For Emma Kilgannon …
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Information Page
Foreword by Andrew McNiece
Introduction
Chapter One: The Journey Begins: The Early Years (1973–1976)
Chapter Two: Journey’s Evolution: A New Musical Direction (1977–1980)
Chapter Three: Don’t Stop Believin’: Journey’s Glory Years (1981–1983)
Chapter Four: The Raised On Radio Era (1984–1987)
Chapter Five: Separate Ways: Steve Perry’s Escape (1988–1994)
Chapter Six: Can’t Tame The Lion: Steve Perry And 99 The Return Of Journey (1995–1997)
Chapter Seven: We’ll Be Alright Without You: The Arrival Of A New Singer (1998–2004)
Chapter Eight: All The Way: Thirty Years Of Journey (And Another New Singer) (2005–2006)
Chapter Nine: Change For The Better: Journey’s Rebirth (2007–2010)
Afterword By Jeff Scott Soto
Endnotes
Appendix 1: Discographies (UK)
Appendix 2: Where Are They Now?
Appendix 3: Steve Perry Solo
Acknowledgements
Bibliography & Sources
BY ANDREW McNIECE
of melodicrock.com
“There’s quite a bit of musicianship and variety that makes up Journey.”
Ross Valory1
When you think Journey – you think of the songs. They seem to have taken on a life of their own and for many the songs are all they know. There is no knowledge of the personalities behind them, nor the years of hard work, endless touring and paying dues that it took to make these songs classics.
Those that are better educated know that beneath the surface lies one of the most fascinating, complicated and dysfunctional histories of any rock band of the modern era.
A myriad of individuals have been part of the Journey machine over the years, from the various members of the band who have come and gone, to those that guided their way and the various crews that kept them on the road.
Journey have always engaged tough management. In the early days Herbie Herbert was a pioneer, a groundbreaking hands-on manager. No one ever said no to Herbie, and decisions he made then still influence the music world today. In more recent times the equally infamous Irving Azoff has guided the band and kept them going when many other bands would not have made it.
At the core of Journey is guitarist Neal Schon – the founding member. And together with Herbie Herbert and later keyboardist Jonathan Cain and Azoff, he made a number of tough calls over the years. These key moments are numerous. The decision to hire a full-time lead vocalist in Steve Perry saw the band lose its early progressive fans for the new commercial direction. As Perry gained more control he brought in his own rhythm section for the Raised On Radio album and tour. Perry then departed and the band disappeared for ten years, only to reunite for Trial By Fire in 1996. Perry was unable to commit to touring due to the need for hip surgery, leaving the band with their toughest call of all. And this time they didn’t hesitate – they made the hardest call in their history and replaced Perry. These were all momentous decisions. Any one of them could have killed the band; but, in hindsight, each decision seems only to have added to the legacy of the group and allowed them to be where they are now – still creating new music, still touring and still playing those beloved classics.
And that is what it is all about – the songs. These are the songs that bring thousands out of their homes each summer as the band tours year in, year out. They are the songs that appear in countless movies and TV shows each year. They are the songs that inspire an unprecedented number of tribute bands, each adopting a song title as a moniker of their own. And Journey have written some brilliant songs that have stood the test of time. The fact that ‘Don’t Stop Believin” is the most downloaded song of all time only proves that.
And one cannot forget this band’s fans – some of the most dedicated, passionate, loving (and at times crazy) people that anyone could wish to meet. The band are their adopted family and they will at times duel to the death to protect their favourite members. It is all part of the energy that envelops this band and everything they do.
Most of the band’s most memorable and popular songs came from the Steve Perry years. The chemistry between vocalist Perry, guitarist Neal Schon and keyboardist Jonathan Cain was undeniable. Despite the dysfunctional nature of their personal relationships with each other, or perhaps because of that creative tension, the trio created a legacy that lives on today, more than thirty years since ‘Don’t Stop Believin” was committed to vinyl. This book details some of the personalities behind the band and some of the countless stories that make up everything that is Journey.
Andrew J McNeice
October 2010
www.melodicrock.com
“They [critics] were critical of Journey being corporate and the money orientation and so forth; shit, try that nowadays. Nowadays, if you’re not making money you’re just not hip.”
Herbie Herbert2
In 2009, a quirky musical comedy set in a high school called Glee aired in the United States, and before long the show’s critical and commercial success spread around the world. The format takes well-known popular songs – often classic rock tracks – and reworks them according to the premise of the show. Without question, Glee’s most popular and widely-travelled song is ‘Don’t Stop Believin”, from Journey’s classic mega-selling 1981 album Escape. The song – both the Glee version and the original Journey cut – became significant chart successes the world over and Journey, a band barely known among British teenagers, became popular all over again. The song took on a life of its own: not only was a version played on Glee, but also on the UK talent contest The X Factor, run by the music mogul Simon Cowell, and Channel Five in the UK even took the big step of naming a TV show after the song. Once “rock dinosaurs”, Journey quickly became anything but “has-beens”. Indeed, Journey’s Greatest Hits – surely one of the finest collections of rock tracks ever assembled on one disc – re-entered the charts in both their native America and many foreign territories, including the UK where their career has often been haphazard.
