“I’m not gonna spend an hour plus watching this but I’m willing to bet Rick doesn’t ask ‘Why are you such an asshole?’”
That text from an old friend was how I found out that Rick Beato had released a video of a detailed interview with Journey guitarist Neal Schon.
I understood why my friend didn’t want to watch it, but of course I watched it. Immediately. I will go to my grave believing that pre-Raised On Radio Journey is in the top 10 finest bands of all time. Not rock bands, not pop bands. Bands, period. They were so good that it’s almost impossible to wrap one’s mind around how good they were. They were so good that people believe stuff about them that isn’t true, just because it sounds more plausible.
An example, and one that utterly infuriates me: In the first season of Treme, which is normally so good about music, Steve Zahn’s gadfly character “Davis” has assembled an all-star cast of New Orleans musicians to record an anti-George W. Bush tune. Someone asks Davis if they’re going to lay down the parts separately. He responds, indignantly,
“What band is this? Journey?”
before indicating that the track will be recorded with the full band live. Ha ha! Very funny! Because when you listen to something like “Open Arms” or “Stone In Love” it seems obvious that it was the product of some Steely-Dan-esque 410-day perpetual studio session. Except it wasn’t. Most of the album was recorded live, just like the band’s past few albums had been. They were really just that good1. If you want proof they could do it live, here’s the Escape tour from Houston. I watched it on MTV the first time they showed it, back in early 1982 or thereabouts. Yes, I am really that old, and I was really (un)lucky enough to have MTV in 1982.
There’s no punching-in on this. Steve Perry really does sing like that. (The end-of-track vocals on “Mother, Father” are him, not a backup or studio singer, which still astounds me now.) Steve Smith is an astounding monster of a drummer. Jonathan Cain does about five different roles during the concert. Ross Valory is beyond criticism.
And Neal Schon is… well, go watch any other live rock guitar performance of the era then come back for comparison. Those were the days of shambolic addicts like the 30-ish Jimmy Page barely getting through their songs on stage. Even Alex Lifeson struggled to play his studio parts in concert. But you’ll wait in wait for Neal Schon to even make a picking mistake in this show. Most of the time he increases the difficulty from the originals. Who else could play like this in 1981? Lee Ritenour. Larry Coryell. Maybe Mike Stern. Certainly Pat Metheny wasn’t that deft back then; I’ve heard enough bootlegs from that era to know. But there were no rock guitarists who were as precise and perfect as Schon. Especially not Carlos Santana, who launched Neal’s career when the latter was 15 or 16 years old. Heck, I’ll go ahead and say it, since it’s true: Eddie Van Halen wasn’t that accomplished as a live artist until he was in his forties and no longer recording any music worth hearing.
As ACF readers know, I am an awful but enthusiastic amateur guitarist and I can attest to the fact that it’s easier to learn EvH or Eric Johnson riffs than it would be to play the stuff on Escape correctly. If you told me my life depended on either correctly duplicating “Panama” or “Mother, Father”, I’d take the former and a hammer to the index finger over trying the latter. Neal Schon should go down as the finest rock guitarist of the Seventies and Eighties.
Except he won’t, because people hate him.
And they have some good reasons to hate him.
We might as well enumerate said reasons, just to get them out of the way. This list is not comprehensive.
Journey wasn’t a band in the traditional sense. It was a Neal Schon showcase arranged by his manager, Herbie Herbert. Everyone else was an employee, a bit player, a Toto-style studio pro brought on to make the star look good. This was a tremendous burden to put on a teenager, and all indications are that Schon came to accept it as his due.
Perhaps because Journey was an old man’s pet project starring a kid surrounded by jazzbos, the band was desperately unhip from the beginning. Whatever planet the New York Dolls or Violent Femmes were from, Journey was on the planet farthest from that one. The absurd Star Wars seriousness of the album art and merch, combined with the soap-opera lighting of their first music videos, seemed almost like Herbert was daring people to make fun of Journey. This dare was gleefully taken up by the entire music press.
When Journey was reimagined for the Eighties as a pop-rock band with the addition of Jonathan Cain and Steve Perry, they went to #1 on the charts with “Open Arms”, the most effective power ballad in human history. It made them mainstream and it meant that even their most devoted humbucker-guitar-playing 12-year-old fans (such as, uh, me) had to turn their noses up a bit. Rather than back away from that vibe, the Perry/Cain/Schon songwriting trio leaned in with “Faithfully”. If you are over 40 years old and you claim to not know “Faithfully” by heart, you are either a recent immigrant from a non-English-speaking country or a congenital liar.
Schon, noting that Steve Perry “seemed to have the hot hand” at the time, allowed Perry to fire Steve Smith and Ross Valory so they could be replaced with more pop-friendly, less virtuosic players. (The most famous of which was, of course, Randy “Yo, dawg” Jackson from American Idol.)
