Section. The hastily assembled line-up featured former Santana guitarist Neal Schon and his bandmate, keyboardist/organist/vocalist Gregg Rolie, with bassist Pete Sears and drummer Gregg Errico. Though Journey are known the world over as an AOR/melodic rock band, famous for immaculately produced rock anthems and power ballads, their roots were, in fact, firmly planted in the Latin American rock of Santana, the San Francisco group named after their charismatic guitarist Carlos.

Thanks in no small way to an acclaimed set at the 1969 Woodstock Festival, Santana, their debut album, was a smash hit when it was initially released that same year. Alongside Carlos, it featured the talents of Gregg Rolie who sings lead vocals on the track ‘Evil Ways’ and plays an electrifying Hammond organ solo in the song’s middle section. Born on June 17, 1947 in Seattle, Washington, Rolie formed the Santana Blues Band with guitarist Carlos in 1966 after he quit an unknown early outfit called William Penn & His Pals. Joining Santana and Rolie in the first line-up of the band was vocalist and guitarist Tom Fraser, drummer Rod Harper, percussionist Michael Carabello and bassist David Brown. The band soaked up the hazy sounds of liberal San Francisco, becoming deeply imbedded in the dope-smoking hippie lifestyle of the mid- to late sixties. But getting the band to life was far from easy.

Former Santana road manager Walter James Herbert II, better known as Herbie, explains: When they signed their deal with Columbia, finally some sort of really low deal with It’s A Beautiful Day, Columbia took the two acts almost on one contract and they went into the studio … and finished the album and sent it to Columbia Records and it was rejected. When it was rejected, I guess that’s when they decided, ‘Well, I guess we really have to change this all around. It’s probably the best record that we can make with this kind of line-up and we need to change.’

A radical realignment was clearly necessary, so Rolie and Santana set about making changes. Herbert: "We had a conga player named Marcus Malone that was very Afro. He wasn’t Latin really at all. He was into the mesmerising trans-dance kind of sound and [Harper’s replacement drummer] Doc Livingstone really had one beat and this one particular type of drum solo that he played, and it seemed like every song became the same when he played it. They made those changes: they went back to an earlier conga player that had played with the band even before I knew them – Michael Carabello. And Michael Carabello met this young Nicaraguan that didn’t even speak any English at all down at Aquatic Park in San Francisco, and his name was Jose Areas [nicknamed Chepito] so Michael brought Chepito into the band. Even way back in the early, early days it was Michael Carabello [who] suggested they call the band Santana after Carlos’ last name. I don’t believe it was ever because he was the leader per se especially back in those days … That was something that evolved over time. They changed the band and got Michael Shrieve – the young nineteen-year-old drummer – Chepito and Carabello, and took the live engineer Brent Dangerfield from the Straight Theatre, and went in and tried to make a record with him, and that is the first Santana album that the world is so familiar with."⁴

Santana was a phenomenon, a melting pot of ideas and people from different walks of life when nobody else did it, Gregg Rolie explained. That part I’m extremely proud of. We just played as hard as we could and created a music no one had done before. If you want to talk about crossing borders, we crossed so many of them … It never got in the way. The only thing that ever got in the way was the music. When we disagreed on the music, that’s when it changed. As far as developing that style of music – that was done by the original six people.⁵

That Santana was a different kind of rock band to the norm was apparent at Woodstock, where their fusion of a startling array of musical styles, Latin rock, blues, salsa, African beats and rhythms and jazz – grabbed everyone’s attention. Nevertheless, Gregg Rolie remained unmoved by the attention: When people tried to explain what Santana music is … it’s not Latin rock. I hate that term. It’s really focused around guitar, organ and percussion. To explain it simply, the organ is huge in it. It carries a lot of the rhythms.⁶

The West Coast city of San Francisco was a cultural hotbed from the mid-sixties to the end of the decade, the focus of an alternative society that coalesced around mind-expanding drugs, a sexually liberated lifestyle and free concerts by groups whose music resolutely rejected the limitations of the pop charts. Its heart was where Haight Street intersected with Ashbury, a neighbourhood where the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin settled and which in 1967 – the Summer of Love – attracted thousands of wayward college drop-outs, the first wave of hippies.