The enormous success of Glee was perfect timing for the band. In late 2007, Journey hired a new singer from the Philippines named Arnel Pineda after guitarist and co-founder Neal Schon had seen him perform Journey tracks on YouTube. So impressed was Schon with Pineda’s vocal abilities that he had the singer flown out to San Francisco to audition for the band. The band had experienced years of relative obscurity following the second – and ultimately final – departure of Steve Perry, Journey’s most iconic singer. It had hired (and fired) two singers, Steve Augeri and Jeff Scott Soto, who, although popular with long-term Journey enthusiasts, brought the band no closer to the mainstream success which had eluded them for years.
In many ways the hiring of the diminutive Pineda would either make or break the band. Ticket and albums sales were down on their early Eighties heyday, a fact most put down to Steve Perry’s absence. In the event, though, the hiring of a frontman from a foreign country turned out to be a masterstroke, since it gave them more publicity than they had had since Perry reunited with them for the Trial By Fire album in the mid-Nineties. In many ways it echoed Judas Priest’s hiring of former Priest tribute singer Tim Owens after the departure of Rob Halford.
With Arnel Pineda, Journey released their thirteenth studio album Revelation, which became their biggest selling album since Trial By Fire. Suddenly, Journey were popular again and their success spread over to the UK where they played sold out tours in 2008 and 2009. Journey’s appeal in the UK has never been as high-profile as in the US or Japan, where they can walk on water, and, prior to their short UK tour in 2006, the band hadn’t played a concert in England since 1980. Journey fans were so keen to have the band tour the UK again that a petition was launched on www.journey.co.uk to entice promoters to invest in a Journey headlining road jaunt. It certainly helped as the band played the UK (with different singers) in 2007 through to 2009 before taking a year off from the road.
The hiring of Arnel Pineda has begun a new epoch in the band’s career and has seen their name rocket to international status for the first time in well over a decade. They have been seen regularly on major American TV shows and are featured in the popular press. Nevertheless, though Robert Flesichman, Steve Augeri, Jeff Scott Soto and Arnel Pineda are excellent singers in their own right, nobody has ever – or indeed will ever – better the vocal perfection of Steve Perry. Rolling Stone included him in their ‘100 Greatest Singers Of All Time’ poll for a reason.
At the time of writing, in mid-2010, as the band are working on their fourteenth studio album with producer Kevin Shirley, there is not a single book on Journey despite their having sold over seventy million albums worldwide and having broken the record for the most downloaded song in the history of iTunes with ‘Don’t Stop Believin”. The only book published on the band was by Robyn Flans back in 1985.
Unfortunately for biographers, most members of Journey, past and present, are believed to have signed confidentiality agreements that prohibit them from giving interviews for ‘unofficial’ books or any other publication without the consent of their management. In other words, like former employees of celebrities such as David and Victoria Beckham, many musicians who feature in Journey’s story have signed contracts with “gagging” clauses. This level of control by Journey’s management is exceptional in rock, and seems to contradict the notion of free speech that the United States proudly upholds as the First Amendment of its Constitution. Isn’t effectively banning musicians from talking about their own experiences with Journey something more associated with dictators in the Middle East or former communist countries? For God’s sake, it’s meant to be rock ‘n’ roll.
However, what this means is that those writers who go down the other route, which is to produce an unofficial book such as this, can offer a complete perspective on the band’s history without prejudice. That’s one reason why there is not a major biography of the band currently sitting on bookshelves in retail stores.
‘Don’t Stop Believin” is not only Journey’s signature song but also a motto they have lived by, and it has taken them through some hard times. This biography begins in 1973 when the band was hastily assembled in San Francisco, California and takes the reader through the early jazz fusion years, the dramatic change in sound to AOR/melodic rock, the numerous line-up changes, the hiring and firing of the band’s first frontman Robert Flesichman and, of course, the enormous success they would achieve with Steve Perry, as well as those years following Perry’s first and second departures.
The Untold Story Of Journey follows their career as they formed, matured, flourished, succeeded and failed. Their story is by no means straightforward: there are obvious lulls in their career like the periods between the release of Frontiers in 1983 and Raised On Radio in 1986 and of course, the massive gap between that album and 1996’s Trial By Fire; and then there was yet another lull while the band were waiting on Steve Perry to decide if he could (or wanted to) go on tour in support of Trial By Fire, their disappointing so-called reunion album. In the end, of course, the band hired another singer so Journey and Perry went their separate ways for the final time. For a band that formed way back in the early 1970s they have been far from prolific. Why is that? Was it down to internal politics?
It is interesting to learn what went in the creation of a back catalogue filled to the brim with beautiful, dulcet songs. The behind-the-scenes arguments and divisions between certain members – always common in rock bands – may startle some readers, as will the ego clashes of some very powerful personalities, and the stories of greed and deceit and the baggage that inevitably comes with superstardom.
