journey last concert with steve perry

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The Day Steve Perry Played His Last Show With Journey

Steve Perry performed his last show with Journey on Nov. 3, 1991, at an all-star concert to honor late promoter Bill Graham. The show came almost five years after Perry's  last full concert with the band , on Feb. 1, 1987.

The reunited group got together to pay tribute – along with other artists who got their start in the San Francisco scene, including  Carlos Santana , the Grateful Dead  and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young  – in Golden Gate Park. Graham died in a  helicopter crash  on Oct. 25.

Journey hadn't played together since the end of their Raised on Radio  tour, and even though their performance at the Graham tribute was brief – less than 10 minutes, and featuring "Faithfully," "Lonely Road Without You" and "Lights" – it was a welcome return for fans who had been waiting for the moment since Perry retired from the group, which broke up following the singer's departure.

Following a 1994 solo album, Perry reunited on record with Journey for 1996's Trial by Fire album, which reached the Top 20 and spawned a trio of hit singles. The band was all set to tour in support of the record, but after Perry injured himself in a hiking accident, the tour was canceled and Perry left for a second and final time .

Watch Steve Perry's Final Performance With Journey

Journey continued with new singers, while Perry remained mostly quiet over the next 20 years, only making occasional appearances to sing "Don't Stop Believin'" with San Francisco Giants fans or onstage with the indie-rock band Eels .

Journey were among the artists inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, but Perry declined to perform with the group onstage. He finally returned to solo work a year later with Traces .

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Steve Perry Walked Away From Journey. A Promise Finally Ended His Silence.

By Alex Pappademas

• Sept. 5, 2018

MALIBU, Calif. — On the back patio of a Greek restaurant, a white-haired man making his way to the exit paused for a second look at one of his fellow diners, a man with a prominent nose who wore his dark hair in a modest pompadour.

“You look a lot like Steve Perry,” the white-haired man said.

“I used to be Steve Perry,” Steve Perry said.

This is how it goes when you are Steve Perry. Everyone is excited to see you, and no one can quite believe it. Everyone wants to know where you’ve been.

In 1977, an ambitious but middlingly successful San Francisco jazz-rock band called Journey went looking for a new lead singer and found Mr. Perry, then a 28-year-old veteran of many unsigned bands. Mr. Perry and the band’s lead guitarist and co-founder, Neal Schon, began writing concise, uplifting hard rock songs that showcased Mr. Perry’s clean, powerful alto, as operatic an instrument as pop has ever seen. This new incarnation of Journey produced a string of hit singles, released eight multiplatinum albums and toured relentlessly — so relentlessly that in 1987, a road-worn Mr. Perry took a hiatus, effectively dissolving the band he’d helped make famous.

He did not disappear completely — there was a solo album in 1994, followed in 1996 by a Journey reunion album, “Trial by Fire.” But it wasn’t long before Mr. Perry walked away again, from Journey and from the spotlight. With his forthcoming album, “Traces,” due in early October, he’s breaking 20 years of radio silence.

Over the course of a long midafternoon lunch — well-done souvlaki, hold all the starches — Mr. Perry, now 69, explained why he left, and why he’s returned. He spoke of loving, and losing and opening himself to being loved again, including by people he’s never met, who know him only as a voice from the Top 40 past.

And when he detailed the personal tragedy that moved him to make music again, he talked about it in language as earnest and emotional as any Journey song:

“I thought I had a pretty good heart,” he said, “but a heart isn’t really complete until it’s completely broken.”

IN ITS ’80S heyday, Journey was a commercial powerhouse and a critical piñata. With Mr. Perry up front, slinging high notes like Frisbees into the stratosphere, Journey quickly became not just big but huge . When few public figures aside from Pac-Man and Donkey Kong had their own video game, Journey had two. The offices of the group’s management company received 600 pieces of Journey fan mail per day.

The group toured hard for nine years. Gradually, that punishing schedule began to take a toll on Journey’s lead singer.

“I never had any nodules or anything, and I never had polyps,” Mr. Perry said, referring to the state of his vocal cords. He looked around for some wood to knock, then settled for his own skull. The pain, he said, was more spiritual than physical.

