Journey have never been short of drama, from numerous line-up changes over the years to public spats between band members. But when Classic Rock say down with the shortly after the release of 2008’s Revelation album, it looked like they’d steadied the bought with new singer Arnel Pineda, who they discovered crooning cover versions of their songs on YouTube.
When Journey played the reconstituted Monsters Of Rock festival at Milton Keynes in 2006, it was their first appearance on a British stage for more than 25 years. There was barely a dry eye in the house.
“You’re telling me grown men were crying during our performance?” laughs guitarist Neal Schon. “I really had no idea. We weren’t that bad, were we? Ha-ha! Right now you’re seeing me with no glasses on, because I’ve had laser-vision treatment. But back then I couldn’t see more than 10 feet in front of me. Even if people were crying I wouldn’t have noticed it.”
Since that triumphant return, Journey haven’t been such strangers to Britain. Only trouble is, every time they come back to tour it seems to be with a different singer. First Steve Augeri. Then Jeff Scott Soto. Now Arnel Pineda. And always with the spectre of Steve Perry, their talismanic frontman in the tux-tail coat, the guy who warbled on all their wimptastic hits, lurking in the background.
“It wasn’t intentional for us to have a revolving door of vocalists every time we visited Europe, it’s just that things didn’t work out quite the way we’d planned,” Schon sighs. “But Arnel has no reason to worry because, well… there are no more vocalists.”
Schon, Pineda and Classic Rock are gathered together in a private meeting room just off the foyer of London’s five-star Royal Garden Hotel. It’s the morning after Journey’s recent show at the Hammersmith Apollo – Pineda’s debut UK performance with the band, and a resounding success all round.
So, have Journey, with Pineda – this diminutive geezer from the Philippines who Schon discovered crooning cover versions of their songs on YouTube – finally managed to exorcise Steve Perry’s ghost? It certainly looks that way. Schon simply shrugs: “Arnel? Yeah, he’s got what it takes.”
Shortly after the ’06 Monsters, Journey played the Sweden Rock festival. It was here that an eagle-eared Scandinavian sound engineer speculated that Steve Augeri – Journey’s singer at the time – might be lip-synching. Classic Rock has quizzed Journey about this in the past and always received evasive answers.
This time, however, Schon is a trifle more open: “Y’know, people get in trouble and they do what they gotta do to get through shows. Augeri had serious problems with his vocals. He had a yeast infection in his throat that was incurable. He couldn’t get the gunk off his throat, so he couldn’t get anything out of it. Anybody in the band who knows what he sounded like when we first got him knew he was hurting.”
So, Journey were actually trying to bolster up Augeri by the use of extra added ‘vocal assistance’, shall we say?
“No comment. You’ll have to talk to him [Augeri] about it. In all seriousness, this is such old news.”
Whatever, Augeri exited soon enough, to be replaced by Jeff Scott Soto.
“Jeff did a great job,” says Schon. “He came in, got us through a tour and got paid very, very well for it. But personality-wise he was not right. After we asked Jeff to leave it got nasty and he decided to sue us. Which was a shame as he’d already been taken care of very well.”
Did Journey always regard Soto as something of a stop-gap frontman?
“I think for a second we thought it was going to work,” Schon admits. “He was a very good showman. But what turned my head around was when we wrote a coupla new songs. We sent them to Jeff, he laid down some vocals… and it didn’t sound like Journey at all. Jeff didn’t have to be a clone of Steve Perry, but his register was more like a baritone. We needed an alto-tenor… that timbre of voice that everybody’s used to. So that was the problem. It didn’t sound great. It didn’t sound like Journey. It was just very nondescript.”
In June 2007 the phone rang at Arnel Pineda’s home in Manila. Amazingly, Schon – or “Mr Neal Schon” as Pineda is wont to call him – was on the other end of the line.
“It was a very unbelievable experience because I never thought that a guitar god like Mr Neal Schon would call up someone like me,” marvels Pineda. “So first off I had to make sure it was actually Mr Neal Schon. I kept on asking him: ‘Are you really who you say you are?’ The whole of July I was processing my US visa papers so I could get to San Francisco, meet these guys and have an audition with them.”
You’ll have noticed that Pineda has been pretty quiet up until now. That’s because he’s rather shy, somewhat overawed by the interview experience, and his grasp of the English language isn’t that great. He’s also, Classic Rock is surprised to learn, 40 years old. Sitting curled up on the armchair in front of us, all jet-black hair and boyish features, he doesn’t look a day over 20.
When Pineda flew into Frisco for his try-out with Journey, did he have an inkling it was going to develop into such a remarkable opportunity?
“No, I was actually quite negative about it because I wasn’t making really good singing for the first few days. I think the defining moment was the two days’ recording session with them.”
Schon concurs: “The first day Arnel was obviously a little under the weather because his hours were out of synch; he wasn’t acclimated at all for the time zone. The second day he got much better, and by the third day he got even stronger. When we went in the studio he was just nailin’ stuff.”
Has Pineda ever been outside of the Philippines?
“Yeah, I was in Hong Kong for 15 years, playing the bar circuit with a band called New Age. We’d relocated there from the Philippines. I’ve also been to Singapore, Japan and Thailand. But I’ve never been to Europe. London reminds me of a better Hong Kong. It’s a big city. The buses, the establishments that you see here, they’re all there also in Hong Kong. The only ones that are missing are the tall buildings that you see on the shores of Hong Kong.”
What’s the music scene like in the Philippines?