The question is: do fans really want to know how the songs that have entertained them for years were actually crafted? Do fans truly want to know the stories behind those songs? It is never easy to learn that one of your idols is perhaps not as endearing as you have been led to believe. Journey’s career certainly is not as controversial or as drug-crazed or booze-soaked as the careers of other American rock bands, but neither has it been an easy ride. If you look deep enough there is still some bitterness, heartache and anger there. This is the story of the band that gave the world songs such as ‘Wheel In The Sky’, ‘Ask The Lonely’ and ‘Lights’ and whose career became synonymous with the term ‘stadium rock’.
Neil Daniels
November 2010
www.neildaniels.com
“I would say it was … fusion rock with vocals. It was different. There was a lot of soloing, but the songs were good. The soloing was the thing that really drove it very, very high but we did write songs but they went through a lot of changes.”
Gregg Rolie3
On November 5 and 6, 1981, Journey played two of their most celebrated concerts ever at The Summit in Houston, Texas. Filmed for MTV, Journey took the opportunity to cement their status as one of the biggest selling and touring rock bands in the United States. They were on fine form as they promoted their mega-selling Escape album in front of 20,000 fans and churned out soon-to-be classics like ‘Wheel In The Sky’, ‘Don’t Stop Believin”, ‘Who’s Crying Now’ and ‘Any Way You Want It’. They were at the peak of their career, but getting to that point had been no easy ride. In fact, in the beginning there was a different band name, a different line-up and an altogether different sound …
The journey began in the unlikeliest of places and under the moniker Golden Gate Rhythm Section. The hastily assembled line-up featured former Santana guitarist Neal Schon and his bandmate, keyboardist/organist/vocalist Gregg Rolie, with bassist Pete Sears and drummer Gregg Errico. Though Journey are known the world over as an AOR/melodic rock band, famous for immaculately produced rock anthems and power ballads, their roots were, in fact, firmly planted in the Latin American rock of Santana, the San Francisco group named after their charismatic guitarist Carlos.
Thanks in no small way to an acclaimed set at the 1969 Woodstock Festival, Santana, their debut album, was a smash hit when it was initially released that same year. Alongside Carlos, it featured the talents of Gregg Rolie who sings lead vocals on the track ‘Evil Ways’ and plays an electrifying Hammond organ solo in the song’s middle section. Born on June 17, 1947 in Seattle, Washington, Rolie formed the Santana Blues Band with guitarist Carlos in 1966 after he quit an unknown early outfit called William Penn & His Pals. Joining Santana and Rolie in the first line-up of the band was vocalist and guitarist Tom Fraser, drummer Rod Harper, percussionist Michael Carabello and bassist David Brown. The band soaked up the hazy sounds of liberal San Francisco, becoming deeply imbedded in the dope-smoking hippie lifestyle of the mid- to late sixties. But getting the band to life was far from easy.
Former Santana road manager Walter James Herbert II, better known as Herbie, explains: “When they signed their deal with Columbia, finally some sort of really low deal with It’s A Beautiful Day, Columbia took the two acts almost on one contract and they went into the studio … and finished the album and sent it to Columbia Records and it was rejected. When it was rejected, I guess that’s when they decided, ‘Well, I guess we really have to change this all around. It’s probably the best record that we can make with this kind of line-up and we need to change.’”
A radical realignment was clearly necessary, so Rolie and Santana set about making changes. Herbert: “We had a conga player named Marcus Malone that was very Afro. He wasn’t Latin really at all. He was into the mesmerising trans-dance kind of sound and [Harper’s replacement drummer] Doc Livingstone really had one beat and this one particular type of drum solo that he played, and it seemed like every song became the same when he played it. They made those changes: they went back to an earlier conga player that had played with the band even before I knew them – Michael Carabello. And Michael Carabello met this young Nicaraguan that didn’t even speak any English at all down at Aquatic Park in San Francisco, and his name was Jose Areas [nicknamed Chepito] so Michael brought Chepito into the band. Even way back in the early, early days it was Michael Carabello [who] suggested they call the band Santana after Carlos’ last name. I don’t believe it was ever because he was the leader per se especially back in those days … That was something that evolved over time. They changed the band and got Michael Shrieve – the young nineteen-year-old drummer – Chepito and Carabello, and took the live engineer Brent Dangerfield from the Straight Theatre, and went in and tried to make a record with him, and that is the first Santana album that the world is so familiar with.”4
“Santana was a phenomenon, a melting pot of ideas and people from different walks of life when nobody else did it,” Gregg Rolie explained. “That part I’m extremely proud of. We just played as hard as we could and created a music no one had done before. If you want to talk about crossing borders, we crossed so many of them … It never got in the way. The only thing that ever got in the way was the music. When we disagreed on the music, that’s when it changed. As far as developing that style of music – that was done by the original six people.”5
That Santana was a different kind of rock band to the norm was apparent at Woodstock, where their fusion of a startling array of musical styles, Latin rock, blues, salsa, African beats and rhythms and jazz – grabbed everyone’s attention. Nevertheless, Gregg Rolie remained unmoved by the attention: “When people tried to explain what Santana music is … it’s not Latin rock. I hate that term. It’s really focused around guitar, organ and percussion. To explain it simply, the organ is huge in it. It carries a lot of the rhythms.”6
The West Coast city of San Francisco was a cultural hotbed from the mid-sixties to the end of the decade, the focus of an alternative society that coalesced around mind-expanding drugs, a sexually liberated lifestyle and free concerts by groups whose music resolutely rejected the limitations of the pop charts. Its heart was where Haight Street intersected with Ashbury, a neighbourhood where the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin settled and which in 1967 – the Summer of Love – attracted thousands of wayward college drop-outs, the first wave of hippies.