When Steve Perry left Journey for medical and (mostly) emotional reasons, Schon decided to simply replace him with Steve Augeri, who was a store manager at The Gap prior to becoming Journey’s lead singer. When Augeri permanently damaged his vocal cords, Schon replaced him again, this time with a Filipino tribute-band performer. As a consequence, Journey toured for more than three and a half decades with a generic lineup, largely playing the music they’d written and performed over just seven years from 1978 to 1985.
In 2012, “Real Housewives” personality and former winemaker Tareq Salahi sued Neal Schon for absconding with his wife, Michaele Salahi. Salahi claimed, and apparently proved in court, that he found out about this because Schon sent him “an email of his large penis, said email being sent for no other purpose than to humiliate and injure the Plaintiff.” The text included with the picture was brief and to the point: “I am fucking your wife.”
When Salahi eventually got his divorce and his lawsuit settlement, Schon married Michaele in a pay-per-view ceremony. This wedding, Schon’s fifth, did not do the numbers the couple had hoped for…. so Schon skipped out of paying the city of San Francisco more than a quarter-million dollars in venue fees.
Steve Perry, who retains 12.5% of Journey, sued Neal Schon a few years ago for mismanagement.
In 2020, Schon sued Ross Valory and Steve Smith, who had returned to Journey as employees, for supposedly trying to take control of the band. Then Schon fired them, again. Steve Perry apparently sided with Valory and Smith, despite being the one to fire them the last time.
Jonathan Cain, who is effectively the only other “real” member of Journey, sued Neal Schon for mismanagement and for repeatedly maxing-out the band’s million-dollar-limit Centurion Card. Finally in 2024, Cain was able to get the court to appoint a third-party babysitter for Neal Schon’s expenses. The band continued to perform together during the lawsuits, but — I am not making this up — Schon prohibited Cain from playing rhythm guitar during “Wheel In The Sky”, presumably out of anger or resentment.
Schon recorded any number of fairly awful solo records, including Beyond the Thunder, an Windham-Hill-esque smooth jazz album so bad Schon has retroactively removed it from streaming services. (But I still dare anyone to play the licks correctly.)
It is commonly agreed that Schon is a truly awful person, in person. He travels with armed guards and is broadly unpleasant to both fans and random people. A quick search of the Internet reveals dozens of personal anecdotes that are universally unflattering to Schon.
No wonder my friend didn’t want to watch the Rick Beato interview… but he, against all odds, has really missed out. The Neal Schon that shows up for this seventy-four-minute discussion is nothing like the man described above. He is painfully humble, crediting perhaps a dozen other musicians as inspirations and speaking kindly at length about both Steve Perry and Jonathan Cain. When Rick compliments him on the famous opening to “Lights”, Schon openly admits that he was imitating Jimi Hendrix. Elsewhere he talks about being overshadowed by Carlos Santana, admiring Wes Montgomery, and how he is permanently inspired by Miles Davis.
At the age of 71, Schon is letter-perfect on the details of how and what he recorded all of the major Journey tracks. This is highly valuable to both fans and other musicians, and is a welcome contrast to the drug-deranged uncertainty shown by a lot of other rockers when discussing the past. Schon can tell you more today about recording an album in 1978 than Slash could tell you in 1992 about recording a 1987 album, for example. He proves capable of playing all the famous licks in studio-perfect form, on a whim. When Beato mentions Wes Montgomery, he responds immediately with… a Wes tune, played on octaves. He offers a lot of interesting details about playing with Jan Hammer and Elvin Bishop, as well.
Most interestingly, Schon is in really good humor throughout. Which is not always the case with Beato’s interviews, perhaps because Rick wants more details than the average podcaster or music journalist would. He is also perfectly happy to confine their discussion largely to things that happened forty years ago. I’ve watched more than one Rick interview where the “talent” keeps trying to steer the conversation to something about which the audience simply won’t care. Schon is exceptionally workmanlike here, discussing various amp settings and guitar choices from 1980 as if he’d not done a single thing he’d rather talk about since then.
The only part of the interview that rubbed me the wrong way was Schon’s suggestion that he wrote bass lines for Ross Valory. This is almost a trope in rock nowadays. David Gilmour was always caustic about Roger Waters’ ability as a player and writer, at one point telling an interviewer that he played all the bass on Pink Floyd records because Waters was too poor a musician to be recorded. I can believe that; even in his The Wall tour, Waters had a bassist off stage. I am much less fond of the late Eddie Van Halen’s continual digs at, and disrepect to, Michael Anthony, which ranged from questioning his ability to play the bass at all to describing Anthony’s voice as a “piccolo trumpet… a limited tool.” Ask yourself how well any of those classic VH records would have done without Michael Anthony.
No sane person doubts Ross Valory as a bass player. He is justifiably famous for his (deliberate, by his own admission) Jaco-like chorus tone on the fretted bass. He played B-E-A-D for his entire career instead of E-A-D-G, and consequently created a lot of things that you just can’t play on a conventional bass. Go listen through Escape and tell me that record would work with anyone else, even Jaco, playing bass. I don’t believe that Neal Schon created the bass part for “Stone In Love”. It’s too similar to stuff Valory was doing for years. And even if he wrote part of the line, he had nothing to do with the unique, syncopated way it’s played. So, yeah… I wish Neal had stayed quiet about that.
