“But when you reach a sort of peak moment where everything clicks, I don’t think it’s calculable. “We really struck a chord with Escape,” Perry says now. ![]() Three Top 10 singles – Don’t Stop Believin’, Who’s Crying Now and Open Arms – helped power the album to No.1. With Rolie having been replaced by Jonathan Cain, the band’s AOR sound was honed to perfection. But it was their 1981 album Escape, three albums later, that made them superstars. The first album he recorded with Journey, 1978’s Infinity, became the band’s first US Top-30 record, and more hits followed. Later that night, in Schon’s hotel room, he and Perry wrote their first song together, a power ballad named Patiently. Behind Fleischman’s back, Perry met with the band after a show in Denver, Colorado. But the first three Journey albums had bombed, and bringing in singer Robert Fleischman to share vocals with keyboard player Gregg Rolie, also ex-Santana, was not working out. The group had been created as a vehicle for guitar virtuoso Neal Schon, a former member of Santana, and Perry liked what he heard: jazz rock fusion, serious chops. He’d seen Journey play live at LA club The Starwood. Soon afterwards, Ellis called Perry, first offering his sympathies, then a new opportunity – an audition with Journey. The band broke up in the summer of 1977 after bassist Richard Michaels was killed in a road accident. It was with Perry’s subsequent band, Alien Project, that he recorded a demo tape that caught the ear of Columbia Records executive Don Ellis. In his early twenties, Perry fronted a number of California rock bands, one of which, Pieces, featured an established star in bassist Tim Bogert, who had been in Vanilla Fudge and Beck, Bogert & Appice. In tribute, his new album includes a version of I Need You, one of the first songs George Harrison wrote for the group. As a teenager, Perry, like so many of his generation, fell under the spell of The Beatles. It was at the age of 12 that he first dreamed of becoming a singer, after hearing soul legend Sam Cooke’s hit song Cupid. When Perry thinks back to his childhood, he says wistfully: “Music is what I lived for as a kid.”īorn on Januin Hanford, California, to Portuguese parents, he is an only child. Because I never thought I’d never feel like this again.” Singing again, I was getting goose bumps. Every night, we’d get one encore, a second encore. “Then I decided I wasn’t going to read them any more. “I only read three reviews in my whole life,” he says. For many critics, Journey’s everyman rock was always a soft target. More than that, what really hurt were the bad reviews the band received. He says he hated being misquoted in the press. I’m missing fingers, still, from the lion’s mouth.” “Because I don’t trust journalists! I’ve had good experiences, and some not so good. Asked why he rarely gave interviews to the press at the height of his fame in the 80s, he replies: “You really want to know? Will you print what I say right now?” He laughs long and hard. From one such exchange comes a blunt disclosure. It is when addressing other subjects – specifically his past drug use and the possibility of him rejoining Journey – that his voice hardens a little and his answers turn more defensive or oblique, or rises as he parries a question with an offhand joke. ![]() In these moments he seems wide open, extraordinarily so for a man who retreated from fame and from the public gaze for such long a time. There is also a remarkable degree of candour in what he reveals about certain chapters in his life – his exit from Journey in the late 80s his search for peace of mind away from the bright lights of rock stardom most revealingly, his brief, intense relationship with Kellie Nash. His high, singsong voice is unmistakable, his manner friendly and engaging. It’s a late summer evening when Classic Rock catches up with Perry, at home near San Francisco.
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