I'm really not a big fan of this group. But I do like a few songs here and there. Plus I like the way lead singer Steve Perry's voice seems to go hand-n-hand with that arena rock style of music his band lays down.

My favorite two tracks by them is "Who's Crying Now?" and "Send Her My Love". Journey were huge in the 80's.

Plus, I used to dig "Foolish Heart" on Steve Perry's solo record in 1984. That song was covered by Sharon Bryant, the co-lead singer of the R&B group Atlantic Starr in 1989 on her debut solo album Let Go .

BRO915 said:

I so love both versions of Foolish Heart. Steve Perry had such a lovely voice to me.

I always thought "Foolish Heart" was a cover of an old R&B classic...I guess that was the intention, at least...all the cheese that goes hand-in-hand with Journey/Steve Perry aside, that really IS a pretty song.

Hey Bro, you got guts.

BRO915 said:

I dig soem of Journey.Neil Schon(Misspelled) the Guitar Player is tight.He came over from Santana&brought His Vibe from that time period with Him.I like them as a Singles Act more than albums but they had some cool Moments.Steve Perry can Sing&He has Feeling in His Voice that Justin Timberlake for instance will never reach.

I've considered buying their greatest hits but don't know what's holding me back. I really like "Open Arms", "Who's Crying Now" and others.

I saw a behind the music type thing and it seems that Perry was a bit insecure about being a member of the group. Something about feeling as if he never really "fit in."

Oh, and that Neil Schon was kinda hot, with his "afro" back in the day.

I just read a new interview with Neil Schon.He and the band still tour frequently,although Steve Perry refuses to re-join the band.Whenever Neil asks him,he just says things like "I'm too busy" or "some other time".Clearly,he's not into a full-fledged reunion,but I'd love to see it happen.

DavidEye said:

Yeah, I actually saw Journey in concert a few years ago (Peter Frampton opened) and it was only then that I discovered Steve Perry isn't with the band. They've got some other look-alike/sound-alike instead...

Dunno bout you, but even though is sounded great, it just wasn't the same knowing that

The album "Captured" is a great album from beginning to end. Great songs, musicians and vocals.

Maybe because it was recorded in Detroit and Journey was the second coming here. Especially at their peak for some reason back in 1981

They fell apart after Steve Perry got some illness and have tried to get back together a couple of times. Now they have the sound alike/loo alike gyt.

There was an article about Perry in Sunday's NYTs.

The New York Times
August 17, 2003
VIEW
Faithfully, a Look Back in Wonder
By MIKE WISE

HERSHEY, Pa.
STEVE PERRY was on the other end of the phone and, unbelievably, I was interviewing him. Soon, he would break into a Journey song. Honest.

Thirty-nine is supposed to be too old to be like the awestruck kid in "Almost Famous," Cameron Crowe's movie about a teenage rock 'n' roll writer who hangs with the band. But you weren't there in 1983, when Mr. Perry, the rock idol of my youth, was crooning the chorus to "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)."

"Some day, love will find you/ Break those chains that bind you."

I rushed the stage from the sixth row. He looked and pointed right at me in my concert T-shirt.

On the off chance you have never heard of Steve Perry, he was the lead singer of Journey — the all-time greatest band in the history of rock 'n' roll, according to, well, me.

Countless friends have told me how pathetic they think that moment, when I was 19 — hair down to my shoulders, trying to connect with Mr. Perry at the apex of Journey's popularity — must have been. They have continued to tease me over the years. One told me that MTV retired the "Separate Ways" video recently because it looked like it had been made at the Home Depot. Others said I needed to recover another memory, starring the Boss or Bono.

But it was my moment, and Mr. Perry's raspy, operatic voice and Neal Schon's stirring guitar licks deeply affected my life at that time.

After college, "Don't Stop Believin' " pumped through the speakers in my Volkswagen Bug on a 105-degree day in Fresno, Calif., when I had no air-conditioning, job or prospects. "Open Arms" was not just a power ballad heard at 1980's proms; it also came to represent my first love. And when she gouged out my heart, I could always count on "Send Her My Love," which I would blare on my Walkman as I passed her house on the bus every day.

"These days, if it's not tough and angry, then something is wrong with you," Mr. Perry said when he spoke with me from his home north of San Diego. "I don't get that."

Mr. Perry is no longer with Journey, having been estranged from the band in 1998, when the other members became tired of waiting for him to decide whether to have hip-replacement surgery or to go on tour again. They hired another singer with a mullet haircut, Steve Augeri, who croons a lot like Mr. Perry, looks a little like Kenny G and works hard to convert the holdout Perry loyalists like me.

I drove to Hershey earlier this month to see the latest incarnation of the band. "We're the music a lot of people graduated to, ended up in the back seat of the convertible to, got married to," said Ross Valory, the bass player who, with the exception of a couple years in the 1980's, has played with the band since it began 30 years ago in San Francisco.

"You go to a Journey concert to make out or meet a girl," said Deen Castronovo, who has been the band's drummer for five years. "You go to Metallica to get punched."

