Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / Journey's Rise, Fall, and Return [Episode 187]

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Journey's Rise, Fall, and Return [Episode 187] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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  We're totally booked rock and roll. I mean gotta leave you. You're reading
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  Little Hands says it's time to rock and roll roll. We are totally booked.
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  Welcome back to Booked on Rock, the podcast for those about to read
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  and rock. Find the podcast at booked on rock dot com, where you
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  can find every episode along with links to your favorite listening platforms, exclusive videos,
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  blogs, links to all of the social media sites, and the latest
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  rockbook releases. You can also watch every episode now in full on video at
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  booked on rock dot com, or just head to the Booked on Rock YouTube
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  channel at Booked on Rock. David Hamilton Golland is this episode's guest. His
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  book has called Livin Just to Find Emotion, Journey and the story of American
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  rock. Since exploding on the scene in the late nineteen seventies, Journey has
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  inspired generations of fans with hit afterhead, But hidden under this rock and roll
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  glory is a complex story of ambition, larger than life, personnel and clashes.
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  Golland unearth's the band's true and complete biography, based on over a decade
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  of interviews in thousands of sources. A professional historian, Golland dispels rehashed myths,
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  and also shows how race and popular music contributed to the breakout success of
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  the band. As the economy collapse and as people abandoned the spirit of Woodstock
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  in the late seventies, Journey used the rhythm of soul in motown to inspire
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  hope in primarily white teenagers' lives. Decades later, the band and their signature
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  sound remains classic and now with singer ar Nel Pinetta, there again a fixture
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  in major stadiums worldwide. A playlist of Journey is on the show notes page.
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  Hi David, Welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much, Eric,
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  It's great to be here. From a historian's perspective, what is it about
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  this band? In particular, in what was it that inspired you to write
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  a book about him? Oh? Gosh, I mean, there's a couple
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  of ways I could approach that question, Eric. So I've been a Journey
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  fan since really the age of ten. I mean it was the summer of
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  nineteen eighty two and I was in a game room at a decrepit old resort
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  in the up in the old Borsch belt of dirty dancing fame, and someone
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  dropped a quarter in the jukebox, and on came Don't Stop Believing. They
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  still don't put on Natural Thing. By the way, I've noticed, whenever
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  I see a juke box with Don't Stop Believing in It, Natural Thing is
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  the B side, and nobody ever picks Natural Thing. I just fell in
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  love with Don't Stop Believing. At that moment, I fell in love with
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  Journey. I fell in love with the voice of Steve Perry. And it's
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  been more than a forty year ride at this point for me. But by
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  the same token, I became a historian, a professional historian. I went
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  to grad school, got that PhD, which sometimes I think stands for piled
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  higher and deeper, and became a professor and dean here at Monmouth University.
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  And my scholarship focused on race in the late twentieth century. It still really
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  does. But I started writing this book really during the pandemic and just kind
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  of looking for something to do, and I thought, this is a great
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  story. I'd love to be the one to tell it in full as a
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  historian, to take my tools of the trade, as it were, and
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  apply it to well. Really, the rock genre is usually dominated by journalists
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  and memoirists, and I thought having a professional historian sort of throw his hat
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  in the ring might be a good thing. And then out of that,
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  of course, as I was doing the research, a thesis emerged that you
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  can kind of ignore if you wish, and just enjoy this great story about
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  this great band, or you can really dive deep and think about some of
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  the challenging concepts that I bring to bear here. The book promises to show
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  how race in popular music contributed to the breakout success of the band. Can
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  you talk about that? Because I didn't really give it that much thought all
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  these years, and then when I read the book, I thought, well,
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  I listened to Steve solo albums, and you hear it a lot in
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  his music, like a song like I believe from Street Talk. I think
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  about that one. There's definitely that influence of soul and the music that came
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  before him. Yes, well, it's not surprising that you wouldn't have thought
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  about it. I think a lot of people don't think about it, and
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  I myself, I went through four decades as a Journey fan without really giving
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  Race all that much thought as it pertained to Journey. But the more I
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  got into the scholarship of it, the more I started to see that,
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  really, rock and roll in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties integrated popular music,
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  and I might even go so far as to say integrated all of popular
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  culture in the United States for the very first time. And then, somewhat
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  surprisingly, there's a resegregation that takes place after Woodstock. So you know,
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  prior to Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, popular culture was fully and thoroughly segregated.
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  White people could enjoy and participate in black culture, but they did so
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  knowing that they were crossing a color line, and the option to cross that
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  line was really far more difficult for African Americans to do. But then with
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  rock and roll, suddenly you have this integrated art form that's really a beautiful
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  thing, and it kind of takes us through the social revolutions of the nineteen
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  sixties. But then after Woodstock there's this incredible resegregation, and we see what
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  happens in rock and roll that in the nineteen seventies, it splits sadly into
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  rock, which is basically coded for white audiences and performed by white performers,
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  with a couple of major exceptions, Lenny Kravitz being an important one. And
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  then later on Prince or not later on, but right around the same time,
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  Prince being another important one, and Soul, which is coded for black
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  audiences and performed by and large by African American performers. And this happened to
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  some extent because there was a backlash in this country to the achievements of the
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  Civil rights era. But one of the results that you see is that when
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  African American artists attempt to play rock music, it's far more difficult for them
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  to break through than it is for white artists to do so. And at
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  the same time, rock music is still a descendant and evolutionary descendant, if
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  you will, of that integrated rock and roll that was taking place in the
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  fifties and sixties. The story of Journey is interesting in many ways, but
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  one is certainly how they sounded at the start, which is very different than
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  the Journey that most people know. They're essentially a jam band, kind of
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  came out of Santana's band. Can you first briefly talk about how Journey formed
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  and the story behind how Steve Perry joins the band because he was not the
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  original lead singer. No, he absolutely was not a Journey formed originally to
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  be a backup group along the lines of the Muscle Shoals rhythm section down in
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  Alabama, and it was originally called the Golden Gate Rhythm Section after the Golden
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  Gate, that waterway in San Francisco, and they very quickly realized that they
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  had this They still had this writing prowess that was new, and it was
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  eclectic, and it was loud, and it was crunchy, and a lot
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  of critics called it spacey, which is a term from that era that sort
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  of speaks to the American and really global fascination with the space race and how
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  we had gone to the Moon just a couple of years before. And even
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  on their first album, Journey dedicates a song to what is it? Is
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  it an asteroid? It's a comet, That's what it is. The comic
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  cahutech that is making its I don't know, one hundred year journey or something
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  like that around our cosmos and was within sight in I guess seventy three seventy
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  four when they wrote that. And Greg Rawley was the original lead singer of
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  Journey, and he had been the original lead singer of Santana. In fact,
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  he's the fellow who sings black Magic Woman. If you go to the
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  Santana Greatest Hits album and you listen to that. He was inducted into the
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  Hall of Fame originally the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, originally with Santana
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  back in the nineties, and they also included Neil Sean, who was the
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  second lead guitarist for Santana starting with their third album and with Santana's third album,
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  not Journey's third album. Ross Valerie, who had played with several important
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  Bay Area psychedelic bands, including one called Frumius Bandersnatch, and had also played
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  with Steve Miller and then Ainsley Dunbar, who was really a king drummer out
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  of Liverpool, out of the British blues scene, and that was where he
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  got his start. And Ainsley, after forming his own band in England,
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  that got him across the Atlantic and he toured with them here in the States.
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  Ainsley worked with Frank Zappa and then David Bowie. I mean he had
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  some of his biggest hits with David Bowie before he joined Journey, and they
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  played a brand of progressive rock that at the time, some people like I
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  said, called space, the others called it jazz fusion, and they were
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  moderately successful. Every album charted. The live act did fairly well for what
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  it was that they were doing. Of course, after they changed their name
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  to Journey and started performing their own stuff, and every album during that era
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  did better than the last on the charts. Their first album, Journey,
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  made it to somewhere in the one hundred and fifties or one hundred and sixties
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  on the Billboard two hundred. The book has the precise number. I'm not
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  recalling it offhand, and really anyone with an Internet connection can look that up.
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  Look into the future. Their second album in nineteen seventy six, I
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  think, broke the top one hundred, and then next made it to like
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  seventy something. So they're not a blockbuster superstar group at that point, but
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  they're making money for the label. And yet this is also a time of
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  cutbacks, This is a time of recession, This is a time of the
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  The economic term at the time was stagflation. It was a stagnating economy coupled
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  with inflation to the point where Greg, the lead singer, started talking about
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  how they couldn't afford to drink heinegen anymore. Now they had to drink Budweiser.
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  We imagine a time where one couldn't afford Heinegen and had to go Bludweiser.
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  It also helped that they got a sponsorship from Budweiser. So why he
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  exactly made that statement is up for debate somewhat. And so the label was
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  ready to cut them, as they were at the time cutting other acts.
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  And Herbie Herbert, their masterful manager, who had started as really a roadie
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  for Santana and at this point is working his way up to being a major
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  music industry mogul. He has the idea that they might be able to get
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  a stay of execution, as he put it, if they hired a frontman
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  style lead singer and perhaps in the style of Robert Plant let's say, a
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  very popular band in the nineteen seventies, led Zeppelin. And so he found
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  a fellow who the label was looking to give work to, and that was
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  a guy out of Chicago named actually out of Los Angeles, but he was
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  based in Chicago at the time, named Robert Fleischmann. And Robert Fleischmann had
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  a different manager, and there were other problems, and it may be that
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  Herbie only brought Robert Fleischman in to just get that stay of execution while he
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  contemplated the next move. But ultimately, a few weeks into Robert Fleischman's tenure
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  with Journey as lead singer, during which, by the way, they wrote
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  a song called that some of our viewers might have heard, called Wheel in
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  the Sky, Herbie Herbert got another tape and it was a singer that he
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  had heard before. And this was a fellow who was really a starving artist,
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  had been told by a dentist that he needed all his teeth to come
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  out because he was so malnourished, eating a lot of pork and beans,
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  barely eking out a living because he was so devoted to being a singer.
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  And this fellow that I'm talking about almost made it big in nineteen in early
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  nineteen seventy seven with a band called Alien Project, until the bass player of
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  that band died in a freak car crash on the fourth of July and he
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  went back to his stepfather's turkey farm to contemplate his future. And fortunately for
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  us, Herbie heard his voice again at that time in history, and that
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  voice was the voice of Steve Perry. What a story of that moment.
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  I mean, you know, rock history changed, and Steve was in his
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  late twenties around this time, so he was talking about this might be it
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  for me. I think he was ready to call it quits. And he
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  did some work on commercials, right, He'd sang jingles for commercials, I
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  think, I try to remember. I think it might be on YouTube,
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  but maybe thinking of somebody else. There were some later commercials that he did
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  with Journey. I'm unaware of any commercials he did okay that era. He
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  had a variety of bands that he worked with, but he had not really
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  had some steady income since leaving a job that he had in the early nineteen
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  seventies working as an engineer in a studio in Los Angeles, where we first
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  got to meet some of the big artists and learned some of the things that
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  frankly, he didn't want to do. You know, he saw a lot
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  of the drug abuse that was taking place among the artists at the time.
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  Sometimes he performed with some names. He did perform with Blocking on the Name,
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  but one of the musicians from Vanilla Fudge worked with Steve for a little
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  while in the mid seventies. But mostly these were rock bands that were sort
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  of cobbled together and didn't really go anywhere until again Alien Project really seemed to
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  be gaining momentum. And that's why it was such a tragedy at the time.
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  When I'll say his name, could just say that we never forget it.