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As a vocalist, Mr. Perry explained, “your instrument is you. It’s not just your throat, it’s you . If you’re burnt out, if you’re depressed, if you’re feeling weary and lost and paranoid, you’re a mess.”

“Frankly,” Mr. Schon said in a phone interview, “I don’t know how he lasted as long as he did without feeling burned out. He was so good, doing things that nobody else could do.”

On Feb. 1, 1987, Mr. Perry performed one last show with Journey, in Anchorage. Then he went home.

Mr. Perry was born in Hanford, Calif., in the San Joaquin Valley, about 45 minutes south of Fresno. His parents, who were both Portuguese immigrants, divorced when he was 8, and Mr. Perry and his mother moved in next door to her parents’. “I became invisible, emotionally,” Mr. Perry said. “And there were places I used to hide, to feel comfortable, to protect myself.”

Sometimes he’d crawl into a corner of his grandparents’ garage with a blanket and a flashlight. But he also found refuge in music. “I could get lost in these 45s that I had,” Mr. Perry said. “It turned on a passion for music in me that saved my life.”

As a teen, Mr. Perry moved to Lemoore, Calif., where he enjoyed an archetypally idyllic West Coast adolescence: “A lot of my writing, to this day, is based on my emotional attachment to Lemoore High School.”

There he discovered the Beatles and the Beach Boys, went on parked-car dates by the San Joaquin Valley’s many irrigation canals, and experienced a feeling of “freedom and teenage emotion and contact with the world” that he’s never forgotten. Even a song like “No Erasin’,” the buoyant lead single from his new LP has that down-by-the-old-canal spirit, Mr. Perry said.

And after he left Journey, it was Lemoore that Mr. Perry returned to, hoping to rediscover the person he’d been before subsuming his identity within an internationally famous rock band. In the beginning, he couldn’t even bear to listen to music on the radio: “A little PTSD, I think.”

Eventually, in 1994, he made that solo album, “For the Love of Strange Medicine,” and sported a windblown near-mullet and a dazed expression on the cover. The reviews were respectful, and the album wasn’t a flop. With alternative rock at its cultural peak, Mr. Perry was a man without a context — which suited him just fine.

“I was glad,” he said, “that I was just allowed to step back and go, O.K. — this is a good time to go ride my Harley.”

JOURNEY STAYED REUNITED after Mr. Perry left for the second time in 1997. Since December 2007, its frontman has been Arnel Pineda, a former cover-band vocalist from Manila, Philippines, who Mr. Schon discovered via YouTube . When Journey was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last April, Mr. Pineda sang the 1981 anthem “Don’t Stop Believin’,” not Mr. Perry. “I’m not in the band,” he said flatly, adding, “It’s Arnel’s gig — singers have to stick together.”

Around the time Mr. Pineda joined the band, something strange had happened — after being radioactively unhip for decades, Journey had crept back into the zeitgeist. David Chase used “Don’t Stop Believin’” to nerve-racking effect in the last scene of the 2007 series finale of “The Sopranos” ; when Mr. Perry refused to sign off on the show’s use of the song until he was told how it would be used, he briefly became one of the few people in America who knew in advance how the show ended.

“Don’t Stop Believin’” became a kind of pop standard, covered by everyone from the cast of “Glee” to the avant-shred guitarist Marnie Stern . Decades after they’d gone their separate ways, Journey and Mr. Perry found themselves discovering fans they never knew they had.

Mark Oliver Everett, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter who performs with his band Eels under the stage name E, was not one of them, at first.

“When I was young, living in Virginia,” Mr. Everett said, “Journey was always on the radio, and I wasn’t into it.”

So although Mr. Perry became a regular at Eels shows beginning around 2003, it took Mr. Everett five years to invite him backstage. He’d become acquainted with Patty Jenkins, the film director, who’d befriended Mr. Perry after contacting him for permission to use “Don’t Stop Believin’” in her 2003 film “Monster.” (“When he literally showed up on the mixing stage the next day and pulled up a chair next to me, saying, ‘Hey I really love your movie. How can I help you?’ it was the beginning of one of the greatest friendships of my life,” Ms. Jenkins wrote in an email.) Over lunch, Ms. Jenkins lobbied Mr. Everett to meet Mr. Perry.

