Steve Perry - Circus June 1981

concedes Schon, 27. "But now we've found a happy medium between vocals and instrumentals, and we're working on improving our show. We're sounding like the band we're supposed to be."
    Singing dervish Steve Perry approaches the subject more cautiously. "I don't know what we are supposed to be except what we are at any one time.," he says in a voice every bit as smooth and flawless as his singing delivery. "Our last album, Departure, was a change for us, and the next one will be even more of a departure. Journey is a new band."
    Again? Here's a band that transformed itself almost overnight from spacy, jam-based rock to tightly constructed pop commerciality without losing a beat. But losing founding member and keyboardist Gregg Rolie, who retired from the road this past January after seven years with Journey (and an additional eight with Santana) has meant filling an important post with a new face - former Babys keyboardist Jonathan Cain. It also means answering charges that Journey has taken its glossy AOR approach about as far as it can go. Now it's time to reclaim its status as a hot, heaving, hard-rocking band.
    "People like us as a hard-rock band," states Schon. Adds brown-haired newcomer Cain, "People are expecting fire."
    Journey has always been a fiery and since it rose from the ashes of Santana in the early '70s. Rolie and Schon, Santana's teenaged whiz kids, founded Journey as the Golden Gate Rhythm Section, the Bay Area's answer to the famous session bands of Los Angeles, New York and Muscle Shoals. It was almost immediately apparent that the band was better than anybody it would back up. Rechristened Journey in 1973, the five signed with Columbia Records, where they attracted a loyal following with their free-form instrumental prowess.
    Steve Perry had been hanging around the San Francisco rock scene with his own band, the Alien project, openly waiting for a chance to join Journey.
    But after three albums and endless roadwork had brought the band tremendous respect and a pile of debts, manager Walter "Herbie" Herbert decided the band needed more commercial song appeal and a lead singer above Schon's and Rolie's barely adequate abilities if they were going to crack the mass market. Perry's band had broken up, but Journey hired local singer Robert Fleischmann, who lasted a few months until Herbert

remembered the demo tape Perry had once sent him and played it again. The result: Fleischmann was out, Perry was in.
    "It wasn't a popular move at first to tone down and get more melodic," admits Schon, hinting that the move especially hurt the ego of Gregg Rolie, who had been Santana's lead singer on songs like "Black Magic Woman" and "Evil Ways." But 1978's Infinity, Perry's singing and songwriting debut with the group, sold over a million copies, making for little argument.

Platinum success marked more than a change in style. Journey also became a rolling rock-and-money machine. In 1980, Nightmare Inc., Journey's management company, grossed some $4 million. The group has invested in its own fleet of semis and lighting equipment, instituted profit-sharing and other employee-benefit packages (Rolie, for instance, still gets a weekly salary from Nightmare), and has handled all the production arrangements and even album artwork, leaving CBS Records practically nothing to do but sell the records.
    "We're blessed with a management organization that's one of the best in the business," says Ron Oberman, vice president of marketing for CBS, who has worked on selling Journey from the beginning. "They're very aware of how important image is; they design their album covers months in advance and keep in mind the merchandising. They're not ones to rest on their laurels."
    Far from that, it seems, Journey is a band of perfectionists. Road manager Pat Morrow describes Schon and Perry as being "totally consumed by the three R's: roadwork, writing and recording." Perry himself can't really say what he does outside of Journey's workhorse schedule. "I have a house in the country where I try to

squeeze off a few minutes with my lady," he says wistfully.     Though you have to admire the relentless efforts by the band members and their willingness to stress teamwork over individual egos (Dunbar, an ace player in anybody's book, was bounced in 1978 because he was deemed "not a team player"), a lot of credit for bringing Journey to its status as one of the country's most successful bands has to go to Herbie Herbert.
    That doesn't mean that Herbert treats his charges like mushrooms, keeping them in the dark and feeding them bullshit. Perry points out how a few years ago the band was renting the upper floor of an old building for its offices. "We couldn't really afford to move, so Herbie sat down with us and convinced us to personally get loans so we could buy our own office. He showed us that it would be an investment we could all benefit from."
    Cain, for his part, is glad to be part of an organization as smoothly and fraternally run as Journey's.
    "He's an excellent rhythm player, and he plays incredible keyboards," Schon burbles. "We might do one of those things hanging the keyboard around the neck. It could really be wild." Cain (a songwriter with an album on Bearsville Records to his credit) has already written more than half of a new studio album, Escape, with Steve Perry. "We had twenty new songs with Jon in a month," says Schon. "We want to get them all down and pick the best ones.
    "You take a tremendous amount of heat from the press when you do something different," he maintains. "Now it doesn't matter. I could give a shit what they think about the albums. But we've taken our audience with us. They say hard rock can't have class, but we educate them to see that they can appreciate good musicianship and still have a rockin' time."