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  It was. His name was Richard Michael's hadad and he died on the
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  fourth of July nineteen seventy seven, breaking up that band, but ultimately for
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  the bet or in terms of Journey, because it made Steve Perry available.
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  Is audio of that band available? Is there anything out there that we can
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  hear? You know? Their most important song was actually subsequently reed recorded.
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  No, it wasn't recorded by Journey. It was put on the Journey Time
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  cubed box set in nineteen ninety two, but it was recorded by the Alien
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  Project. I'm thinking because it was a Steve Perry demo tape and the song
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  was if you need Me call me? Oh yes, yeah, that I've
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  heard that song, I believe. Isn't that though? Is it also on
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  the expanded edition of Street Talk or maybe I'm exactly right don there. I
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  think it may have made it onto his Greatest Hits plus five, so that
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  might be where I heard it. Yeah, it's a great song. Yeah,
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  it's interesting to hear the story about Steve's musical awakening moment being hearing Sam
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  Cook's Cupid on the radio. That just speaks to his background. You talk
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  about talk about his background and what formed his musical knowledge and influences that he
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  put into Journey, because I think he's probably the most influential in terms of
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  that soul sound. Yes, I would say it's a really close call who
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  was the most influential songwriter, because Jonathan Kane, who joined the band in
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  early nineteen eighty one and then proceeded to co write or write by himself every
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  single one of the band's hits from that point forward, is either tied with
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  Steve Perry or a very close second in that category, and he brings his
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  own different influences that we can discuss. But Steve Perry, Yeah, he
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  was absolutely steeped in the soul and motown tradition. It's what he wanted to
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  be. I think. I think I describe him in the book as a
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  white, a white Sam Cook attempting to be a white James Brown, and
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  you see that in some of his some of the other street talk outtakes from
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  his first solo album, Street Talk Where, which ended up in that expanded
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  edition that you talked about a couple of decades later. There's one where he
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  really does seem to sound like like a very energetic and frenetic and enthusiastic James
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  Brown, and so he sort of brings that into this loud, crunchy,
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  progressive, almost metal, and they were called metal by some critics, very
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  hard rock band, and it's like, why on earth, you know,
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  it almost seems like, if you're looking at it at that moment in time,
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  it's like, what on earth is Herbie Herbert thinking? And the band
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  themselves didn't want Steve Perry. They're like, this guy's completely different than what
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  we do. Some of them actually would have preferred to stay with Robert Fleischman
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  because he was, like I said, he was in the Robert Plant mode.
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  He mold he was a screamer, you know, and maybe a band
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  like that needed a screamer. But Steve Perry just comes in and Greg Rawley
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  is a tenor, by the way, the original lead singer is a tenor,
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  but he's a what we might call a normal ranged tenor. Steve Perry
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  just takes it to these stratospheric heights. And you know, if you sit
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  there on a piano and listen to him sing and just start tapping out the
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  keys and seeing how high you can get on the keyboard while still playing the
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  exact note that Steve is singing. It's just amazing that a male voice can
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  go quite so high and still be in full voice, not falsetto absolutely remarkable.
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  But then that style, right, that is the major moment when soul
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  and motown enter the songwriting process of Journey. That is not the first time
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  African American influences have entered Journey, and I would say that combination of Santana's
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  Greg Rawley and Neil Sean with the liver Liver Pudley and blues drummer Ainsley Dunbar
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  is the is a huge part of the African American tradition entering Journey's music.
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  But Steve, it's a very different side of that background coming in. I
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  think that's sorry, I was gonna say that side of him is what stands
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  out for me, because yes, I'm I'm always going to be a fan
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  of a singer who can who has an amazing range, but I'm more drawn
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  to what I'm feeling from when they're singing, is there's some kind of soul
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  in there. How are they emoting those those notes? And that's what's always
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  stood out with with Steve Perry for me, is even if he couldn't sing
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  all those notes, I think I'd still love just the way he sings.
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  Yes, he's a he's a truly remarkable performer. He seems to feel the
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  music right performing it, and that you can see it in the videos of
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  him on stage, but you can also hear it even in the studio recordings,
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  which you know, a lot of times we hear the studio recording and
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  it just sort of seems even with music that we think is fantastic, it
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  just sort of seems like plain And we then we go to see the band
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  in concert to see them really act it out right. And with Steve Perry,
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  I mean, you listen to some of these songs the studio recordings,
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  and it's just it's all there. He's bringing it, He's bringing it one
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  hundred percent. Yeah, And he and Robert Fleischman were in the band briefly
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  at the same time. Another interesting to read in your book is that Robert
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  Fleischman was He was considered to be the singer of Genesis after Peter Gabriel left,
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  but then Phil Collins. Somewhere along the line, Phil Collins decided,
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  Okay, I'll give it a shot. So Robert didn't get that gig.
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  I thought that was interesting. Yeah, they were going in to do trick
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  of the Tale. Genesis was into the studio and they called Robert Fleischman in
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  and he was like, I think he had his back packed and his tickets
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  printed. Wow used to print tickets. Yeah, yeah, And then he
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  got the call and they said no, no, no, Phil Collins is
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  gonna try it. And he you know, he was the drummer for Genesis,
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  Phil Collins, and that changed history too. The book Down Rock Podcasts
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  will be back after this and it's some great stories in the book regarding the
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  the album that Steve Perry records on the first album with Steve Perry, that's
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  seventy eight's Infinity producer Roy Thomas Baker. He sprayed the studio with a chemical
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  fire extinguisher with which corroded the recording tape, so they had to move to
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  a different studio. And then there was something that Steve Perry said about he
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  would just come in like biting on some cheese and saying I like that,
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  I don't like that, and then just walk out. But the results speak
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  for themselves obviously. And when you talk about the success of this album and
• 21:51
  the songs from it that to this day, because I was putting together playlist
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  for this episode, as I was mentioning to you before we started recording,
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  and you go to that album that's like the greatest hits lights feeling that way
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  into any time, Ladu dah patiently wheel in the sky, something to hide.
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  Then winds of March can do and open the door of the last three
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  tracks, but all those songs leading up to Winds of March can do and
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  open the door. Still played heavily on radio today. When you look at
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  the songwriting credit, Steve Perry shows up often. So is he the big
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  difference maker here or is that too simple of an answer Because there was that
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  collective decision by the band and manager Herbie Herbert to change the sound, does
• 22:34
  that contribute as well? Yeah, he is a huge influence on Infinity And
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  you know, I agree, Eric. I mean, it's a fantastic album
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  and it truly exemplifies what we mean when we're talking about album oriented rock,
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  I mean the whole album is the work of art, and of course that's
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  why you get these stories about these artistic types like Roy Thomas Baker doing weird
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  things. Excuse me, But as I say in the book, and I
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  should say the name of the book again, I was trained by my publicist
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  to keep saying the name of the book in all of these interviews right live
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  in just to find emotion Journey and the Story of American Rock. Yes,
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  I'm sale now, I'm sale now. That's right, And folks can go
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  to journeyhistorybook dot com write a lot more about it, and to buy a
• 23:23
  copy available on audio as well. But as I say, the addition of
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  Steve Perry is really more of an evolution of the band than a revolution,
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  which is surprising, giving how given how different he was than the other members
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  of the band. But in infinity he doesn't take control of the band.
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  He's the frontman for the tour, he's the lead vocalist, and he's one
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  of the lead vocalists, I should say, in the studio, so he
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  and Greg Rawley continue to share lead vocal duties. Steve is on every one
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  of those songs, but there are songs that Greg Rawley sings the verses and
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  then Steve Perry will come in either for the chorus or for the bridge.
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  Anytime is a good example of that feeling that way as well. And also
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  if you listen to the sound, you can hear a lot of what Journey
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  had been doing in their first three albums as well. And you can also
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  if you listen carefully to those first four albums together, the three without Steve
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  Perry, and then that one Infinity, listen to them sort of chronologically,
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  you're gonna see changes taking place between Journey and Look into the Future, between
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  Look into the Future and Next, and then again between Next and Infinity,
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  and you can see that the changes. Maybe they were the biggest changes between
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  Next and Infinity, but they're not exponentially greater than the changes between the Next
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  and It's precursor the Future or the one before that. And then, of
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  course in the live show, they're still performing so much of those original three
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  albums. It's just that Steve Perry is doing a lot of the singing,
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  which you know on these songs that he hadn't originally recorded. Even after the
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  albums, even after Infinity starts to take off right around April of nineteen seventy
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  eight. They're still going to include some of those original songs from the first
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  three albums in their live show right on up until the time Greg Rawley leaves
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  the band. At the end of nineteen eighty, Infinity sold three million copies
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  and reached number twenty one on Billboard, a drastic improvement from those first three
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  albums, and then from this point on, Journey only gets bigger and bigger.
• 25:42
  Seventy nine's Evolution that's number twenty on a Billboard, Departure nineteen eighty reaches
• 25:48
  the top ten at number eight, and then they reach the top of the
• 25:52
  charts with nineteen eighty one's Escape, which eventually sells ten million copies. So
• 25:56
  between Infinity and Escape they release a string of hit so Here we Go,
• 26:00
  Will in the Sky, Lights, Love and Touch and Squeezing any Way you
• 26:03
  want it, Who's Crying Now, Don't Stop Believing, and their first number
• 26:07
  one single, Open Arms, I Mean, what a run? And they
• 26:10
  still weren't done yet, which leads to my next question. So howard things
• 26:14
  internally within the band? Because you're right about Steve Perry being a perfectionist and
• 26:18
  could be difficult to work with at times, and he wanted to replace Rory
• 26:22
  Thomas Baker as a producer. Says he increasingly gaining more control over band decisions
• 26:27
  because in the book there are some sources that claimed Ainsley Dunbar was fired in
• 26:33
  seventy eight because he and Steve didn't get along. But that's up for debate,
• 26:37
  right, It's absolutely up for debate. And what I do with the
• 26:41
  story of Ainsley Dunbar's firing is I kind of I take a few pages to
• 26:47
  unpack this. I think that's one of the differences between what I do as
• 26:48
  a historian and what say, a journalist would do. And there have been
• 26:52
  a couple of journalistic histories of Journey over the years that just sort of say,
• 26:59
  okay, and then he was fired and then they move on right pretty
• 27:02
  much, or they might put one reason out there into the book, but
• 27:07
  I really do my best to unpack it. I read every single interview pretty
• 27:11
  much that any of the players, or Herbie Herbert, any of the individuals
• 27:15
  affected by this set about it, and then I kind of hit the jackpot
• 27:22
  at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Archives at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland.