They hit it off immediately. “At that time,” Mr. Everett said, “we had a very serious Eels croquet game in my backyard every Sunday.” He invited Mr. Perry to attend that week. Before long, Mr. Perry began showing up — uninvited and unannounced, but not unwelcome — at Eels rehearsals.

“They’d always bust my chops,” Mr. Perry said. “Like, ‘Well? Is this the year you come on and sing a couple songs with us?’”

At one point, the Eels guitarist Jeff Lyster managed to bait Mr. Perry into singing Journey’s “Lights” at one of these rehearsals, which Mr. Everett remembers as “this great moment — a guy who’s become like Howard Hughes, and just walked away from it all 25 years ago, and he’s finally doing it again.”

Eventually Mr. Perry decided to sing a few numbers at an Eels show, which would be his first public performance in decades. He made this decision known to the band, Mr. Everett said, not via phone or email but by showing up to tour rehearsals one day carrying his own microphone. “He moves in mysterious ways,” Mr. Everett observed.

For mysterious Steve Perry reasons, Mr. Perry chose to make his long-awaited return to the stage at a 2014 Eels show at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn. During a surprise encore, he sang three songs, including one of his favorite Eels tunes, whose profane title is rendered on an edited album as “It’s a Monstertrucker.”

“I walked out with no anticipation and they knew me and they responded, and it was really a thrill,” Mr. Perry said. “I missed it so much. I couldn’t believe it’d been so long.”

“It’s a Monstertrucker” is a spare song about struggling to get through a lonely Sunday in someone’s absence. For Mr. Perry, it was not an out-of-nowhere choice.

In 2011, Ms. Jenkins directed one segment of “Five,” a Lifetime anthology film about women and breast cancer. Mr. Perry visited her one day in the cutting room while she was at work on a scene featuring real cancer patients as extras. A woman named Kellie Nash caught Mr. Perry’s eye. Instantly smitten, he asked Ms. Jenkins if she would introduce them by email.

“And she says ‘O.K., I’ll send the email,’ ” Mr. Perry said, “but there’s one thing I should tell you first. She was in remission, but it came back, and it’s in her bones and her lungs. She’s fighting for her life.”

“My head said, ‘I don’t know,’ ” Mr. Perry remembered, “but my heart said, ‘Send the email.’”

“That was extremely unlike Steve, as he is just not that guy,” Ms. Jenkins said. “I have never seen him hit on, or even show interest in anyone before. He was always so conservative about opening up to anyone.”

A few weeks later, Ms. Nash and Mr. Perry connected by phone and ended up talking for nearly five hours. Their friendship soon blossomed into romance. Mr. Perry described Ms. Nash as the greatest thing that ever happened to him.

“I was loved by a lot of people, but I didn’t really feel it as much as I did when Kellie said it,” he said. “Because she’s got better things to do than waste her time with those words.”

They were together for a year and a half. They made each other laugh and talked each other to sleep at night.

In the fall of 2012, Ms. Nash began experiencing headaches. An MRI revealed that the cancer had spread to her brain. One night not long afterward, Ms. Nash asked Mr. Perry to make her a promise.

“She said, ‘If something were to happen to me, promise me you won’t go back into isolation,’ ” Mr. Perry said, “because that would make this all for naught.”

At this point in the story, Mr. Perry asked for a moment and began to cry.

Ms. Nash died on Dec. 14, 2012, at 40. Two years later, Mr. Perry showed up to Eels rehearsal with his own microphone, ready to make good on a promise.

TIME HAS ADDED a husky edge to Mr. Perry’s angelic voice; on “Traces,” he hits some trembling high notes that bring to mind the otherworldly jazz countertenor “Little” Jimmy Scott. The tone suits the songs, which occasionally rock, but mostly feel close to their origins as solo demos Mr. Perry cut with only loops and click tracks backing him up.