“I went up to San Francisco [and] purely because of the music I moved into the city,” said Rolie. “This was the summer of love, and we were really into the music, and wanted to be an international band. It was our driving force. It was a great place to get that across. San Francisco at that time, you could draw an equivalency to what Seattle became in the nineties. It was the same kind of ideal, when the music scene totally changed. It was a very experimental type of music that was based upon blues that all of a sudden was miraculously found by everyone from FM radio.”7
Santana’s second album, Abraxas, featuring a notable cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Black Magic Woman’, sold over four million copies and hit number one in the Billboard Top 200 album charts, as did their third, Santana III, on which new guitarist Neal Schon joined Santana in a twin-lead attack. However, tension was mounting within the ranks, especially after Chepito Areas had an almost fatal brain hemorrhage. Schon gave the band a powerful, rock-driven stamp but this was increasingly at odds with Carlos’s vision for a more spiritual, ethereal sound in keeping with his deepening interest in meditation and the teachings of Indian philosopher Sri Chinmoy.
Neal Schon was born on February 27, 1954 on Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. His father was a jazz saxophonist who encouraged his son to learn the guitar from an early age, and both parents even backed their son when he made the life-altering decision to pursue his musical ambitions and drop out of high school (Aragon High in San Mateo, California) before graduating.
“I picked up my first guitar when I was ten years old and practised all the time,” he said. “When other kids were playing sports, I was playing guitar – it was an obsession. I dedicated all of my time to learning and was addicted to guitars. By the time I was twelve I was getting around the guitar pretty well. I never got into sports at all until I was in my early twenties and after my music career got going.”8
Predictably, Schon’s earliest musical influences were the American blues pioneers Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters. John Lee Hooker, B.B. King and Albert King, but perhaps more importantly he learned his technique from the British electric blues players of the sixties, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Peter Green. The earth-shattering white electric English blues of that era really grabbed his attention, and he devoured albums by the Yardbirds, Fleetwood Mac, Cream and, later, Led Zeppelin. Jeff Beck’s Truth, with Rod Stewart on vocals, was regularly played on his turntable at home. Those British artists still inspire Schon to this day.
Eric Clapton made a surprise appearance in Schon’s life on the eve of his joining Santana. “Clapton was a fan of Carlos and the band, and while I was jamming with them at the Wally Heider Studio in Berkeley, Eric dropped by,” he recalled. “This was before I joined Santana. That night we met again and jammed some more. Eric said ‘Goodnight’ to everyone and the next morning I had this note from him saying he wanted me to sit in with him. Later that day he asked me to join his band, Derek & The Dominos. That was the day before Carlos asked me to join him … I went with Carlos.”9
Schon came to the attention of Santana after Gregg Rolie and drummer Michael Shrieve saw him play at a local club called the Poppycock in Palo Alto about 35 miles south of San Francisco – and even got up on stage to jam with the teenage guitarist. Up to that point Schon had performed only with local bands after his family had relocated and settled in the Bay Area. Schon’s adopted home had an enormous influence on the young guitarist and his playing. He said: “San Francisco had a lot of influence on me … when I was younger. When I was about 15 playing in the clubs, the scene was hot. If I got out early enough I could see three different acts. There was a lot of jazz clubs and I would sit in with Gabor Szabo and then take off and play Latin music with some others guys.”10
What Rolie and Shrieve witnessed that night at the Poppycock club impressed them enough to ask the young guitarist to join Santana. He wouldn’t make a great deal of money in the band but it was certainly more than delivering newspapers for a local store or working Saturday jobs at movie theatres. Plus Schon – only 16 years old at the time of joining the band – was getting an incredible amount of experience and first-hand knowledge of what it is like being in a successful band.
Schon explained: “It was a pretty amazing experience, very much an eye opener for me. We were travelling all over the world, playing in Africa, South America, all over Europe, experiencing the different audiences all over the world. The band was one of the biggest in the world at that time. I loved playing with Carlos and the rest of the guys. Musically, they opened me up to many different types of music that I was unaware of at that point – Latin music, Cuban rhythms, African rhythms – the band was a melting pot of all different kinds of music. The most I got out of playing with Carlos was how melodic he was. He rubbed off on me definitely, and I think vice versa too, when we were playing together. I became much more of a melodic guitar player.”11
After yet more changes to the line-up – largely different approaches in musical styles which resulted in divisions between some members -Santana III was recorded between January and July of 1971 at Columbia Studios in San Francisco, marking the recording debut of the teenage guitar prodigy and the first sessions that teamed Neal Schon with Gregg Rolie. The album’s sound was given more meat by the addition of the horn section from the Bay Area group Tower Of Power, as well as a number of extra percussionists and background vocalists. Santana III was a big success with two hit singles, ‘Everybody’s Everything’ and ‘No One To Depend On’, both of which featured solo spots by Schon. In many ways, that album was the end of an era for Santana, although it sold a healthy two million copies and like its predecessor peaked at number one on the Billboard charts.