• 27:26
  They have the relationship with the Rock Hall, so they get to hold
• 27:30
  all those archives and copies of all sorts of rock books. By the way,
• 27:34
  I recommend it to all your readers to go check that out when they're
• 27:37
  in Cleveland visiting the Rock Hole, head over to Cuyahoga Community College and see
• 27:41
  the Rock Halls archives as well. And a copy of my book should be
• 27:47
  there by now too. Live in just to find emotion Journey and the story
• 27:51
  of American rocks. But when I went into that archive, lo and behold,
• 27:56
  I found Ainsley Dunbar's lawsuit. And the thing. The thing about being
• 28:00
  a historian is you want to try to get everything and then read everything,
• 28:07
  and that is a fundamentally impossible task. So you do your best. You
• 28:11
  get as much as you possibly can, and there's always constraints in terms of
• 28:17
  your own time, in terms of the funding that you have available to do
• 28:19
  these things, to make trips to archives, for instance, And I could
• 28:25
  go on West Law or another legal database and look through every single law case
• 28:33
  in every county anywhere near San Francisco and then state cases for a couple of
• 28:38
  years, and that would probably take me years just to do that without an
• 28:44
  actual case file number. But if you go to an archive where they have
• 28:48
  a folder called journey and then a subfolder called Ainsley Dunbar's lawsuit, right,
• 28:53
  and you open it up and there it is, it sure does save a
• 28:56
  heck of a lot of time for the researcher was and I read it really
• 29:03
  really carefully to try to figure out what the heck was going on with this,
• 29:10
  And so I'll leave some of those conclusions for the readers to discover in
• 29:15
  the book, but just to say that when it comes to sources, there's
• 29:25
  a big difference between what someone says in a media interview and what someone says
• 29:30
  in illegal filing. First of all, in illegal filing, you are under
• 29:33
  oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and as they say nothing
• 29:37
  but the truth, you're also going to say everything you can possibly say to
• 29:41
  win your case in the spirit of the whole truth. Right. And so
• 29:45
  there was both the suit and the countersuit. So I got to see what
• 29:49
  Herbie Herbert said about it, and I got to see what Ainsley Dunbar said,
• 29:53
  and ultimately to make a judgment and draw some conclusions. As historians do
• 30:03
  for some documents that really hadn't been released publicly. The other I mean,
• 30:07
  when they say everything that they could possibly say to win a case, that
• 30:11
  includes lots and lots of things that they would not say publicly, because what
• 30:15
  you say publicly is always sort of mediated by publicists with the idea that you
• 30:23
  have a brand that you're trying to promote, and in the case of Journey,
• 30:29
  by the time this lawsuit was filed in nineteen eighty, that brand was
• 30:33
  growing by leaps and bounds and there was lots and lots of money to be
• 30:37
  lost if they had revealed some of these things publicly, but they had to
• 30:41
  put him in the lawsuit to try to win the case. So wow.
• 30:45
  So yeah, is how much of an influence is Steve on the band as
• 30:49
  far as decision making by this time? Yeah, not so much. No,
• 30:53
  he's not the band leader. It's only after Evolution that he's able to
• 31:00
  engineer the firing of Roy Thomas Baker. And in that case he goes to
• 31:06
  his bandmates and he goes to the manager, but the manager is in charge.
• 31:08
  Herbie Herbert was in charge of Journey in nineteen seventy nine. That's why
• 31:12
  sort of to say, Okay, Steve Perry fired, Ainsley Dunbar or Ainsley
• 31:18
  Dunbar was fired because he didn't get along with Steve Perry is really truly an
• 31:22
  oversimplification. It's one of many factors that went into that moment. But with
• 31:29
  Roy Thomas Baker, that's really because Steve Perry wants to fire him, and
• 31:34
  Steve Perry increasingly because he's a perfectionist in the studio and in much of what
• 31:40
  he does professionally. What he sees when he sees Roy Thomas Baker destroy a
• 31:45
  studio with fire extinguisher, when he sees him come in and barely pay any
• 31:49
  attention, or as Ross Valery, the bass player says, always wanting to
• 31:52
  take a call from Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, who he had
• 31:56
  worked with. Well, I was going to say, yeah, he's famously
• 31:59
  known for his work with Queen. Right a Night at the Opera He had
• 32:02
  just produced for Queen, which includes that well known hit right Bohemian Rhapsody that
• 32:08
  I've heard of. That one everyone from age three to eighty three probably sings
• 32:13
  along to whenever they hear it. Right, Yeah, that's interesting. So
• 32:19
  yeah, I mean so Ross Valor would joke that every time the phone rang
• 32:22
  it was Freddie Mercury, and you know, off goes Roy Thomas Baker out
• 32:24
  of the studio. And for Steve Perry, I mean, this was his
• 32:28
  big break, this was his chance to finally make the big time. And
• 32:32
  here's, as far as he's concerned, here's this guy who's coming in and
• 32:37
  taking their money right for doing almost nothing and in some cases doing things that
• 32:42
  are counterproductive to the mission. Frankly, the mission is to write, produce,
• 32:49
  perform fantastic music that develops a growing an ever growing audience, right to
• 32:55
  make their mark on the art. And this guy's coming in and playing games
• 33:00
  and barely actually doing the job of producer. In one of Steve Perry's later
• 33:04
  interviews of the period in the mid nineteen eighties, he talks about how he
• 33:08
  doesn't even feel that there should be a producer at all if you have a
• 33:12
  competent band, he says, producers that's when he talked about just coming in
• 33:16
  and having a bit of cheese and leaving right. Producers are the record label's
• 33:22
  way of making sure that the band doesn't get off track and waste days and
• 33:27
  weeks and months In the studio when they should be producing the effort. And
• 33:30
  it's a reasonable point. If you're a record label, you're a buttoned up
• 33:35
  suit wearing nine to five office dweller who is looking at what bands actually do
• 33:39
  in the studio and going, that's ridiculous, kid stuff. Why are you
• 33:44
  know we need to send in a professional. But in Steve Perry's case,
• 33:46
  the professional with Steve Perry and the other members of the band, by the
• 33:50
  way, not just Steve. This was an incredibly professional group of musicians,
• 33:54
  So why do they need this joker to come in? But his success in
• 34:00
  firing or engineering the termination of Roy Thomas Baker was the first move. And
• 34:07
  I'm not going to say, and I don't say in the book, although
• 34:09
  the press puts something on the cover of the book that gives the impression that
• 34:14
  Steve was a mastermind in taking over the band, and like he was sort
• 34:17
  of evillly rubbing his hands together, like I'm going to take over this band.
• 34:21
  That's not Steve Perry. He did eventually take over the band. He
• 34:24
  absolutely took over the band, but it's not like he was planning over the
• 34:29
  course of six years to take over the band. It just sort of happened
• 34:34
  over time. It was more again, more of an evolution than a revolution.
• 34:37
  He felt that Roy Thomas Baker needed to go. He made the case
• 34:39
  and Roy Thomas Baker left. Then, when Greg Rawley left a co founder
• 34:45
  of the band at the end of nineteen eighty and in the years preceding Greg
• 34:52
  Raley leaving, Steve and Steve Perry and Neil Sean becoming the primary songwriters and
• 34:58
  Greg Rawley doing a lot less of the writing. There really is a move
• 35:02
  to and again it's not Steve consciously doing this, I think, but Steve
• 35:07
  ultimately becomes far more of a band leader after Greg Rawley leaves. As Greg
• 35:13
  Rally was an icon, I mean he is an icon. He's a founder
• 35:15
  of Santana, He's a founder of Journey. You know, the foyer in
• 35:20
  his house has a wall of golden platinum records. Of course, as it
• 35:24
  should. He's a double member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
• 35:29
  He leaves, Jonathan Kane comes in, and Jonathan Kane is going to be
• 35:34
  very very important for the evolution of this band and the success, the superstar
• 35:37
  success of this band, really, But that leaves Neil Sean and Ross Valerie
• 35:44
  as the only remaining original members of the band and Steve Perry as the front
• 35:49
  man who's getting all the press, and then from that point on, Steve's
• 35:52
  path to taking over the band is a much cleaner, smoother direction. It's
• 36:00
  it's going to be a lot easier because that that sort of lynchpin of the
• 36:04
  founding moment has left and is replaced by a new guy, as it were.
• 36:08
  Right, Yeah, that's interesting when you talk about the idea of do
• 36:13
  we need a producer or not? I usually I always feel like it's best,
• 36:16
  but I guess maybe it's case to case, like this might have been
• 36:19
  the exception to the rule, because a lot of bands do need a producer.
• 36:22
  You can hear I think a lot of the artists too, as they
• 36:24
  get further into their careers and they feel that they can they don't need a
• 36:29
  producer. You'll hear the difference negatively in the product. Whereas you know,
• 36:36
  you get a producer in there and they'll say, I think, let's shorten
• 36:38
  this up, or let's let's speed that up a little bit, or let's
• 36:42
  cut that part out. I think that's important, but in this case,
• 36:45
  it just sounds like, Yeah, those guys were they didn't need that.
• 36:47
  Now with Steve and Neil was that relationship where they did they get along?
• 36:54
  Were they friendly? Because that's always interesting the guitarist singer dynamics there. What
• 37:00
  was their relationship like like brothers, you know, like siblings and the such
• 37:07
  relationships, whether they're like siblings or whether their actual siblings have their ups and
• 37:12
  downs as everyone knows who has a sibling, right, and it changes over
• 37:15
  time depending on how we develop as individuals, that will affect the relationship.
• 37:24
  In the nineteen seventies, Steve Perry was a hungry, starving artist and Neil
• 37:30
  Sean was a very successful rock star even even with Journey. Before Steve Perry,
• 37:38
  I mean, here's this guy who at age fifteen sixteen is working with
• 37:45
  a superstar band called Santana. That's amazing. Yeah, we didn't mention that
• 37:50
  he's just a kid age right, and then short and then after the original
• 37:53
  Santana breaks up and he leaves and he doesn't leave with Greg Rawley. They
• 37:58
  both leave and then eventually they come back to get Journey. During that year
• 38:00
  and a half two year period between Santana and Journey, Neil Sean does not
• 38:06
  have a day when he doesn't have work, right, he's with a band
• 38:09
  called Azteca with Coke escoveto Sheila E's father and pretty much everybody wanted him in
• 38:16
  there as a session player. So he's living a fifteen year old's wet dream
• 38:23
  through his twenties. He really still is. Actually now has he turned seventy.
• 38:30
  He's coming up on seventy I think next year if he hasn't turned No,
• 38:32
  I think he did turn seventy last month. And what does that do
• 38:38
  to you psychologically? Right to become famous and successful as a rock star at
• 38:49
  age fifteen sixteen? In that sense, I feel sort of sad for Neil
• 38:53
  Sean and I think Steve Perry probably does too, because it really does arrest
• 38:58
  his development, his sury. He you know, he doesn't have to go
• 39:02
  through a lot of the things, or at least he can ignore a lot
• 39:06
  of the emotional things that most of us have to go through in our teens
• 39:08
  and our twenties. And Steve Perry did have to go through all those things
• 39:14
  in his teens and twenties because he was a starving artist. He was not
• 39:16
  a rock star. Now, when Steve Perry becomes a rock star and is
• 39:22
  for a few years sort of overwhelmed by this rock star lifestyle. They mesh
• 39:28
  very well, their relationship is really tight. They get each other on a
• 39:31
  very fundamental level. But over time that's going to change because Steve Perry is
• 39:39
  going to come to realize, as he does on February first, nineteen eighty
• 39:44
  seven, when he walks off a Journey stage for the last time, when
• 39:47
  he realizes as a very a very mature move which is has made his fans
• 39:55
  incredibly sad for now thirty five odd years, right, he walks off that
• 40:00
  stage for his own health and his own well being, his emotional, his
• 40:07
  mental, his physical well being. And Neil Seawn never does that. Neil
• 40:12
  Sean does not seem to ever really have a reckoning moment where where his maturity
• 40:20
  allows him to sort of look back on all of this and sort of make
• 40:22
  some moves that will help him for the better at that level. Unfortunately,
• 40:28
  and really really sadly, and they haven't really seen eye to eye since they're
• 40:35
  too completely they're they're in completely different places psychologically at this point. Steve Perry
• 40:43
  is a very mature seventy two, seventy three year old I forget exactly how
• 40:47
  old he is. But he's he's an incredibly well he thinks really clearly about
• 40:54
  what is best for himself and for his loved ones, and he charts a
• 40:59
  course of his life, and he has for decades charted a course for his
• 41:01
  life that has has helped him achieve that. And Neil Sean is not doing
• 41:09
  those things. And so they Neil Sawan doesn't even have Steve Perry's phone number.