I went up to San Francisco [and] purely because of the music I moved into the city, said Rolie. This was the summer of love, and we were really into the music, and wanted to be an international band. It was our driving force. It was a great place to get that across. San Francisco at that time, you could draw an equivalency to what Seattle became in the nineties. It was the same kind of ideal, when the music scene totally changed. It was a very experimental type of music that was based upon blues that all of a sudden was miraculously found by everyone from FM radio.⁷

Santana’s second album, Abraxas, featuring a notable cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Black Magic Woman’, sold over four million copies and hit number one in the Billboard Top 200 album charts, as did their third, Santana III, on which new guitarist Neal Schon joined Santana in a twin-lead attack. However, tension was mounting within the ranks, especially after Chepito Areas had an almost fatal brain hemorrhage. Schon gave the band a powerful, rock-driven stamp but this was increasingly at odds with Carlos’s vision for a more spiritual, ethereal sound in keeping with his deepening interest in meditation and the teachings of Indian philosopher Sri Chinmoy.

Neal Schon was born on February 27, 1954 on Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. His father was a jazz saxophonist who encouraged his son to learn the guitar from an early age, and both parents even backed their son when he made the life-altering decision to pursue his musical ambitions and drop out of high school (Aragon High in San Mateo, California) before graduating.

I picked up my first guitar when I was ten years old and practised all the time, he said. When other kids were playing sports, I was playing guitar – it was an obsession. I dedicated all of my time to learning and was addicted to guitars. By the time I was twelve I was getting around the guitar pretty well. I never got into sports at all until I was in my early twenties and after my music career got going.⁸

Predictably, Schon’s earliest musical influences were the American blues pioneers Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters. John Lee Hooker, B.B. King and Albert King, but perhaps more importantly he learned his technique from the British electric blues players of the sixties, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Peter Green. The earth-shattering white electric English blues of that era really grabbed his attention, and he devoured albums by the Yardbirds, Fleetwood Mac, Cream and, later, Led Zeppelin. Jeff Beck’s Truth, with Rod Stewart on vocals, was regularly played on his turntable at home. Those British artists still inspire Schon to this day.

Eric Clapton made a surprise appearance in Schon’s life on the eve of his joining Santana. Clapton was a fan of Carlos and the band, and while I was jamming with them at the Wally Heider Studio in Berkeley, Eric dropped by, he recalled. This was before I joined Santana. That night we met again and jammed some more. Eric said ‘Goodnight’ to everyone and the next morning I had this note from him saying he wanted me to sit in with him. Later that day he asked me to join his band, Derek & The Dominos. That was the day before Carlos asked me to join him … I went with Carlos.⁹

Schon came to the attention of Santana after Gregg Rolie and drummer Michael Shrieve saw him play at a local club called the Poppycock in Palo Alto about 35 miles south of San Francisco – and even got up on stage to jam with the teenage guitarist. Up to that point Schon had performed only with local bands after his family had relocated and settled in the Bay Area. Schon’s adopted home had an enormous influence on the young guitarist and his playing. He said: San Francisco had a lot of influence on me … when I was younger. When I was about 15 playing in the clubs, the scene was hot. If I got out early enough I could see three different acts. There was a lot of jazz clubs and I would sit in with Gabor Szabo and then take off and play Latin music with some others guys.¹⁰

What Rolie and Shrieve witnessed that night at the Poppycock club impressed them enough to ask the young guitarist to join Santana. He wouldn’t make a great deal of money in the band but it was certainly more than delivering newspapers for a local store or working Saturday jobs at movie theatres. Plus Schon – only 16 years old at the time of joining the band – was getting an incredible amount of experience and first-hand knowledge of what it is like being in a successful band.

Schon explained: It was a pretty amazing experience, very much an eye opener for me. We were travelling all over the world, playing in Africa, South America, all over Europe, experiencing the different audiences all over the world. The band was one of the biggest in the world at that time. I loved playing with Carlos and the rest of the guys. Musically, they opened me up to many different types of music that I was unaware of at that point – Latin music, Cuban rhythms, African rhythms – the band was a melting pot of all different kinds of music. The most I got out of playing with Carlos was how melodic he was. He rubbed off on me definitely, and I think vice versa too, when we were playing together. I became much more of a melodic guitar player.¹¹

After yet more changes to the line-up – largely different approaches in musical styles which resulted in divisions between some members -Santana III was recorded between January and July of 1971 at Columbia Studios in San Francisco, marking the recording debut of the teenage guitar prodigy and the first sessions that teamed Neal Schon with Gregg Rolie. The album’s sound was given more meat by the addition of the horn section from the Bay Area group Tower Of Power, as well as a number