In January 1972 Neal Schon joined Carlos Santana, Santana percussionist Thomas ‘Coke’ Escovedo and former Band Of Gypsy’s drummer Buddy Miles for a concert at the Diamond Head Crater in Honolulu, Hawaii. The concert resulted in the live album Carlos Santana-Buddy Miles Live though it was far from a stellar performance. Indeed, despite the towering success of Santana’s first three albums, behind the scenes there was an abundance of drug use, bitterness and arguments, especially between Carlos and Michael Carabello, and the latter left before the recording of their fourth album Caravanserai between February and May of 1972.
Neal Schon explained: “It was kind of just falling apart at that point. There was a lot of tension in the band. Gregg and I were the only members left besides Michael [Shrieve]. Carlos was wanting to play a certain kind of music and we wanted to play rock and continue with what we had. And we weren’t into Carlos’ new direction. It was pretty much that nobody could agree on what they wanted to play.”12
Along with Carlos, Shrieve, Rolie and Schon, Caravanserai featured some external musicians: bassists Tom Rutley and Doug Rauch replaced David Brown, and Michael Carabello was replaced by percussionists Armando Peraza and James Mingo Lewis. To make matters worse, Gregg Rolie even had support on the keyboards from Wendy Hass and Tom Coster. The growing tensions between Rolie and Carlos over the band’s musical direction resulted in Rolie being replaced on select tracks. Despite some notable changes to the line-up in the past, Santana was shifting towards jazz fusion, and prior to the completion of the record, both Schon and Rolie decided to quit the band. Indeed, Rolie moved back to Seattle to open up a restaurant with his father, which proved unsuccessful.
Herbie Herbert: “It was in early ‘72 when I was touring with Steve Miller in Europe and the band [Santana] was making their fourth album and were having lots of problems. [They] were not really talking to each other in a civil way, and going into the studio independently, hardly ever any two members at the same time … and I thought that there was likelihood that the band might be imploding. It was devastating to consider what my vibe was, and we had been to Europe several times and Steve Miller was a really close friend and wanted me to take him to Europe in January and February of ‘72 for his first European tour.
“During that tour, John [Villanueva] and Jack [Villanueva] – my other partners in crime, the other two roadies for Santana – called me and said: ‘Hey, the band has decided to break up. They told us. We did nothing. They can’t afford to pay us what they owe us. We pick up our last cheque on Friday and you better come home and fix this’ … so [I] flew home. We had a few days left to go on the Steve Miller tour. [We] tried to negotiate a settlement, which we did, and part of that settlement was we use the sound and production for Santana should they ever reform or tour again …”13
Caravanserai was the final Santana album to feature Gregg Rolie and Neal Schon. It was a critical success and made it in to the top ten in the Billboard album charts but the drastic change in sound probably damaged sales. Certainly Columbia Records head Clive Davis feared that if the band continued to pursue their new musical direction they would lose their commercial appeal and prominent status in the US and abroad. The album featured many lengthy jazz influenced instrumentals and the complex nature of the music probably distanced even the most enthusiastic and broad-minded Santana fan.
Around November and December of each year Santana had traditionally flown to Hawaii to play shows at the HIC – now called the Blaisdell Arena – as well as a New Year’s Eve gig at the Otani Mansion on Diamond Head, and then they would perform inside the Diamond Head Crater for free on New Year’s Day. Importantly, it was this tradition – and the lead up to those proposed shows in 1972 after the departures of Schon and Rolie – that would have an impact on the creation of the Golden Gate Rhythm Section and thus create the foundation for the band Journey.
Herbie Herbert describes the haphazard beginnings of the Golden Gate Rhythm Section in detail: “Let’s say summer of ‘72: Carlos approaches me and wants me to manage him once he’s got a whole new band together. We have a conversation, I say, ‘Well, I love Gregg Rolie and Neal Schon.’ And he said: ‘Well, they’re really part of my past.’ And so we went on what we called the Caravanserai tour on September 1, 1972 …
“The band was coming off their first three albums and doing sell-out arena business [like] two nights at the Forum in LA. All of a sudden on this tour it became two nights at the Long Beach Arena with maybe 5,000 people a night. Faster than Rolls could tell Royce something, the whole world knew that this version of Santana was basically instrumentals only, progressive, kind of fusion-jazz. Nobody was playing or singing any of the old hits, ‘Evil Ways,’ ‘Black Magic Woman,’ ‘Jingo,’ none of that stuff, ‘Oye Como Va’, and the ticket business was very soft everywhere. We get to Hawaii and we play two nights at the Blaisdell Arena, a small crowd [of] 3,000 a night and the place holds 8-9,000. Carlos meets with me the following morning and gets all up in my face about the reason he’s doing such bad business at the Blaisdell Arena is because everybody knows that Santana is gonna play the free show in the Crater, which is my pet project, and so he was telling me how that was fucking him up and why should people pay to see the band if they’re gonna get to see him play for free. My response was: ‘Carlos you did bad business coast to coast, border to border in America because there’s no Gregg Rolie and no Neal Schon, and nobody’s singing the hit songs. You’re doing what you wanna do; you’re not doing what the audience wants.’