• 41:14
  I mean, they they talk through lawyers at this point because they're just
• 41:19
  so different and they I think they probably are. One way to put it
• 41:22
  is there, they're just speaking completely completely different languages. Yeah. Steve Perry,
• 41:27
  by the way, seventy five five, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 41:30
  Steve Perry, he knows what it was like to live the quote unquote normal
• 41:36
  life. So he enjoys that, whereas, like you say, Eil fifteen
• 41:43
  years old, he's he's a rock star, and so he really doesn't that.
• 41:46
  That's the big difference here. Boy, that's it now. Jonathan Kane,
• 41:50
  when he steps in, he's on nineteen eighty one's Escape, that's the
• 41:54
  first album he's on. He takes over for Greg. He takes over for
• 41:57
  Greg Raley. Now his contributions songwriting wise, Is that a welcome edition from
• 42:01
  Steve and and Neil? Are the three writing songs together? What's that whole
• 42:07
  songwriting process like from that point forward? Oh? Yes, they work absolutely,
• 42:10
  they work incredibly well together. Now Jonathan Kane to continue in that vein
• 42:17
  of how we experience and grow from our childhood traumas and our young adult traumas.
• 42:23
  Jonathan Kane was also a starving artist in the nineteen seventies with several brushes
• 42:28
  with stardom, made it as far as Dick Clark's American Bandstand, and then
• 42:34
  everything he ever did at that in that era just gone, you know,
• 42:37
  just did not get any traction until he got an audition to be with The
• 42:43
  Babies, who needed to replace their keyboard player. And the Babies is a
• 42:47
  bit of a harder rock act at that point than Journey and a little bit
• 42:52
  of a different sound. Jonathan Kane is successful with them. He helps them
• 42:57
  in their fourth and their fifth albums, and you can definitely hear that evolution
• 43:00
  taking place in the Babies when Jonathan Kane and bass player Ricky Phillips joined the
• 43:05
  Babies. But he really starts to shine when he joins journey, that songwriting
• 43:09
  team Perry Caine Sean is responsible for nine out of twelve of the Dirty Dozen,
• 43:19
  that they play on stages still today, or that Cain and Sean play
• 43:24
  with Arnel Pinetta today and that they've been playing for decades. He brings,
• 43:30
  in a sense the missing link. So you talked about Wheel and the Sky
• 43:35
  being a hit, you talked about Lights being a hit. Yes, they
• 43:37
  get a lot of airplay today as classic rock hits, and they got some
• 43:42
  airplay back in the seventies. But their first real bona fide hit that charted
• 43:50
  in the top twenty, that's not until eleven, Touch and Squeezing, which
• 43:53
  I think mayde number nineteen on the Billboard Hot one hundred in nineteen seventy nine.
• 43:59
  And then, of course, or any way you want, it does
• 44:01
  very well. I forget how where they where. That one charted probably in
• 44:04
  the twenties in nineteen eighty. But as you say, Escape is going to
• 44:12
  go all the way to number one, and that's their nineteen eighty one album.
• 44:14
  Why is that? It's because of Jonathan Kane. He adds that final
• 44:19
  element at the exact moment, and that's where the race story comes in and
• 44:23
  that's where American popular culture comes in at the exact moment when the rock fan
• 44:30
  base, if there is one, There are many rock fan bases, but
• 44:32
  when there's what I call and what many people call the cultural zeitgeist, the
• 44:37
  cultural zeitgeist is ready for the journey that is going to happen with the addition
• 44:44
  of Jonathan Kine to that songwriting team of Steve Perry and Neil Sean. Now
• 44:49
  we've talked about where Steve Perry and Neil Shan come from, not so much.
• 44:52
  Neil Sean, we haven't talked about him so much, but he's basically
• 44:55
  Eric Clapton meets Jimmy Hendrix with as he put it's a lot of Aretha Franklin
• 45:00
  thrown in there for good measure. And he also thinks of himself correctly,
• 45:05
  I would says, as being the consummate guitar player for the consummate vocalist.
• 45:10
  And so the epitome of this, by the way, if you'll permit me
• 45:15
  a little tangent is his I think two thousand and two solo album Voice Fantastic
• 45:22
  Album, Grammy nominated album, which is all instrumentals where he uses his guitar
• 45:29
  to replace the Voice on covers of everything from Enrico Caruso to Brian Adams.
• 45:36
  Oh wow, I got to hear it. Wonderful album. Yeah, I'm
• 45:38
  ashamed to say I have not listened to it. Okay, it's called Voice,
• 45:42
  It's called Voice, Neil Sean Voice, Neil Seawan Voice. All right,
• 45:46
  and yeah, go buy it. Tell everyone to buy it. Once
• 45:50
  you hear it, you will tell everyone to buy it. We use parties
• 45:52
  for the record. He's an amazing guitarist. He truly is. I don't
• 45:57
  think he gets a lot of press as the most underrat guitarist. I don't
• 46:00
  think he's actually underrated. I think being the lead guitarist in Journey and being
• 46:05
  known for that is a great rating. Sure sure. And I'm a huge
• 46:08
  Sam Hagar fan. So the work he did hsas Oh great. I wish
• 46:13
  that would have continued, but that never did. Never did. But but
• 46:17
  you're saying, yeah, I escape is that you hear the differ, You
• 46:21
  hear the difference. So that's where Neil Sean came from. And you we've
• 46:23
  talked about where Steve Perry came from. Jonathan Kane, as I like to
• 46:28
  say, as he would probably put it, and he does talk about this
• 46:30
  in his memoir. He combines Arkansas country with Chicago polka and modern rock and
• 46:38
  roll, and so you would you wouldn't expect those influences to be there,
• 46:45
  and yet they are so. Don't Stop Believing is a good example of this.
• 46:50
  We talk a lot about that, A lot of people talk about Don't
• 46:52
  Stop Believing. Forbes just named it the biggest song of all time. But
• 46:55
  you know, another example of this is can be found in their song Only
• 47:00
  the Young, which was on the soundtrack to the movie Vision Quest. Song
• 47:05
  is so much better than the movie. It has been a lot more successful
• 47:09
  than the movie, made it onto their Greatest Hits album, And in songs
• 47:15
  like that, you see this very middle American post drive through suburban heartache.
• 47:28
  Some people call it right that Jonathan Kane truly embodies. You know, Jonathan
• 47:34
  Kane talks about Steve Perry having the persona of the next door guy who never
• 47:39
  got the girl. But really that's that's Jonathan Kane. That's the that's the
• 47:44
  angst that Jonathan Kane brings to his songwriting. It's this incredibly heartfelt, incredibly
• 47:51
  honest, incredibly open way of looking at the human condition that comes from a
• 47:58
  very Middle American a whitebread combination of of of sounds that he was raised with
• 48:07
  as as I think the descendant ultimately of Polish immigrants. Don't don't quote me
• 48:12
  on that. I mean it's in we're taping, but I think he's the
• 48:15
  descendant. His name is Friga, that's his legal name, Donathan Friga,
• 48:20
  and his father's name was Leonard Frigga. But he had that kind of Arkansas
• 48:23
  country strain, and he went and visited his grandparents' house down in I think
• 48:29
  Paris, Arkansas, where he heard people playing fiddle and you know that sort
• 48:32
  of thing, and then he plays polka to in bars in his twenties in
• 48:37
  Chicago, in around O'Hare Airport, entertaining you know, flight attendants, and
• 48:45
  it really does. I mean, you know another another place where you can
• 48:47
  see this, two places really open arms and faithfully open arms. He co
• 48:52
  writes, I think with Perry. I'm pretty sure that's just a simple co
• 48:55
  write with Perry. I don't think Neil Sean has a has a credit on
• 48:59
  that, because I remember Neil Sean talks well. They talked about how Neil
• 49:02
  Sean was smirking through the whole time and complained, right, couldn't figure out
• 49:07
  what to play there. But in the book, Yeah, faithfully. On
• 49:09
  their nineteen eighty three album Frontiers, another really big hit for them, he
• 49:15
  wrote that Jonathan Caine wrote that all by himself, and that's a love letter
• 49:17
  to his wife, his wife who then betrays him. And then he goes
• 49:24
  into another sort of phase of his musical career where he's writing about that betrayal,
• 49:30
  and then he has another very successful marriage where he betrays his wife in
• 49:35
  the two thousands, and so there's kind of this back and forth with him
• 49:39
  that he's incredibly open and honest with in his memoir, which is also a
• 49:44
  really really remarkable thing to see. I think he called Yeah. He called
• 49:46
  that one Don't Stop Believing the man, the band, and the song that
• 49:52
  defined generations. I think that's the title of his memoir twenty nineteen. But
• 49:59
  that's the end. Did he write all the lyrics, David? Did he
• 50:02
  write all the lyrics to all the songs he writes to Steve? Did Steve
• 50:06
  Perry write some? I don't. I don't know how they broke down the
• 50:12
  songwriting credits in that level of detail, Whether it was whether he can take
• 50:17
  credit for all of the lyrics. I do know that he wrote or co
• 50:22
  wrote every single Journey song from the moment he was hired. Yeah, until
• 50:25
  after Steve Perry left. There are a couple in their last four or so
• 50:30
  albums. Their two thousand and five album and I think their twenty eleven album
• 50:34
  have a song or two. The book Down Rock Podcast will be back after
• 50:37
  this. Now open arms this this initially Steve Perry Neil Sewan didn't want to
• 50:45
  record this one initially? Why was that? And what's the connection to Joe
• 50:49
  Cocker's With Little Help from my Friends on this track? Huh? You might
• 50:53
  have stumped me on that joke. I have the entry here if you want
• 50:55
  to. I had a feeling my book. It's in your Yeah, I'm
• 51:00
  sure I got it right when I wrote the book. Yeah, here we
• 51:02
  go. Let's see the result, however, is breathtaking, and the fans
• 51:06
  agreed, although not giving a writing credit. Smith Smith Smith added a drum
• 51:09
  line inspired by Bruce Rowland's performance of With Little Help from My Friends with Joe
• 51:15
  Cocker Woodstock. Where do we hear that? That's right? I didn't hear
• 51:20
  that in the song as I because I analyzed every song writing the book.
• 51:24
  But what happened is Steve Smith actually said that in an interview, and then
• 51:29
  you once you hear that, you go back and you listen, and then
• 51:31
  you listen to Joe Cocker's Woodstock performance, and oh, okay, okay,
• 51:36
  we got starting to come together side by side of you. I said,
• 51:38
  quote, It's not like I copied that note for note or anything, but
• 51:42
  just somehow the way he played that three four kind of feel. Yeah,
• 51:45
  yeah, that's interesting. So but yeah, that those Steve and Neil didn't
• 51:47
  want to. I didn't want to put it on the album. Why was
• 51:50
  that? No? Steve did? Steve first? Jonathan Kane. Jonathan Kane
• 51:54
  wrote the first draft of it as a wedding present really to his wife,
• 52:00
  Tawny, the daughter of a Hollywood star, Tawny McClure, who was her
• 52:06
  father. I'm blocking on that. It's in the book and it's also on
• 52:08
  Wikipedia. But he wrote that as a wedding present to his first wife,
• 52:15
  and then he presented it to John Waite, lead singer of the Babies,
• 52:19
  and John Waite said, no, we're not doing this, which is interesting
• 52:22
  because basically, ten years later, a similar song written by Diane Warren when
• 52:31
  I see you smile. John Waite insisted on including on the Bad English and
• 52:39
  Kine objected. Kane was like, no, we're a hard rock band.