“There’s a real split between bands who do originals and bands who do cover songs. The bands who play covers are the ones you can always see in the bars, where they get paid 500 to 1,000 pesos a night [a mere £5.70 to £11.40, according to Classic Rock’s ready-reckoner]. Then there’s these regional bands that does their own stuff. I used to sing in another band called Zoo and we were unusual because we mixed originals and covers together. But in general it’s very difficult in the Philippines. There’s a lot of places where people are starving.”’
We ask Pineda for his favourite singers (besides Steve Perry, of course) and the names spew forth: “Robert Plant, Bono, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Barbra Streisand, Nat King Cole… a lotta great singers. Ann Wilson of Heart and Robin Zander, the singer of Cheap Trick. Lovin’ Every Minute Of It – was that Mike Reno? Yeah, of Loverboy. Phil Collins, Dio. It’s a lot out there. I’ve listened to all of them and then I have followed them. It became my icon, my model, just to become what I am right now.”
Is Pineda concerned by the rapid turnover of Journey singers?
“I am also concerned about that because of the type of vocal prowess that you need to show with these guys. I’m just human, and the vocals they’ve got for their music is just, like…”
“He’s got what it takes, though,” Schon repeats. “Out of Steve Perry, Steve Augeri and Jeff Scott Soto, Arnel has what it takes because he’s very musical. He doesn’t have to burn out singing all the high stuff every night. Steve Perry skated… he used lower notes that sounded just as good. They weren’t the high, soaring notes. When you have to, you have to. Robert Plant does it, everybody does it. Arnel’s got very good musical sense to just ad lib when he needs to, and make up whatever notes he wants to go to that night. And some people don’t. So he’s gonna be fine.”
Journey recorded their latest album, Revelation, with Pineda in tow – and they didn’t hang about.
“It was very fast, pretty much a live performance in the studio,” Schon confirms. “Originally we were going to have four new songs and fill up the rest with Arnel singing our greatest hits. But then I thought we’re going to end up with egg on our faces if we do that, so I pushed management and talked the band into writing more new stuff. I’m happy that we did because I think there’s much more interest in the new stuff than in remakes of the old stuff. Having said that, when people hear Arnel singing the old material they realise, wow, he can obviously cover that.”
“I wish I had a longer time,” Pineda mutters.
Schon isn’t worried if people are sceptical about the whole YouTube find-me-a-new-singer process.
“You can’t be concerned about what people think,” he insists, “you just go with your gut instinct. With Arnel we’ve got the link that’s been missing in the band for quite some time. Had I known Arnel back in the 1980s when Steve Perry decided to go, I would’ve called him.”
![Journey - Don't Stop Believin' (Live 2009) [Official Video] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/4Yy6pmsQ9H8/maxresdefault.jpg)
With Perry out of the equation after 1986’s Raised On Radio, Journey went on a 10-year hiatus. They reunited in the mid 1990s for Trial By Fire but it didn’t last long.
“Trial By Fire was received very well,” says Schon. “It got to No.3 in the Billboard chart and we had a hit single with When You Love A Woman. But Perry had physical issues [the singer went on a hiking holiday in Hawaii and cracked his hip; he claimed he needed a replacement] and didn’t want to do much touring. So we asked him: ‘Do you want to write a new record? Do you want to sing a song for a movie? Do you want to play at an awards ceremony?’ ‘No, no, no,’ came the answers. At that point you’re wondering, why did we even bother putting Journey back together?”
Nevertheless, with big-time reunion tours all the rage at the moment, wouldn’t it be tempting to get Perry back in for one last humungous paycheck?
“I would be in the front-row seat if that ever happened,” Pineda chips in.
Schon declares: “No, Steve wants nothing to do with us. It’s been like that for years.”
The last time Schon saw Perry was in January 2005 when Journey were given a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.
“It was a great day. I was really happy to see everyone. I think they all showed up except for [ex-keyboardist/vocalist] Gregg Rolie and Herbie Herbert, our former manager. I suppose there were some sour grapes. But everyone else was there.”
Schon says he’s looking forward to writing a bunch of new songs with Pineda: “This summer we’ll be travelling on the same tour bus. [Journey will be touring the Stateside sheds, along with Heart and Cheap Trick.] I’m going to have an acoustic guitar in there and we’re going to knock out some stuff.”
“I like songwriting,” says Pineda. “It’s one of my hobbies. Most of the time I like to be alone and just think about all of the melodies in my brain.”
“I wanna write with Arnel and I believe we’re going to have some great chemistry,” Schon continues. “I’m going to push next time to have no more than two ballads on a record, because that’s all you really need. And Arnel’s voting with me.”
“I agree with Mr Neal Schon. We should rock,” says Pineda. “We should rock more. The whole band should agree with rocking more.”
These words might return to haunt us, but as our interview winds down Classic Rock is convinced Arnel Pineda is here to stay.
“Joining Journey has been a good joyride so far,” says the small-town Filipino boy. “I hope it continues for a long time.”
“When we were recording Revelation, our producer, Kevin Shirley, said: ‘Don’t treat Arnel so good. He’ll he happy with a sandwich,’” Schon chuckles.
Pineda leaves us clutching a big, black, gift-wrapped box. It’s large enough to contain several dozen sandwiches. We wonder what’s actually inside.
“It’s a present to me from our drummer, Deen [Castronovo],” says Pineda. “A brand new watch.”
Sheesh, we remark, judging by the size of the box it must be one helluva watch.
“Yeah,” Pineda smiles, cradling the box in his arms. “Welcome to The Big Watch Club.”
Originally published in Classic Rock magazine issue 122, July 2008