“We had a fight and we decided to part ways, at which point I talked him into staying until the day after Christmas so we could have our Christmas dinner with the whole band and their families and Chepito had his family from Nicaragua there. I said: ‘I’ll take you to the airport on the day after Christmas on the 26th’ which is what I did. I called [promoter] Bill Graham and said: ‘Bill, You’re going to have to become Carlos’ manager. He and I are parting ways. Here’s his flight, pick him up at the airport, take care of him; you’re the only guy that would even want to bring this guy back. I have no desire.’ He thought I was nuts. He said: ‘What are you gonna do?’ I said: ‘As soon as I hang up this phone I’m gonna find Gregg Rolie and Neal Schon and put something together.’ He said: ‘Well, that could take a long time.’ I said: ‘I’ve gotta do it today because I’ve gotta have someone to play the Crater to replace Santana.’ And so I called Gregg Rolie, Neal Schon, Gregg Errico from Sly & The Family Stone, Pete Sears, a British guy that had played in Cooperheard, [who] was a great bass player and keyboardist, so I brought all these guys together and flew ‘em to Hawaii and called it the Golden Gate Rhythm Section.”14
Settled back home in Seattle, Gregg Rolie had been off the road since late 1971. Herbert was more than confident with the keyboardist/organist’s talent; his vocals were known to millions on such Santana hits as ‘Black Magic Woman’ and ‘Evil Ways’ so to reunite him with Neal Schon was a no-brainer.
Herbie Herbert: “Their first and only show was at the Diamond Head Crater which was probably in terms of audience the most successful of all the Crater[s]. I stood there on the stage and watched them perform with Gregg and Neal and no percussion; it was kind of a rock ‘n’ roll version of Santana when they do a song like ‘Black Magic Woman’. I said, ‘Hey, this is very cool. Let’s put together a rock band’ and that’s what I proceeded to do immediately … But we didn’t have a name yet; we weren’t called Journey. It was still the Golden Gate Rhythm Section.”15
Though they ended up playing only the one show in Hawaii, the Golden Gate Rhythm Section was also conceived as a sort of backing band for artists in the Bay Area. However, the initial line-up of the band with Pete Sears and Gregg Errico was short-lived, as Herbert explains, “We decided no, let’s go get Prairie Prince from The Tubes to play drums and Ross Valory, fresh out of the Steve Miller Band, to play bass, and George Tickner was a person I knew that wrote a lot of instrumental material that would be perfect for Neal, so I introduced Neal to all those things.”16
In March 1973, Herbert created Nightmare Incorporated to service the needs of Journey. It became his music industry empire. “We called it Nightmare because the business tends to be that way, it’s not the way we want it to be,” he says.17
Bassist Ross Valory was born on February 2, 1947 in San Francisco and was a childhood friend of Herbie Herbert. Prior to joining the band that would become Journey, Valory had been schooled in the blues in the same way as Neal Schon and it showed during his tenure in the Steve Miller Band. From 1967 to 1969, Valory played in the Sixties psychedelic rock band Frumious Bandersnatch – a cult outfit in the Bay Area that had supported the Santana Blues Band on a number of occasions. He was joined by guitarist David Denny, drummer Jack King and bassist Bobby Winkelman, all of whom would become members of the Steve Miller Band. In fact it was Jim Nixon, the manager of Frumious Bandersnatch, who would introduce the band’s road manager Herbie Herbert to Bill Graham, the famous concert promoter who would have important relationships with both Santana and, later, Journey. Valory’s bandmate in Frumious Bandersnatch was the New York-born rhythm guitarist and songwriter George Tickner (born September 8, 1946). Finally, Prairie Prince (born May 7, 1950) relocated to San Francisco from Arizona with some fellow musicians in 1969 and it was there that the two Arizona outfits, The Beans and The Red, White And Blues Band, merged to create The Tubes, a band that caught the attention of Herbie Herbert.
With a line-up that consisted of guitarist Neal Schon, keyboard player and vocalist Gregg Rolie, bassist Ross Valory, rhythm guitarist George Tickner and drummer Prairie Prince, the Golden Gate Rhythm Section opted for a name change almost as soon as they began to work on fresh material. The strongest songwriter of the group at the time, George Tickner, set about writing lyrics and the band recorded some (still unreleased) demos that were influenced by the raw energy of British bands like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and the Who. Those recordings were submitted to a radio station in San Francisco named KSAN-FM.