• 52:43
  We should not be playing ballads. And now Bad English is known for that
• 52:45
  because it was their number one bit. Well, yeah, John Waite Moss
• 52:49
  said, yeah, I learned my lesson the first time, exactly right.
• 52:51
  Yeah, we're recording this one. I should have gone with open arms,
• 52:54
  and but that's what Steve Ferry does. Steve Ferry hears it and he goes,
• 52:59
  well, well, John Waite's loss is our game and he loved it,
• 53:04
  and because it really represents that's yet a new direction for the band.
• 53:08
  It's it's it's hard to call it a rock song, although it does end
• 53:13
  up on the soundtrack to the motion picture Heavy Metal. But it's Neil Sean
• 53:19
  who doesn't like it. Neil Neil, who was a founder of this band
• 53:22
  and who you know for the first three albums and for years, is just
• 53:27
  right out there up front, waving that giant head of hair that he had
• 53:30
  up and down, playing that guitar, crunchy loud as we said, rock
• 53:37
  and roll, rock music, hard rock music. It's like what do I
• 53:38
  play on this? Like what can I make out of this? And Steve
• 53:43
  Perry's like, I don't care. We're recording it. And then there's a
• 53:46
  story one of them told where Neil Seawan was standing outside of the studio smirking
• 53:52
  while they were playing it and almost trying to get them to try to screw
• 53:55
  Steve Perry up while he was singing the song. I think they did that
• 53:59
  with Peter Chris On Beth too. Jean and Paul are in there giving them
• 54:02
  facial expressions and the greatest right right the moment you say it, everyone's thinking,
• 54:09
  yeah, lyrics in our heads, right, But and yeah, he's
• 54:15
  he's out there messing with them. And finally Steve Perry said I need to
• 54:17
  have you removed from the studio and like you're out of here, and he
• 54:22
  Lee left and they and boy were they all you know, John Waite and
• 54:24
  Neil Sean they were totally wrong and it's their highest charting hit in history.
• 54:29
  Jury, Yeah, don't stop believe in who are the street light people that
• 54:32
  Steve Perry is singing about? Because there's different versions of stories here from Jonathan
• 54:37
  Caine and Steve. They've got different answers. Yeah, I think Steve Perry
• 54:40
  was in Uh, he was in Detroit. There is no as as the
• 54:45
  book says, and as has been repeated ad nauseum, there's no such place
• 54:47
  as South Detroit. There is a place called Windsor, Canada, just south
• 54:52
  of Detroit. But Steve Perry was looking out of his hotel room after a
• 54:58
  gig in Detroit. It may even be the one where they recorded songs for
• 55:02
  their live album captured back in nineteen eighty, and there were street lights in
• 55:08
  that hotel, in front of that hotel, and people walking around back and
• 55:13
  forth. He sort of saw them as the people who were kind of not
• 55:16
  knowing what to do after the show. You know, that moment, that
• 55:20
  that natural high that a lot of us get when we see a great concert
• 55:23
  and we just don't want it to end, you know, and then we
• 55:27
  leave and we just sort of walk quietly. Nowadays, you know, I'm
• 55:30
  sure you've experienced some of our listeners and viewers have experienced this, just sort
• 55:35
  of walking to the car kind of quietly. And nowadays, maybe the kids
• 55:38
  are teenagers and they're like, what do you want to talk about? What
• 55:42
  do you want to talk about? And you're just like, I don't want
• 55:43
  to talk about anything. I just want to think about that experience that they
• 55:45
  just had. And I think that's a lot of what Steve Perry was thinking
• 55:50
  when he wrote that. Both he specifically cites seeing that in Detroit, but
• 55:57
  he also saw it quite a bit in Los Angelus. For Jonathan Caine,
• 56:02
  it was he talks about being in a second story, a second floor apartment
• 56:07
  in downtown Los Angeles when he was really just living hand to mouth and sort
• 56:15
  of looking out the window at night and to seeing these people wandering around and
• 56:20
  you know, just sort of aimlessly. And that, by the way,
• 56:22
  is ultimately leads to where I took the title of my book Living Just to
• 56:28
  Find Emotion Journey and the Story of American Rock, because it's the street light
• 56:31
  people who are living just to find emotion, Right, That's that's the way
• 56:36
  the song goes. And you know, if you think about it as folks
• 56:39
  who are wandering under the street lamps, maybe in a parking lot after a
• 56:43
  show, and what are we doing? You know in that moment, you
• 56:46
  know, we're we're living just to recapture that emotion that we had in the
• 56:51
  show. One thing, they're absolutely clear about both of them is that it
• 56:55
  has nothing to do with prostitution, right, because that was always something that
• 57:00
  was asked street light people. You're talking about street walkers, you're talking about
• 57:06
  people under the street lights in the in the red what are those things called
• 57:09
  red? The red light district, red light districts, right, And that's
• 57:14
  absolutely not what they're talking about. So they so they say, yeah,
• 57:16
  that was Rocks and that's different songs, a very different song. Yeah.
• 57:21
  David Hamilton Golland is this episode's guest. The book Living Just to Find Emotion
• 57:25
  Journey in the Story of American Rock. My personal favorite Journey album is Frontiers
• 57:31
  nineteen eighty three's Frontiers, Separate Ways, Worlds Apart, Faithfully Center, My
• 57:36
  Love, I love Chain Reaction, I love After the Fall. I always
• 57:39
  love those quote unquote minor hits, you know, the ones that kind of
• 57:44
  drop off the radio and you go back and listen. Edge of the Blade,
• 57:46
  Trouble Child, Rubicon. I love all of these tracks. Number two,
• 57:52
  album four, Top forty singles, six times platinum. The critics didn't
• 57:55
  like it, but the fans obviously thought differently. Neil told Hipparata at the
• 58:00
  time that this was the beginning of a whole new era for the band.
• 58:02
  But as we know, things start to fall apart soon after, which I
• 58:07
  want to ask you about. But first the band takes a break and they
• 58:09
  work on some other projects here. The biggest is Steve Perry's solo album Seat
• 58:15
  Talk, which I Love from nineteen eighty four, sells two million copies,
• 58:17
  which is number twelve on Billboard. The single's Foolish Heart, and of course
• 58:22
  the big one, Oh Sherry, that's modeled on the four tops nineteen sixty
• 58:25
  seven motown hit Bernadette, and the lyrics are about Steve's then girlfriend Sherry Swafford.
• 58:31
  And you feel the title may have been inspired by a dish at a
• 58:36
  New Orleans restaurant. Yeah, every time I hear the song, now I'm
• 58:38
  going to think, I think of that. Oh sure, I have a
• 58:39
  coworker named Sherry, so I'm always thinking of that. This is definitely unsubstantiated,
• 58:46
  And as I say in the book, I talked to Bill Cuomo about
• 58:49
  this. Bill Cuomo was one of Steve Perry's co writers. He lives in
• 58:52
  Nashville. Now very has had a very successful career. I think he co
• 58:58
  wrote or he worked on Betty Davis Eyes with Kim Carnes, and I think
• 59:01
  he had been with the Carpenters before that, and he said, no,
• 59:06
  absolutely not. We added the oh because it was just timing. It adds
• 59:10
  a syllable to the song. But my theory was, and it goes back
• 59:15
  to that Frontiers album you're talking about, Journey descended on New Orleans to to
• 59:22
  record some really horrendous music videos that today have been the butt of all sorts
• 59:29
  of jokes, and to no end. I think Billy Squire wearing pink What
• 59:34
  was the one? The most ridiculous one, of course, is Separate Ways
• 59:38
  worlds apart, where they're on the pier on the Mississippi River January, so
• 59:45
  it's cold, but they're pretending it's not. And there's this they're they're playing
• 59:50
  air instruments, which I mean, everyone's familiar with air guitar, right,
• 59:52
  But Jonathan Keen is playing air keyboard, Steve Smith is on air drums,
• 59:58
  Ross Valerie is doing air base and then somehow the instruments then miraculously appear.
• 1:00:01
  At one point, the keyboard seems glued to the wall of a warehouse and
• 1:00:07
  Jonathan Kane is sort of playing it with his head over the should. Yeah,
• 1:00:12
  the flock of seagulls. I ran with a tinfoil all around the room.
• 1:00:16
  And there's this clue model who's just for some reason walking through the set,
• 1:00:22
  and Sherry Swafford was unhappy that she wasn't asked to be the clueless model
• 1:00:24
  walking through set. There's no real explanation to this album, to this,
• 1:00:29
  to this, this video. And at that point, of course, Steve
• 1:00:34
  Perry says, we're not doing stylized music videos anymore, and and he doesn't
• 1:00:38
  that they do on the road music videos like the one for Faithfully, and
• 1:00:44
  they do in the studio music videos right where you can see them recording.
• 1:00:47
  But other than that, they're not trying to tell us what to feel or
• 1:00:51
  what to imagine for the storyline. And he really does make fun of that
• 1:00:54
  in the Oh Sherry video. But so we're in New Orleans at this point
• 1:00:59
  in the store, and if you're Steve Perry and you're in New Orleans,
• 1:01:05
  well, for most of us, we go to New Orleans for as I
• 1:01:07
  did for a conference a couple years back, and you've got to go to
• 1:01:10
  gallat Wars. Everybody goes to Gallatoars. I mean, it is this jacket
• 1:01:15
  required. There's Phil Collins entering the story again, restaurant on Bourbon Street in
• 1:01:22
  the French Quarter, and it's like, I don't know half a block in
• 1:01:24
  from I think Canal Street, the main drag there where all the big hotels
• 1:01:29
  are, and Galatoires has a dish, as so many places do. But
• 1:01:32
  it's the sort of place where, if you're Steve Perry, the sort of
• 1:01:36
  person who would wear a top coat and tails on stage at that point of
• 1:01:40
  his career, you're gonna go and have dinner. Someone's gonna say, well,
• 1:01:43
  you got to go have dinner at Gallatwars, right, So you're gonna
• 1:01:45
  put on your jacket and you're gonna walk into Gallatoars. And what do you
• 1:01:50
  see when you first open the menu? Turtle soup oh sherry, which is
• 1:01:55
  French. It means turtle soup with sherry, right, but it's a sherry
• 1:02:00
  s h e r r y, meaning fortified wine from Spain. Right.
• 1:02:07
  Sherry Swafford's name is not spelled that way, hers and her name is spelled
• 1:02:10
  s h e r r i E. And of course the song is not
• 1:02:15
  au O, it's O h oh. But I developed my own little pet
• 1:02:19
  theory. In that moment, I myself went I went to Gallatois at my
• 1:02:22
  last conference a couple of years ago before the book came out, and I'm
• 1:02:24
  like, really, turtle soup all Scherry and I had just been out to
• 1:02:29
  the pier to check out where they filmed the video, because that's what I
• 1:02:34
  do when I go around the country. I see where Journey has been and
• 1:02:36
  I, you know, I sort of think about how that affected everything,
• 1:02:39
  and it just sort of all came together. And it may be completely false,
• 1:02:44
  but I think I like it. I think that's up there with the
• 1:02:47
  Wizard of Oz and The Dark Side of the Moon. We got to put
• 1:02:50
  it up there. This is interesting too. Now, next time, whoever's
• 1:02:53
  listening to or watching this interview, give oh Sherry a listen and try to
• 1:02:58
  imagine a saxophone soul right, because that was what Steve wanted. But wadi
• 1:03:01
  wat tell ends up doing the guitar solo and I thought that was interesting.
• 1:03:06
  Now, the success of Steve's solo album that definitely had fans worried. I
• 1:03:09
  can imagine the band members might have been like, oh, what's going on?