Since the interview, Schon and Cain have formally announced the end of their collaboration as Journey. There will be one more tour, after which Cain plans to permanently retire. Schon, on the other hand, says he will do “something”. And that he’d love to see Steve Perry come back. And that Gregg Rollie, who sat in with Journey briefly after forty years away, could come back, too. (Ross Valory and Steve Smith? They’re not welcome.)
It is easy to turn up one’s nose at Neal Schon’s desire to keep playing Journey’s music, in some form, into his middle to late seventies. If we are sympathetic to the man, however, a lot of his flaws seem a bit less severe. He was literally raised on a live performance stage. Can you blame him for not wanting to wrap up his professional life at the age of… thirty-three, when Steve Perry walked away? Can you imagine just doing nothing from that age forward? Can you imagine spending years in front of an adoring crowd and just quitting?
Ask anyone who has ever performed for tens of thousands of people, which does not include me but does include Brother Bark, whether that level of affirmation is easy to walk away from. A few years ago, Josh Tillman aka Father John Misty dragged a Rolling Stone journalist on stage with him and had the crowd cheer for the journalist, just to show the poor dorky guy how seductive it can be. I’m not inclined to judge Neal Schon too harshly because he won’t give up the limelight or even behave like a normal person. I don’t see when in his life anyone would have trained him to be a normal person.
I also think it’s important to once again point out that “normal people” tend to make lousy art. There’s something about the creative process that demands a little bit of ego, a little bit of irrationality, a little bit of psycho-or-socio-pathy. Normal people never have thoughts like “Everyone should listen to this music I’ve just written.” Normal people don’t live out of vans and pawn all their stuff to chase their dreams of being artists. The great Ross Bentley once said to me, “If you still own a decent street car, you’re not serious about being a professional racing driver. Because a professional racing driver would have already sold that car to fund an opportunity.” As he told me this, I had a one-of-a-kind, four-month-old lime-green Audi S5 in the parking lot behind us. But I didn’t go home and sell it, because I wasn’t serious about being a professional racing driver.
I’d like to think that Neal Schon is on his way to being a generally likable fellow. He has settled his lawsuits, he has stayed with his crazy fifth wife for a decade and a half now, he can say nice things about Jonathan Cain in an interview. I don’t think it’s too late for him to become a regular guy. But I also don’t think it matters. The world is full of likable, low-ego, low-drama 71-year-old men. None of them ever wrote “Stone In Love”, or recorded it perfectly, or played it perfectly live. Mark my words. The esteem in which Journey is held will only increase during the years to come. Other bands were hipper, or cooler, or more in touch with the mood on the street. In the long run, they will find their fame and critical respect as fickle as those moods. So, too, will the critics that laughed at Journey wither into irrelevance over time. Can you name a single person who wrote about Pride and Prejudice upon its publication? Brother Bark once said, regarding some critic, “Just write one song as good as the worst Fiona Apple song on Tidal.” And we laughed, because we knew that would never happen.
Earlier today I re-taught myself how to play “Don’t Stop Believin’” on the piano. YouTube makes it a lot easier than it was in 1985, trust me. You would think that overexposure would kill that song dead, the same way Tony Soprano was shot dead while it played at the end of the HBO series. (There’s no other sane interpretation of said ending, by the way.) The truth is that you can’t erase the power and vitality of that song. Even if everything about it is self-consciously serious and lampoonable. Even there is no “south Detroit”. If you heard it for the first time today, you’d be astounded. Go look at what the Top 40 right now. The best of it isn’t close. Every song on Escape is better than anything on the charts now.
Even, it pains me to say, “Open Arms”.
It should be noted that there are a few parts on Escape that were punched in after the fact, largely because Steve Perry wanted his vocals to be both perfect and in line with his own imagination. “I had my moments where I was probably a bit of a stick in the mud for what I believed in, yes,” Perry told a British interviewer in 2002. “I never would settle. I know what I can do. There were certain things that I wanted a specific way. So I had to go back and keep trying to do them until I could find the way. One that comes to mind would be the vowel on Open Arms, on the ‘A’ of the chorus. I wanted it to sound a certain fucking way. I wanted it to happen, and I kept re-punching that for a couple of days until I got what I wanted. The same thing happened with Don’t Stop Believin’. I wanted a high note. It wasn’t as crucial as it was on Open Arms, I just wanted that long note to be something really special. I don’t want it to be even a nano-fraction out of pitch. That’s just how obsessed I could be. I’m cranky that way.”
Jack listened to a podcast, guys.
Where would you put Glen Campbell as a guitar player? Friend of mine caught him opening for BrandX a long time ago and was shocked at just how good of a jazz player he was.