Herbie Herbert: “[Roadie] John Villaneuva was sitting in San Rafeal smoking a joint … We had put a contest out on [the] radio to find a name but the names that were coming back from the fans – hundreds and hundreds of them – were [not] really very good or appropriate. John, one day on the couch, said: ‘I think we should call the band Journey.’ I said: ‘You’re right! You’ve got it!’ We claimed that it was a contest winner from the radio station, Toby Pratt, just so the radio station would save face and it wouldn’t look like management decided to name the band and blow off the contest. But it was actually John Villaneuva who named the band Journey.”
With a new name and some fresh recordings, Journey was born. However, it would take a considerable amount of time and effort for them to find their niche sound. Gregg Rolie: “It was an assumed band, as a matter of fact. I have to say the band really belonged to Neal and Herbie because they started it. They called who they wanted to call and put that together and it turned into a band pretty quickly … I could say I am a founding member of that group, easily. But it really was their brainstorming that started it. It became a band and we started working and then we worked harder, as opposed to Santana. For me, Santana was a phenomenon. We worked hard at it for a few years, when it exploded after Woodstock. Journey was more of an effort. It was three or four years of real hard work”
Journey made their live debut at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on New Year’s Eve, 1973, in front of 10,000. The following day they flew to Hawaii to play at the Diamond Head Crater to an even larger crowd. It was obvious that the often complex Santana-type jazz fusion sound with doses of progressive rock had a massive impact on the early sound of Journey.
Herbie Herbert already had in mind the type of band he wanted Journey to be, as he explains: “The idea with Journey was we wanted to be able to play with Santana, play with Weather Report, play with Mahavishnu Orchestra, play with Return To Forever; but then on the very next night [after] you play with Return To Forever … you play with Ted Nugent or Aerosmith … and that absolutely worked. CBS Records in Europe put out a couple [of compilations] albums way back then, progressive pop and progressive rock, and one of the albums was a compilation with Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report and so forth and Journey; and the other was a rock record with Ted Nugent and Aerosmith and Blue Öyster Cult and Journey and all the various CBS rock genre artists and all the various CBS jazz artists. We worked well in both mediums and both genres and would have loved to have made it as that progressive band that made the first three albums but we didn’t. That was a very, very tough time.”18
There was no question about it: Journey was an incredible live band from the get-go. How could they not be? Coming from similar backgrounds – albeit with different tastes in music – each member brought not only their talent, but their individual idiosyncrasies to the band’s sound, which was manifested in the early live performances. “There was no Latin percussion, or a Latin feel to it. It was a fusion rock band, with a lot of soloing. It was based on the energy of that at the time. That’s why the band always did well when we played live. People were blown away by it,” said Rolie.19
However, the initial line-up did not last long. Drummer Prairie Prince returned to The Tubes at the start of 1974. “I never made it to their first album, but we wrote all the songs on the demo that got them their first record deal. So I’m on the demo for the first album,” Prince said.20
Enter Liverpool-born drummer Aynsley Dunbar (born January 10, 1946) who beat 30 fellow hopefuls in getting the job on Journey’s drum stool. Dunbar had made a name for himself in the UK playing drums for Jeff Beck, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and even David Bowie on his seventh album, Pin-Ups, in 1973. But what grabbed Herbie Herbert’s attention was Dunbar’s work with Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention. Dunbar explained: “Well, I had done some sessions with Neal Schon, and he called me up – or his manager – our manager had called me up … And I never knew who the hell he was till one day I got back, and it said Neal Schon wanted to talk to me. So when I saw Neal, I did a couple of sessions with him.”21
Dunbar became an official member of Journey on February 1, 1974, and though unfamiliar with the work of the individual members of the band was impressed with their chemistry and obvious talent. He was also looking for a more stable job after a career of jumping from one band to another. He said: “That’s what I was looking for all the time. But you have to live, and therefore you have to jump around. I didn’t want to become a sideman and just get lost in somebody else’s situation, so you have to keep jumping around, until the situation’s right. Fate. I always believed in fate.”22
On February 5, Journey performed with Dunbar for the first time at the Great American Music Hall in front of executives from Columbia Records. On the strength of that performance and the band’s growing reputation as a sort of Santana-type outfit, Journey were signed to Columbia. They started to build up a name for themselves on the Bay Area live circuit, playing the Oakland Coliseum and the Cow Palace, even venturing back to the Winterland Ballroom where they played support to Robin Trower and Dave Mason.
With producer Roy Halee – known for his collaborations with Simon & Garfunkel – the band entered Studio A at CBS Studios in San Francisco in November to record what would become their self-titled debut album. With the exception of Aynsley Dunbar, the rest of the band had a hand in writing the seven tracks. Even Ross Valory’s poet wife, Diane, shared writing credits on the lengthy ‘Mystery Mountain’ with Rolie and Tickner.
Released in April 1975, the record hardly set the charts on fire, creeping up to a rather unhealthy number 138 on the Billboard albums list though it managed to get to 72 in Japan. Many critics noticed the similarities with Santana III and there are influences from Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa, but some have argued that the album was too left field for the mainstream rock audiences yet not inventive enough for the progressive audience. Journey somehow lingered between the two musical camps. Strangely, the album depicted the band dressed in space suits alighting on an alien planet.