• 1:03:13
  But he wasn't gonna leave the band comments that Steve made to the press,
• 1:03:19
  though didn't go over well with the band. One member panned Street Talk
• 1:03:23
  right, there was one guy in Journey that said something negative about it.
• 1:03:30
  Yeah, it hasn't been revealed in any of the sources that I've read to
• 1:03:35
  date which member of Journey did not like Street Talk. Steve Perry said,
• 1:03:39
  who It wasn't And I'm forgetting that passage of my book. It probably says
• 1:03:44
  it. You probably haven't right now. I got it here, let's you
• 1:03:46
  can find it. But I know I do remember Neil Shaan saying, boy,
• 1:03:50
  that was a song, Oh Sherry, we could have used. He's
• 1:03:52
  kind of bummed, you know, like that that would have been another hit
• 1:03:55
  for us. Well, he did kind of leave the band in his head,
• 1:03:59
  as he put it late, in his head. He quit and he
• 1:04:01
  didn't tell anyone that he had quit because he liked, and he still does
• 1:04:06
  today, like to be likes to be a little vague and always hold out
• 1:04:11
  that possibility. And part of that is Part of that is money. Part
• 1:04:16
  of that is maintaining this this air of possibility that keeps the fans interested over
• 1:04:23
  the years and and therefore keeps the money flowing. In people buying the albums,
• 1:04:28
  people seeing the live act, which he still profits from even though he
• 1:04:30
  doesn't actually perform with them anymore. And then he came back, but he
• 1:04:36
  came back under certain conditions. He that's when he took over the band.
• 1:04:43
  Frankly, so he had the experience of a solo album that was off the
• 1:04:47
  chart successful, and he he was the biggest celebrity in the band at this
• 1:04:54
  point. He knows he's the driver of what they're going to be able to
• 1:04:59
  do, and he basically gives them an ultimatum that none of us knew about
• 1:05:02
  at the time. It was totally behind the scenes. It was not publicized,
• 1:05:08
  but the company that controlled the band, Nightmare Productions Incorporated, that Herbie
• 1:05:15
  Herbert, the manager, was president of, and that all the members of
• 1:05:18
  the band were co owners of. He basically said, if you want me
• 1:05:21
  to come back, you need to give the authority over the band to this
• 1:05:27
  new entity that I'm creating called Elmo Partners, which is named after the character
• 1:05:31
  on the cover of your favorite album, Eric Frontiers. That's called Elmo.
• 1:05:36
  Yeah, that's right. So they created Elmo Partners, which is an equal
• 1:05:43
  partnership. At the time, it was an equal partnership of Steve Perry,
• 1:05:46
  Neil Sean and Jonathan Kine. And at the time there was it wasn't certain
• 1:05:51
  that they were going to get rid of bass player Ross Valerie or drummer Steve
• 1:05:57
  Smith, only that they were going to take control of the band, and
• 1:06:00
  they did. But Neil Sean and Jonathan Kane they accept this with the idea
• 1:06:09
  that they can be co owners of this new entity Elmo Partners and the other
• 1:06:13
  people involved, the other owners, Herbie Herbert, Steve Smith and Ross Valery,
• 1:06:17
  they go along because they want to keep the money train running. I
• 1:06:20
  mean, this is just the reality. Steve. Steve Perry says, this
• 1:06:24
  is what we have to do. That's what we have to do. And
• 1:06:28
  the result is another incredibly successful album, as you know, Raised on Radio,
• 1:06:34
  which is both a nostalgic look at rock and roll and a further a
• 1:06:42
  furthering of their sort of direction towards motown and soul oriented music. And that's
• 1:06:50
  because Steve Perry is in charge now. He decides which songs are going to
• 1:06:55
  be on the album. He produced the album himself, he was the producer,
• 1:07:00
  and he wants to move in this direction, not just because that's what
• 1:07:03
  he was raised on, right, Sam Cook and Motown. But because of
• 1:07:09
  something else that was happening right around the same time, Prince and Michael Jackson
• 1:07:14
  had become superstars, and especially Prince. When Steve Perry looks at Prince's success,
• 1:07:20
  he's looking at African American rock, and Prince is really the exception that
• 1:07:27
  proves the rule. Where else is there African American rock that is successful at
• 1:07:31
  that level since Jimmy Hendrix, there just isn't. And yet Prince's success tells
• 1:07:38
  Steve Perry. Prince's success in Michael Jackson's success tells Steve Perry, I want
• 1:07:43
  to move journey a little bit further in that direction. And then something happens
• 1:07:47
  that now is a Netflix documentary We Are the World, to help with famine
• 1:07:54
  relief in Ethiopia, Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson get together and
• 1:08:00
  put together a star group of musicians including Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and
• 1:08:06
  Steve Perry. Right, and Steve Perry is one of the very select few
• 1:08:12
  musicians who's given a solo spot in We Are the World, and even more
• 1:08:15
  select few musicians who has asked to contribute an original song to the USA for
• 1:08:21
  Africa album that We Are the World is the center of and he sees all
• 1:08:26
  this happening and he just he says, you know what, I'm doubling down
• 1:08:29
  on this, and that's what raised on radio is, and what do we
• 1:08:31
  get from it? Suzanne, be good to yourself. You've done a good
• 1:08:35
  job listing songs, listing tracks from album. I'll leave that to you.
• 1:08:39
  Eric, positive touch, I'm trying. There is one on there that's very
• 1:08:44
  much. I think it has a soul lean to it, and it might
• 1:08:47
  be positive touch. I could be wrong. Yeah, but just overall,
• 1:08:51
  the whole album, like you say, is it's it's got that feel to
• 1:08:55
  it. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, And and I forgot about I forgot
• 1:09:00
  just how good of a song that is. Yes, yeah, that came
• 1:09:03
  out in eighty six. A lot of problems getting that album done. By
• 1:09:08
  the way, before I forget, Steve Smith was the guy that Steve Perry
• 1:09:12
  said, Steve Smith's not the guy who hanned my Street Talk album. Yeah,
• 1:09:18
  yeah, so the album three top twenty singles. Be good to yourself,
• 1:09:21
  girl can help it. I'll be right, I'll be all right without
• 1:09:24
  you. And then I mentioned Suzanne the album each number four, double platinum,
• 1:09:29
  but it's the last with Steve Perry until his return ten years later.
• 1:09:31
  So what was Steve's reason for pulling the plug? And can you talk about
• 1:09:35
  the comment from original Journey bassist Ross Valerie which you include in the Book's pretty
• 1:09:41
  powerful? I have it here if you need a reminder on this one too,
• 1:09:44
  but I thought it was interesting. Yeah, And in that in that
• 1:09:47
  passage, I quote, so I quote Ross Valerie. Ross Valerie, the
• 1:09:50
  bass player for Journey, founding bass player who off and on was with Journey
• 1:09:56
  for fifty years pretty much and is no longer with the band now thanks to
• 1:10:00
  a twenty twenty lawsuit unfortunately. But that quote from Ross Valerie is from a
• 1:10:06
  couple of decades later, and he's sort of asked to reflect on his experience
• 1:10:13
  with rock singers in a documentary about their current lead singer, Arnelle Panetta,
• 1:10:17
  and it just seemed very insightful when it came to Steve Perry, so I
• 1:10:23
  put it in a couple decades earlier. The part where I'm discussing Steve Perry
• 1:10:27
  leaving. The other thing to talk about that process is that I included some
• 1:10:31
  recent scholarship from psychologists about the psychological impact of being a touring musician or a
• 1:10:41
  touring professional and what they call the incidents of suicidality. The frequency with which
• 1:10:46
  people in that world commit suicide is significantly higher than in other professions. It
• 1:10:51
  is an incredibly taxing way of life. Ross Valerie talks about that in that
• 1:10:58
  quote. You go away from your family, you go away from your friends.
• 1:11:01
  Their lives continue while you're away. People die, people move on,
• 1:11:08
  and you're not part of it. And you come back almost as an alien
• 1:11:12
  from time to time and visit with them, but you're not really a part
• 1:11:15
  of that anymore. And that's really really hard for a lot of folks to
• 1:11:19
  accept, and that ultimately was something that Steve Perry could not accept. He
• 1:11:25
  wanted to be human, he wanted to be with his loved ones, and
• 1:11:29
  you can't do that in a superstar rock band. And he finally came to
• 1:11:33
  realize that in the winter of nineteen eighty seven he had lost his mother tragically.
• 1:11:43
  And you know, Herbie Herbert later on makes the point valid point that
• 1:11:47
  most of them had lost parents during that era, and as Ross Valerie says,
• 1:11:53
  that's what happens Ross Valerie lost his parents during that era as well,
• 1:11:57
  but they accept did the rock star lifestyle and accepted that they would not necessarily
• 1:12:02
  be there for the funeral. They wouldn't be at these loved ones deathbeds.
• 1:12:06
  Life moved on without them, and Steve Perry had a real problem accepting that
• 1:12:11
  he and he walked away, and like I said, February first, nineteen
• 1:12:15
  eighty seven, happened in Anchorage, Alaska, was the last show that Journey
• 1:12:20
  has to date to date performed with Steve Perry, but he left that and
• 1:12:28
  he has never been on a Journey stage since. They did a reunion album,
• 1:12:31
  as you mentioned Eric a decade later, nineteen ninety six's Trial by Fire,
• 1:12:38
  which earned them their first and only Grammy nomination for their hit song When
• 1:12:42
  You Love a Woman. But Steve did not go out on tour with them
• 1:12:45
  after that, and within a couple of years the band had moved on without
• 1:12:50
  him, and they signed legal documents to ensure from Steve Perry's perspective that he
• 1:12:59
  would be taken care of. The book down Rock Podcasts will be back after
• 1:13:03
  this. I was happy to see as all the Steve Perry fans were when
• 1:13:09
  he came back in ninety four. I think that was ninety four. Was
• 1:13:12
  for the Love of Strange Medicine. Yes, and You Better Wait in Young
• 1:13:15
  Hearts Forever are among my favorite Steve Perry songs, Journey or solo. The
• 1:13:20
  album did well. It was great to see him back. He did some
• 1:13:23
  shows. I know he toured a little bit for that one. And then
• 1:13:26
  you mentioned the ninety six album Trial by Fire. So but that fell apart
• 1:13:30
  fast because now he said it was a physical ailment that he needed some time
• 1:13:36
  on. And then the guy said, sorry, we're not going to wait.
• 1:13:39
  Yeah, he needed hip replacement surgery, and he argued correctly that it
• 1:13:44
  was not the band's business. His medical situation was not their business. And
• 1:13:51
  they argued, also correctly, that if you're not medically capable of doing the
• 1:13:57
  job, then we can replace you. So they were in a sense,
• 1:14:00
  they were both right. He was I conjecture that like so many of us,
• 1:14:06
  he was afraid to get on that operating table. You never know what's
• 1:14:10
  gonna happen. Even if you're a high level celebrity like Steve Perry. Surgeons
• 1:14:15
  make mistakes, and he did subsequently have the hip replacement surgery and then about
• 1:14:20
  a decade later, had his other hip replacement surgery, so he's had both
• 1:14:26
  halves of the hips replaced. But while he was waiting and while he was
• 1:14:34
  thinking it over, is when the band moved on now arguably, and what
• 1:14:41
  Herbie Herbert said was that he thought that Steve Perry never actually wanted to go
• 1:14:45
  out on tour with the band, never wanted to return to the band,
• 1:14:48
  just wanted to do a reunion album. And there is certainly evidence of that,
• 1:14:56
  and that is ultimately what did happen. They had a reunion album and
• 1:14:59
  no tour. But what it did was it empowered the rest of Journey.