Before I spoke to Mr. Perry on the phone, I visited with the current Journey band members at their hotel, riding to the concert with them. Humble and ingratiating, the band seemed happy to have the attention. "Thanks for caring. I mean that sincerely, bro' ," Mr. Valory said.

"We used to spend about $14 million on our tours in the 80's," said Jonathan Cain, the band's keyboardist and unabashed sappy songwriter. (He was a co-writer of "Open Arms" and "Faithfully.")

"That stage alone cost $80,000," he remembered. "It ended up in storage in Oakland. I think someone stole it. Anyway, those days are long gone."

No temptresses like Kate Hudson in "Almost Famous" were waiting backstage in Hershey, nor were the women in the catering tent scorned lovers from tours gone by. But there were devoted fans: Rhonda Dirr and Tracy Watland, for instance, both 37 and from Chicago, who have made it to 19 of Journey's 46 shows since May.

"I'm the Web master for jonathancain.com," said Ms. Dirr, who is an accountant. "I'm the creative director for the Web site," Ms. Watland said, smiling.

Mr. Cain is 53, Mr. Valory 54, and Mr. Schon, the diminutive guitarist who at 15 played with Carlos Santana, 49. The three remaining members from the band's heyday, they still have their hair and their passion for the music.

Mr. Schon, who wore bandanas and leather vests and whose solos used to make girls swoon, is about 15 pounds heavier today.

Mr. Cain talked about his low-carb diet before he went onstage, saying he slept and felt better without all that pasta, rice and bread in his stomach. And Mr. Augeri spoke eloquently after the show about the perils of being the replacement for Mr. Perry, the voice of Journey. He said that a rock impresario had taken him to lunch, giving him sound advice.

" `You got to think like a star, act like a star, be a star,' he told me," Mr. Augeri said. Just then the door to his cramped backstage trailer opened and in came one of the road managers.

"There's no dry-cleaning at the hotel in Cincinnati," he said. "You want to do your own shirt again?"

"Sure, I'll get the Woolite, the steam iron; I'll do it," Mr. Augeri said.

The band's members know that they had been labeled dinosaurs catering to nostalgic boomers. They don't care; they seem content to transport a sea of fans with comb-overs and paunches back to a time when there were few rock ensembles bigger than Journey.

There was one thing I wanted to know from Mr. Perry. Did he remember me, the guy in the Frontiers T-shirt, from that night years ago?

"I'm sorry, I don't remember you," he said, laughing.

I asked, "So you just used me and the others to sell albums and T-shirts?"

"No," he said, pausing, "I used you to become myself."

"There were times, whether I was playing a solo tour at the Beacon Theater or there were 60,000 at the L.A. Coliseum, where it felt I was having a conversation with one person. Nothing brought me closer to being myself than a crowd of people when I was onstage."

Over the years, Journey broke up, got back together briefly in 1995, and then split up again. I used to have vivid fantasies about reuniting the band. I could see it all, on the next "Behind the Music" — "How I Got Steve Perry and Journey Back Together." After patching up things between Mr. Perry and the band, I would convince Mr. Cain that Journey needed two new power ballads. And maybe another jolting segue after a chorus, like those crescendos in "Don't Stop Believin' " and "Escape."

"I'll never say never, but then maybe that's just me saying, `I'll never say never,' " Mr. Perry said.

He and the band have not spoken in about five years. He turned 50 earlier this year. He said he misses the music "terribly."

"It was the peak in a dream for me," he said. "But I can't minimize how difficult surviving the re-entry phase is for someone who has been there, how hard it is to go back to the life you had before."

I tried to make peace, telling him how much the band still respected him. But I also told him that Neal Schon remembered the exact moment when things went sour. Mr. Schon was blasting his guitar, playing "Rubicon," from the album "Frontiers," when, he said, Mr. Perry came over and turned down his amplifiers. "They want to hear the voice," Mr. Schon remembered Mr. Perry saying. "That was the start of it for me," he said.

"Neal doesn't remember all those times I fought for his solos in our songs," Mr. Perry said. "You know the guitar outro from `Who's Cryin' Now'? I fought for that, because I knew no D.J. would cut that song off with Neal's guitar wailing at the end of it. It was too brilliant. I can even hear and sing that song right now, right now."

And so he did: "Two hearts born to run," he sang into the receiver. "Who'll be the lonely one, I wonder. Who's cryin' now?" He bad-dah-dahed the guitar solo and then said that he and Mr. Schon were like "salt and pepper, linked together forever, that voice and that guitar."

Two weeks ago, when the masses in Hershey sang the chorus of "Don't Stop Believin,' " I closed my eyes, hoping to see and feel 1983.

But I was not 19 anymore. I was swaying in the 12th row, and the members of my favorite band were no longer rock gods. Still, I wondered:

Would Steve Perry mind traveling with his own Woolite?

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Thx for posting this great article. It made me pull out the old Journey just because of this thread.

any non-believers, just find a copy of the Time 3 box set. the greatest hits barely scratches the surface.