Comparisons with Santana soon began to grate as Gregg Rolie said: “Talking about Santana screws up the whole concept of everyone in this band. A lot of people would come to see us and expect conga drums. The last thing I want to see for the rest of my life is conga drums!”23
Journey opens with the seven-minute epic ‘Of A Lifetime’ which features vocals from Gregg Rolie. It is a curious track with hints of jazz fusion, and some of the passages certainly lean towards early Pink Floyd. ‘In The Morning’ has a stronger vocal presence from Rolie and it holds the album’s most distinctive guitar spot; about two minutes into the track a heavy guitar strums into action alongside some pounding drums while the organ is on fire as the band blitz through this passage. The six-and-a-half minute instrumental ‘Kohoutek’ has since become something of a cult classic amongst Journey enthusiasts. It is a terrific slice of progressive rock with some “spacey” passages, and immediately demonstrated to critics and fans the power of their talents and the obvious chemistry between them. ‘To Play Some Music’ sees more vocals from Rolie, while the melody is probably the most accessible on the album. There are some vocal effects which add a science-fiction type theme to the song and the organ work adds considerable depth to the track. The album’s second and final instrumental, ‘Topaz’, has hints of Santana’s ‘Song Of The Wind’ about it with some exuberant guitar playing and a dreamy ambience. The five-minute ‘In My Lonely Feeling/Conversations’ has a powerful one-minute climax where the pace picks up considerably and Schon displays some intricate guitar playing backed up by Tickner’s rhythm guitar; it’s undoubtedly the main attraction of the song. ‘Mystery Mountain’, the album’s closer, has since become a fan favourite. There is some very complex guitar playing and, predictably, some heavy instrumental spots.
Journey is by no means a perfect album by any stretch of the imagination but each instrumentalist plays his part amid plenty of left-field influences. Though it’s mostly an instrumental album, Gregg Rolie does more than a half-decent job on vocals. It is obvious, however, that the vocals -just as they were in Santana – are secondary to the actual musicianship. However, much of the album is self-indulgent and it appears as though the band were jamming just for the sake of jamming. It was merely a taste of things to come …
Following its release, Journey continued to tour heavily to promote their album and to build up a strong fan base. However, the touring became too much for rhythm guitarist and songwriter George Tickner who quit before the release of their second album. Although credited as a co-writer on the tracks ‘You’re On Your Own’ and ‘I’m Gonna Leave You’, Tickner decided to enroll at Stanford Medical Centre which left the band without a rhythm guitarist. When Schon opted to take on all guitar duties by himself it actually gave the band a tighter, more concise sound.
Journey entered CBS Studios in San Francisco in late ‘75 and came out with Look Into The Future. To promote it they performed a two-hour show at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle, a one-off performance that was aired on FM radio several days later. The album was released in the US in January 1976 and peaked at number 100 in the Billboard top 200 album charts, although over in Japan it managed a healthier 58.
Whereas Journey seemed like a band that had been jamming in the studio, Look Into The Future was more controlled and taut. The less experimental sound probably helped the band climb higher in the album charts than they had with their initial album.
Produced by the band themselves, Look Into The Future opens with ‘On A Saturday Night’24, a surprisingly upbeat, poppy song with a bouncing melody helped along by Rolie’s piano. Curiously, the next track is a cover of George Harrison’s Beatles tune ‘It’s All Too Much’ from their animated film Yellow Submarine. Journey’s version certainly has some progressive elements to it though it’s much less psychedelic than The Beatles’ original cut, with Schon’s guitar solo undoubtedly the centrepiece. ‘Anyway’ is a slow, almost sombre bluesy effort in sharp contrast to the previous songs. ‘She Makes Me (Feel Alright)’ – co-written with the San Francisco singer-songwriter Alex Cash – is probably the album’s standout rock track; Schon’s guitar playing is surprisingly gritty and Rolie’s vocals are more aggressive and dominant than on other songs. ‘You’re On Your Own’ opens with some downbeat keys before the rest of the band join in, and has a more earthly feel than its siblings, with progressive guitar and nifty organ work. ‘Look Into The Future’ – co-written with Ross’ other half, Diane Valory – is an eight-minute track which some critics dubbed Journey’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’ for its length, shifts in tempo, complex melody structure, intricate guitar work and memorable harmonies. Sure, Led Zeppelin had been an enormous influence on Neal Schon and it shows in this single track, but it’s by no means easy on the ears and takes several pushes of the repeat button to fully appreciate its ingenious nature. ‘Midnight Dreamer’ is similar in style and temperament to ‘She Makes Me (Feel Alright)’; it’s a hard and fast rock song with some angry vocals, no-nonsense guitar work and notable drums. The final track, ‘I’m Gonna Leave You’, is led by some memorable organ work which was perhaps inspired by early Deep Purple.
Look Into The FutureJourneyLook Into The Future