• 1:15:03
  So legally Elmo Partners no longer controlled the band because there was excuse me,
• 1:15:09
  there was a line in the Elmo Partner's contract that said that their contract was
• 1:15:14
  only valid as long as all three of those members Neil Sean, Jonathan Kine
• 1:15:17
  and Steve Perry were continuing to be Journey, and the moment any one of
• 1:15:24
  them was not in Journey or performing as Journey, their contract was null and
• 1:15:28
  void. So technically, on February first, nineteen eighty seven, the Elmo
• 1:15:32
  Partners no longer controlled Journey. Now it takes another decade, they don't actually
• 1:15:39
  act on that, but finally after the reunion album, Nightmare Productions reasserts control
• 1:15:47
  over the band. Actually they reasserted control before the band, and Steve Perry
• 1:15:51
  went along with that, and that's why Ross Valerie and Steve Smith were welcomed
• 1:15:55
  back for that reunion album, even though they had one of what had been
• 1:15:59
  fired in one quit during raised on radio a decade earlier. But that empowers
• 1:16:03
  them. Then they say, well, why the heck aren't we just moving
• 1:16:06
  on with another lead singer. And it was a hard road. Steve Smith
• 1:16:12
  left, so it was really Jonathan Kine and Ross Valerie and Neil Sean who
• 1:16:16
  kept going. But they found a fantastic drummer in Dean Castronovo, who,
• 1:16:23
  despite some legal troubles about a decade ago, is again with the band and
• 1:16:28
  doing very well with the band. And they found Steve au Jerry out of
• 1:16:30
  Brooklyn, almost a clone of Steve Perry, who performed very successful with successfully
• 1:16:36
  with them for a number of years until, of course, there was a
• 1:16:41
  lip syncing scandal because he had blown out his voice performing Steve Perry's songs,
• 1:16:46
  and they ultimately replaced him twice and then finally Arnelle Pinetta joined. Yeah.
• 1:16:53
  Yeah, they did go through some singers and that was there was a while
• 1:16:57
  there where they were struggling, But all of a sudden they're a huge draw
• 1:17:02
  again in concerts. So when at what point does it start to make that
• 1:17:09
  turn to where they become a huge touring act. How long does it take
• 1:17:12
  from the time that Steve's out and Arnelle's there and all of a sudden things
• 1:17:17
  take off. Because they did pretty well with Augerry from what I recall,
• 1:17:20
  I mean, they released an album that resulted in the loss of their label,
• 1:17:27
  that threat that had been made by Columbia Records way back in nineteen seventy
• 1:17:30
  seven. The label finally made good on that threat. Although it is an
• 1:17:33
  incredibly good album, Arrival, with some really solid songs. I got at
• 1:17:41
  the moment it was released in Japan actually, and then a year later I
• 1:17:44
  got the US version and enjoyed that tremendously Still due, but they were not
• 1:17:49
  a superstar act anymore. With Steve au Jerry. They did a lot of
• 1:17:54
  state fairs in the early two thousands, and they then did an album that
• 1:18:00
  they really don't talk about anymore. They did an album in two thousand and
• 1:18:03
  five called Generations that sort of disappeared very quickly, and really it was the
• 1:18:12
  growth of Don't Stop Believing in those years, the resurgence of this song that
• 1:18:16
  had been I guess a number eight hit back in nineteen eighty one in nineteen
• 1:18:21
  eighty two and was certainly a big enough hit to bring me into the band
• 1:18:25
  and so many others of my generation. But it started to come back.
• 1:18:30
  If you look at these sort of moments in time. Nineteen ninety eight,
• 1:18:34
  I think, is when Adam Sandler uses it in The Wedding Singer. He
• 1:18:40
  has a violin version of Don't Stop Believing as a send up to how ridiculous
• 1:18:45
  they were making out the early eighties popular culture to be. And that was
• 1:18:47
  the Wedding Singer, right, it's being made fun of up to two thousand
• 1:18:53
  and seven, where it's the final moment of the Sopranos, right that final
• 1:18:58
  episode where Tony Soprano is sitting in that diner with his family and he's playing
• 1:19:02
  Don't Stop Believing on the jukebox. In between, you have this slow growth
• 1:19:06
  of this song that starts coming back, and it's an underdog, it becomes
• 1:19:10
  an underdog anthem for sports teams. It's in movie soundtracks like the movie Monster,
• 1:19:15
  which Steve Perry consulted on. It becomes a song that's used regularly on
• 1:19:21
  the TV show Glee, and then after The Sopranos explodes in renewed popularity,
• 1:19:29
  they don't have a lead singer. They need a lead singer, and within
• 1:19:31
  a few months they hire Arnell Pinetta. Oprah Winfrey invites them on for Arnell
• 1:19:36
  to tell his rags to riches story and journey has never looked back. Yeah,
• 1:19:42
  By the way, what do you make of don't stop believing in that
• 1:19:45
  soprano scene? Because there's always that that discussion. It's like a real over
• 1:19:49
  analyzing it. I mean, what's in the lyric? Why did they decide
• 1:19:51
  it? I always find that fascinating, you know, because the Sopranos fans
• 1:19:57
  really really analyze every aspect of that show. It's it's a beautiful ending.
• 1:20:05
  And that was actually Steve Perry's opinion. When David Chase told him the ending,
• 1:20:10
  he was the only person outside of the cast and crew who knew the
• 1:20:13
  ending, and he demanded to know the ending because it's a it's a violent
• 1:20:17
  television program and he said, I don't want this song to be used if
• 1:20:23
  it's if there's gonna be some sort of a bloodbath or, as he put
• 1:20:26
  it, a Saint Valentine's Date massacre at the end of this show. And
• 1:20:30
  when he was told, when he was given the script for the ending,
• 1:20:32
  he said, no, no, no, this is this is exactly right.
• 1:20:36
  And the way I talk about it is Tony Soprano is fictional, of
• 1:20:44
  course, but what he represents is that white suburban teenager of the late nineteen
• 1:20:50
  seventies who is a huge rock fan and who is seeing the world of his
• 1:20:57
  parents disappear before his eye. That is the world where a good middle class
• 1:21:03
  job could be depended on a good industrial job, where the minimum wage actually
• 1:21:09
  was enough to give you a middle class lifestyle. That world was starting to
• 1:21:14
  disintegrate in the nineteen seventies, and that's represented in The Sopranos as the world
• 1:21:17
  of the American mafia is fading. Tony says in some of the earliest episodes
• 1:21:21
  of that show more research, I had to go back and watch the entire
• 1:21:26
  run of The Sopranos. That was fun. He had not a bad homework
• 1:21:29
  assignment, that's right, and he says early on, he says, I
• 1:21:33
  feel like I'm I feel like I'm at the end of something. I feel
• 1:21:39
  like I'm in the end of something that had a heyday. And he's thinking
• 1:21:43
  that the world of the Mafia was about Las Vegas and Tony, you know,
• 1:21:47
  and not Tony Frank Sinatra and hanging out with the brat pack in the
• 1:21:53
  cabaret, when it was always this horrible, evil organized crime syndicate or series
• 1:22:00
  of syndicates. But this notion of decline, this notion of declension, is
• 1:22:05
  such a prevalent theme in American popular culture because things have changed so significantly over
• 1:22:12
  the past half century. We have moved from an industrial base of producing things
• 1:22:18
  like cars in Detroit to a service base right economy, and those changes changes
• 1:22:25
  are very difficult, and it's very hard to adapt to those changes. And
• 1:22:28
  Tony Soprano really represents the difficulties adapting to those changes, and he's going through
• 1:22:34
  therapy because of it. He's going through classic Freudian psychoanalysis as a result.
• 1:22:39
  It's kind of both the comedy and the genius of the Sopranos. And so
• 1:22:44
  when that when it ends with don't stop believing, it's a callback it's yeah,
• 1:22:50
  of course, yes, it's the music of his youth, but it's
• 1:22:54
  also it's a callback to what at this point, middle aged from the heartland,
• 1:23:01
  if you will, that suburban heartache we talked about earlier, where they
• 1:23:05
  are at that point in their lives, in their late forties and their early
• 1:23:10
  fifties. And that's one of the reasons why The Sopranos was so successful.
• 1:23:16
  You know, it's not all the blood and guts. I mean, for
• 1:23:18
  the same reason that The Walking Dead is not successful for the zombies. It's
• 1:23:23
  successful because it makes us think about ourselves, right, and it makes us
• 1:23:27
  think about the way humans interact. Similarly with the Sopranos, The Wire with
• 1:23:31
  other you know what we call the new Golden Age of American television. That's
• 1:23:36
  what they're doing there. And so to end it with Don't Stop Believing,
• 1:23:42
  is producer David Chase saying, that's what that song represents. That song represents
• 1:23:47
  people who think that things were better, who are having difficulty adjusting to change,
• 1:23:53
  but who know that if they just hold fast, it can still get
• 1:23:58
  better again in the future. The book Down Rock Podcasts will be back after
• 1:24:01
  this. Steve Perry did return in twenty eighteen with Traces, another great album,
• 1:24:10
  and it was received well. What was he doing all that time in
• 1:24:14
  between and what led him back into the studio. He was truly retired for
• 1:24:19
  most of that period, and then he fell in love again, you know,
• 1:24:24
  and it's it's a tragic love story. He fell head over heels in
• 1:24:29
  love with a woman he met through a friend, a friend who Patty Jenkins,
• 1:24:33
  who was the director of the film Monster, and he had worked with
• 1:24:36
  her when when they had worked on putting Don't Stop Believing in that film,
• 1:24:43
  and his girlfriend had terminal cancer and and yet the heart wants what the heart
• 1:24:53
  wants. And they had an incredibly short, but incredibly passionate and incredibly beautiful
• 1:25:01
  relationship of two really adult, mature people who seemed to really really appreciate each
• 1:25:11
  other and what they brought to each other. And he moved to New York
• 1:25:16
  with her for treat for her treatment, and some of that you hear in
• 1:25:20
  Traces. There's a song October in New York which is just just heartbreaking and
• 1:25:26
  beautiful and fantastic all at once. And when she was dying, she extracted
• 1:25:34
  a promise from him that he would return to music and we are the beneficiaries
• 1:25:40
  of that. So thank you to her, because then he very quietly and
• 1:25:45
  secretly went into the studio. Every musician who worked on that album was sworn
• 1:25:48
  to secrecy, almost as if they were working on the Sopranos Final scene.
• 1:25:54
  And it took about five years, but Traces is a masterpiece. Yeah,
• 1:26:00
  absolutely, And he talked about going for long rides on his bike through Hanford,
• 1:26:05
  California, which is where he was from, just being a normal person,
• 1:26:09
  being a normal dude. Yeah. Now, so where's Journey at right
• 1:26:13
  now? There? Over the last few years, they've been in the headlines
• 1:26:17
  for not good reasons, a lot of lawsuits, battles between Jonathan and Neil,
• 1:26:21
  and so where are we at right now with the guys in Journey?
• 1:26:25
  Uh So, when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
• 1:26:31
  in twenty seventeen, four of the five classic members were in the band because
• 1:26:39
  Steve Smith had rejoined the band after Dean Castronovo had some legal troubles, and
• 1:26:45
  that gave a whole lot of Journey fans hope that maybe Steve Perry will come
• 1:26:47
  back for just one more reunion. And then certainly after he released traces,
• 1:26:54
  there was again that sort of dynamism. Maybe he's maybe that's what's gonna happen
• 1:26:59
  again. That's what happened in nineties. He released a solo album, then
• 1:27:01
  he did a reunion album with Journey. Maybe we're looking at that. And
• 1:27:06
  then within a year all those hopes were dashed because in January of twenty twenty,
• 1:27:16
  Neil Sean, with the with the agreement of Jonathan King, illegally fired
• 1:27:24
  Ross Valerie and Steve Smith. And I say that, and when I say
• 1:27:30
  illegally, I'm not referring to criminally illegal. I'm referring to civilly illegal.