The idea that the album might kick-start a comeback for Mr. Perry is one that its maker inevitably has to hem and haw about.

“I don’t even know if ‘coming back’ is a good word,” he said. “I’m in touch with the honest emotion, the love of the music I’ve just made. And all the neurosis that used to come with it, too. All the fears and joys. I had to put my arms around all of it. And walking back into it has been an experience, of all of the above.”

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The Last Performance Of Steve Perry With Journey

via Journey on MV/YouTube

For Bill Graham and The San Francisco Crowd

Steve Perry performed with Journey for the last time on November 3, 1991 in Golden Gate Park at a memorial concert for the late rock promoter Bill Graham who was killed in a helicopter crash. Perry’s final full concert with the band was on February 1, 1987.

Graham helped Journey get their start by giving them their first gig at Winterland Arena in San Francisco, CA on December 31, 1973.

As for the tribute, Journey’s set was only less than ten minutes but they powered through three songs – Faithfully , Lonely Road Without You , and Lights . It was short but sweet especially for those who have long wanted to see The Voice reunite with his bandmates.

After a few years, Perry went back to the recording studio with Journey for their 1996 album Trial by Fire . It was a commercial success and peaked at #3 on the US Billboard 200.

In an interview earlier this year, Perry said: “As much I missed the lights, as much as I missed the stage, the applause and the adoration of people who were loving the music I was participating in, I had to walk away from it to be okay emotionally on my own without it. And that took time. That doesn’t mean I didn’t miss it, it means I had to keep walking the other way. There was some personal work to be done within myself, to be honest with you.”

Check out their performance below.

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Flashback: Journey Perform ‘Girl Can’t Help It’ on Final Tour With Steve Perry

By Andy Greene

Andy Greene

After weeks of uncertainty following a bitter separation with drummer Steve Smith and bassist Ross Valory, Journey re-emerged over the weekend as part of UNICEF’s Won’t Stop streaming concert with a lockdown rendition of “Don’t Stop Believin’.” They used the occasion to announce the addition of bassist Randy Jackson and drummer Narada Michael Walden to their official lineup.

“Journey is an ever-changing unstoppable force,” guitarist Neal Schon tweeted. “This is a completely new chapter for us and can’t wait to get to it!”

For old-school Journey fans, this might set off a bit of déjà vu, as this is the second time that the band fired Ross Valory and replaced him with Randy Jackson. The first time took place during the Raised on Radio sessions in 1985 when frontman Steve Perry wanted to take the band in a different musical direction. Bass duties on the album were filled by Jackson and Bob Glaub, but it was Jackson who toured with Journey throughout 1986 and 1987. (Here’s video of the band playing “Girl Can’t Help It” on that tour.)

The tour wrapped when Perry decided he wanted to step away from public life, and when they re-formed in 1996, they brought Valory back into the fold. (Jackson, meanwhile, became one of the original judges on American Idol in 2002.) Valory stayed with the group as frontman duties rotated from Perry to Steve Augeri to Jeff Scott Soto to Arnel Pineda, but he was let go in March following a behind-the-scenes power struggle relating to the group’s trademark.

Jackson was an obvious pick to replace Valory since he’s the only other bassist on the planet who’s toured with Journey in the past. Narada Michael Walden may not have that same level of experience with the band, but he has played with everyone from Jeff Beck and Weather Report to Robert Fripp and Carlos Santana. He’s also collaborated with Schon on numerous non-Journey projects over the years.

The band now has a complete lineup once again, but it’s unclear when they’ll be able to play in public. The group had a massive co-headlining summer tour with the Pretenders on the books, but they had to cancel it because of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Their lawyers, however, are being kept quite busy due to the ongoing legal dispute with Smith and Valory.)

This might seem like a lot of drama and intrigue for a single band, but that’s been the normal state of Journey affairs for decades by this point. It’s a band where the alliances shift all the time and members from years past can return with little warning, unless that member happens to be named “Steve Perry.” He’s stayed as far away from all of this as he possibly could over the past two decades and that’s unlikely to ever change.

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