• 1:27:36
  So there's a difference. And I don't mean to imply that laws were broken.
• 1:27:41
  What I am stating is that contracts were broken, and that Neil Sean
• 1:27:45
  had no right, nor did his management company have any right to fire Ross
• 1:27:50
  Valerie and Steve Smith. They, along with Steve Perry and Herbie Herbert,
• 1:27:56
  all co owned Nightmare, which was the corporate entity of Journey, and Neil
• 1:28:01
  Sean had tried to create a side project called Journey through Time, which would
• 1:28:09
  have allowed him to make more money. And what has really infuriated Neil Sean
• 1:28:15
  over the years is that both he and Jonathan Kane, as part of their
• 1:28:19
  agreement with Steve Perry after the breakup in the late nineties, agreed to pay
• 1:28:26
  huge sums to Steve Perry. Now it's twelve and a half percent of every
• 1:28:30
  dollar they earn on the road and twelve and a half percent of every dollar
• 1:28:33
  they earned from their recordings, meaning the new recordings. They're still paying him
• 1:28:38
  for that. And Neil Sean also is on wife number seven. He has
• 1:28:45
  over the years had lots and lots of alimony and lots and lots of child
• 1:28:48
  support to pay for and a rock star lifestyle, and so to have to
• 1:28:56
  continually pay this rent as it were to Steve Perry was chafing, very chafing
• 1:29:00
  to him. And so he created this side entity called Journey through Time.
• 1:29:04
  Even brought back Greg Raleigh for it, and originally it was for charity.
• 1:29:09
  But when he started to try to make money off of it, money that
• 1:29:13
  he would not have to share with any of the former members of Journey,
• 1:29:16
  including Steve Perry, the company acted a nightmare, said well, no,
• 1:29:23
  you can't do that. You can't create a band with the word journey in
• 1:29:26
  it. If you're Neil Sean and expect that we're going to allow that to
• 1:29:31
  happen. And so they had board meetings where he was removed from his post
• 1:29:36
  as president. He was never removed, his shares were never taken away from
• 1:29:42
  him. He always maintained a seat on the board of that company. But
• 1:29:46
  ross Valerie was put in place, I think as the secretary and Steve Smith
• 1:29:49
  as president. These are mostly honorary titles in a board of that nature.
• 1:29:56
  But Neil Sean then concocted a story that the two of them were in gauging
• 1:30:00
  in some sort of a corporate coup d'eta, and he won in the press
• 1:30:03
  very quickly. Lots and lots of journalists bought that story, hook line and
• 1:30:09
  sinker. But that's again where you have to read the entire legal documents,
• 1:30:14
  because ross Valerie sued, He said, you can't do this. I'm a
• 1:30:16
  co owner of this company. You can't fire me. And then Neil Sean
• 1:30:21
  countersued and said, yes I can. And when you read these documents very
• 1:30:26
  carefully, as I did, it's clear that ross Valerie was right. What's
• 1:30:30
  also clear, however, is that once they can't work together anymore, there's
• 1:30:34
  no way you can really have a journey led by Ross Valerie and Steve Smith
• 1:30:40
  without Neil Sewan and Jonathan Kaine. That just won't fly. You can have
• 1:30:43
  a journey with Neil Sewan and Jonathan Kane without Ross Valerie and Steve Smith.
• 1:30:47
  That's what they're doing right now. So they were gonna settle. We always
• 1:30:50
  knew they were going to settle. The delay and how long it took to
• 1:30:55
  get to a settlement was caused by something we all experienced in March twenty twenty,
• 1:30:59
  the pandemic. The courts shut down gave them time to think about what
• 1:31:02
  the settlement was going to be. It ultimately became a game of chicken.
• 1:31:06
  How long would Ross Valerie hold out to try to get as much as he
• 1:31:10
  could in consideration for what he had done for this band over fifty years before
• 1:31:15
  finally agreeing to a settlement, And how close was Neil Sean going to let
• 1:31:19
  it get to an actual court Because if they had gone to court, Neil
• 1:31:23
  Sean would have lost and that would have been the end of journey. And
• 1:31:27
  so the only really the only way Ross Valerie could lead journey is if Steve
• 1:31:31
  Perry came back. So and that's not in the cards at this point,
• 1:31:36
  so journey continues. They have Arnel Pinetta still. He's their longest running chronologically
• 1:31:42
  speaking lead singer in history. He's recorded three albums with the band, none
• 1:31:45
  of them have achieved anything close to the success of the Steve Perry stuff.
• 1:31:49
  And they pretty much don't play that music in concert. They go out and
• 1:31:53
  they play their hits, but they have huge crowds that they perform in front
• 1:31:57
  of their very successful concert draw. And as I say at the end of
• 1:32:01
  the book, at some point when the current members can no longer perform,
• 1:32:04
  they'll probably make like Abba and put up holograms and just keep this journey going
• 1:32:10
  forever and everything. Yeah, yeah, on and on and on right,
• 1:32:13
  And Jonathan and Neil are getting along now because they had I guess Neil was
• 1:32:16
  not happy that Jonathan was talking about politics and interviews. And then I heard
• 1:32:19
  a story about they hired bodyguards to make sure that the other guy didn't sneak
• 1:32:25
  into the other guy's dressing room before a show, Like what's going on?
• 1:32:29
  Yeah, I mean a lot now, though a lot of this does devolve
• 1:32:31
  down to Neil Sean's maturity level, unfortunately, And let me be absolutely clear,
• 1:32:39
  I am a fan of Neil Sean's music. I really love his guitar
• 1:32:44
  playing. I have bought every album he has ever produced, whether it's his
• 1:32:47
  solo album or Journey stuff or other bands that he's been a member of.
• 1:32:50
  And I encourage everyone to go and do this because it is fantastic hsas folks,
• 1:32:57
  Yeah, Sa Seawan and Bad English Hardline, all that stuff. Go
• 1:33:02
  and get it. Absolutely. But unfortunately, as a human being, he
• 1:33:08
  really still is that fifteen sixteen year old and it does come out in the
• 1:33:13
  way that he deals with people. That's not to let Jonathan Kane totally off
• 1:33:15
  the hook. Jonathan Kane is married to Donald Trump's spiritual advisor, Paula White
• 1:33:23
  Kine, and that has caused tension in the band because Neil Sean wants it
• 1:33:27
  to be an apolitical, a non political entity, Journey, and Neil Seawan
• 1:33:32
  is right in that regard. But simply being married to someone who works with
• 1:33:39
  a politician is not the same as bringing politics into the band, and I
• 1:33:43
  sympathize with Jonathan Kane. Jonathan Kane is in love with his wife. He
• 1:33:46
  has every right to be in love with his wife and to go with his
• 1:33:50
  wife to events. He is also entitled to his political opinions. He is
• 1:33:56
  also entitled to play Don't Stop Believing at events with Donald Trump, which he
• 1:34:00
  has done. Those are not a political use of Journey. That's a guy
• 1:34:04
  who showed I mean, if you're invited to an event like this and your
• 1:34:08
  wife is that high level, you're gonna go. Many of us may disagree
• 1:34:12
  with him politically, but he also doesn't actually talk about the politics. He
• 1:34:18
  doesn't go to Journey concerts or get on the press, get on the horn
• 1:34:23
  with the press and say Neil Sewan is wrong because of all these good things
• 1:34:27
  about my favorite political candidate. Whereas Neil Sean will do things like when Aretha
• 1:34:34
  Franklin died, he'll say that his tribute to Aretha Franklin was not a Journey
• 1:34:39
  tribute but a Neil Sean tribute. And he'll call up reporters all over the
• 1:34:43
  country and ask them to print retractions when they say it's a Journey thing rather
• 1:34:46
  than a Neil Sean thing. It's almost embarrassing. Really. They suit each
• 1:34:50
  other over misuse of a Journey corporate credit card, and in that case,
• 1:34:56
  I think Jonathan Kane was right when I read those legal filings that Neil Sean
• 1:35:02
  probably was misusing a Journey credit card. In the end, they settled.
• 1:35:06
  But yeah, there were times when they as late as last year, when
• 1:35:11
  they needed bodyguards against each other, or at least they said that they did,
• 1:35:15
  or reporters observed them as having separate bodyguards. But they always managed to
• 1:35:21
  get out there on stage together and that does say a lot. And they're
• 1:35:26
  still together, so there's still yeah. And Steve Perry meanwhile, I was
• 1:35:30
  like, I'm just happy I'm not involved in all this stuff. Well,
• 1:35:32
  Steve Perry did sue that. Yeah, he scratched that separate lawsuit. So
• 1:35:39
  Neil and Jonathan had sold their rights to the songs and Steve Perry had not
• 1:35:44
  sold his rights to the songs. And then I think Neil had tried to
• 1:35:48
  use the songs in another way, and Steve Perry filed a complaint against them
• 1:35:55
  with the Trademark Office of the US Patent and Trademark Office, and it just
• 1:36:00
  Yeah, at the end of the day, though, it's the music that
• 1:36:03
  truly is so drawn to and it's just the most amazing music. So many
• 1:36:09
  great songs live in just to find emotion. Journey in the story of American
• 1:36:12
  Rock by David Hamilton Golland. So it's out now through Roman and Littlefield and
• 1:36:15
  you can find it wherever books are sold and where can people find you online.
• 1:36:19
  There was also a website you want you mentioned earlier. We can mention
• 1:36:21
  that again, Yes, journeyhistorybook dot com all one word, journeyhistorybook dot com,
• 1:36:29
  and I hope you'll go there. You can find a link there to
• 1:36:31
  the Roman and Littlefield site where you can get the hardcover and you can get
• 1:36:35
  the ebook. You can also find a link on journeyhistorybook dot com for the
• 1:36:42
  audiobook, which I'm also very proud of. And in addition, journeyhistorybook dot
• 1:36:47
  com contains Spotify playlists that you can listen along to as you read each chapter,
• 1:36:54
  as well as my appearance schedule if you'd like to come and meet the
• 1:36:57
  author and get your copy signed. By the way, favorite album, favorite
• 1:37:00
  song, favorite album would have to be Escape, That's what brought me in.
• 1:37:05
  But my favorite song is Wins of March from it. Oh yes,
• 1:37:10
  yes, Winds of March. Okay, I'll make sure I put it in
• 1:37:13
  the playlist for this episode, all right, David, So people, any
• 1:37:16
  any social media pages you want are sites you want to get out there too,
• 1:37:19
  if people want to reach out to you. I'm on x formerly Twitter
• 1:37:25
  at d H Golland, and I'm on Facebook just David Golland, I think
• 1:37:30
  is what I am on Facebook. But all of those links you can find
• 1:37:32
  through Journey History Book. Oh perfect. So I'll just put that link up
• 1:37:36
  in the show notes page. So for anybody listening or watching this, check
• 1:37:40
  out the show notes page below or wherever you get the show notes. You'll
• 1:37:43
  see it there. David, thanks so much. This was a fascinating conversation.
• 1:37:46
  Eric. This has been an absolute pleasure. I've really enjoyed talking with
• 1:37:49
  you this morning. Thanks so much. That's it. It's in the box.