year steve perry left journey

The Real Reason Steve Perry Left Journey

For years, Journey singer Steve Perry used to wear a necklace of a gold musical eighth-note. In 2018, he explained to Rolling Stone it was a gift he received from his mom when he was 12 years old.

"She always believed in me. I wore it for years and years, but hung it up in May of 1998, just after the band and I legally split and I had a complete contractual release from all my obligations to the band and label."

Perry fronted Journey to its greatest commercial success in the '80s, catapulting the band to arena rock stardom through the likes of "Open Arms" and "Don't Stop Believin'." However , by 1987, even with the triumph of Raised by Radio tour, the band was greatly fractured and went on hiatus for nearly ten years. 

As time heals all wounds, Perry reunited in the mid-90s with bandmates Jonathan Cain, Ross Valory, and Steve Smith. Now under the management of Irving Azoff, Journey released Trial by Fire. The Recording Industry Association of America certified the album platinum and the Recording Academy nominated one of its hit singles, "When You Love a Woman," for a Grammy.

Through pain, Steve Perry came back to music

Just before tour arrangements could be made, Perry collapsed while on a hike. He learned he needed hip surgery due to a degenerative bone condition. The band could not wait for Perry to heal, and so he was replaced by Steve Augeri and later Arnel Pineda .

For years, Perry's surgery explained his reason for officially leaving Journey. But in 2018, he made a revelation. Ahead of the release of his solo album Traces , Perry admitted his actual motive.

"The truth is, that I thought music had run its course in my heart," Perry said. "I had to be honest with myself, and in my heart, I knew I just wasn't feeling it anymore."

Perry , in soul and spirit, was tired. But like any true rockstar, he could not be away from the limelight too long. Traces allowed Perry to find music again. In a promise to his late girlfriend Kellie Nash, who died in 2012 from breast cancer, this was the moment he stopped isolating himself from the world. 

"I found myself with not only just a broken heart but an open heart," Perry told Billboard . "And from that came rock and roll."

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25 Years Ago: Why Steve Perry Left Journey for Good

Journey  lost singer Steve Perry  for a second time on May 7, 1998. The first time, back in the '80s, Perry's exit had been voluntary – the result of recent solo success and growing indifference toward the band.

Left to their own devices at the time, former bandmates Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain formed Bad English with singer  John Waite . (Perry had fired founding bassist Ross Valory and longtime drummer Steve Smith during the sessions for 1986's Raised on Radio .)

A decade mostly gone from bright arena spotlights paved the way for Journey's triumphant mid-'90s reunion. The resulting Top 20 album, 1996's Trial by Fire , swam against the current of the era's reigning alt-rock. Three charting singles, a Grammy nomination and plans for a successful comeback tour made it seem just like the good old days.

Unfortunately, those touring plans were derailed when Perry suffered a hiking accident and refused to undergo the hip surgery necessary to get him back onstage. This opened the door to renewed ill will and undoubtedly dredged up memories of the singer's late-'80s power grab for Journey's fate.

Instead of bending to Perry's whims this time, the other members of Journey banked on their fan base's renewed support and unquenchable hunger for tour dates by recruiting a Perry soundalike Steve Augeri in order to get on with business.

The band's decision appeared to have been vindicated by a successful decade-plus of touring and recording with Augeri and, later, Arnel Pineda. Perry, for his part, maintained a relatively low profile, seemingly satisfied belting out "Don't Stop Believin'" from the bleachers of his hometown San Francisco Giants' baseball stadium, and occasionally showing up as a guest singer. He's only put out one proper solo album since, 2018's Traces . (Perry released a different version of the same LP in 2020, followed by The Season , an album of Christmas standards, in 2021).

Journey joined the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017 . Before the ceremony, Schon said he hoped Perry would perform with him again. Instead, Perry ended up taking part only in the acceptance speeches, simply commenting : "I am truly grateful that Journey is being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.”

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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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Former Frontman Steve Perry Will Never Reunite With Journey — Here's Why He Left

Updated Aug. 29 2023, 3:51 p.m. ET

The American rock band Journey has cemented their legacy in the world of classic rock music . With power ballad songs such as "Don't Stop Believin'" and "Faithfully," the lyrics continue to be sung throughout generations.

Initially formed in the early '70s, Journey reportedly hit its commercial peak between the late 1970s through the late '80s.

In 1987, frontman Steve Perry decided to part ways with Journey. Given the impact the band had, many were shocked when they learned ties had been severed. So, why did Steve leave Journey? Keep reading to find out more.

Why did Steve Perry leave Journey?

According to iHeartRadio , Steve left Journey in 1987 and pursued a solo career, though he never reached commercial success as an individual artist. In the mid-90s, Steve reunited with bandmates and prepped for an upcoming tour. However, those plans changed after Steve found out he had a hip condition that would require surgery. But, he wanted to try alternative treatments.

“They wanted me to make a decision on the surgery,” he told Rolling Stone in a 2018 interview. “But I didn’t feel it was a group decision. Then I was told on the phone that they needed to know when I was gonna do it ’cause they had checked out some new singers.” 

Though he asked his bandmates to reconsider, they did not. “I said to them, ‘Do what you need to do, but don’t call it Journey,’” he said, adding, “If you fracture the stone, I don’t know how I could come back to it.”

The band found a new singer and the group continues to tour today. While the former lead singer was present during Journey's 2017 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, he has not performed with the band since then.

“What they do is none of my business,” the 71-year-old told the outlet. “When I walked away from it, I did not go to any of the shows, nor did I listen to any of it.”

So, what did he do after leaving behind his music career?

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Steve Perry (@steveperrymusic)

Rumors surfaced that Journey's Steve Perry was a recluse.

After parting ways with the band, Steve took a step back from the spotlight and music. “I didn’t sing in those years,” he explained to Rolling Stone . “I didn’t write music. I must have gained 50 or 60 pounds. I got a butch haircut. I just said, ‘I’m going to just become a plump kid in my hometown again.’ I’d already lived the dream of dreams and didn’t know how I could come close to being anything like what I was before.”

View this post on Instagram One late night, I was sitting in my room thinking about so many things. This song came into my mind, and it brought me some comfort. I hope it does the same for you. Stay safe, Steve A post shared by Steve Perry (@steveperrymusic) on Apr 17, 2020 at 9:02am PDT

The singer revealed that rumors started to surface of the former frontman being a "recluse with long nails." 

Finally, after several decades, Steve decided to release his third studio solo album "Traces," which was a project five years in the making.

As for fans holding out that Steve will one day reunite with his former bandmates, don't hold your breath. The singer told the outlet, "I left the band 31 f--king years ago, my friend. You can still love someone, but not want to work with them."

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When and why did Steve Perry leave Journey?

Journey helped set the soundtrack for the 1970s and 1980s, with hits that are still remembered as some of the best songs ever written. However, the band couldn’t count on lead singer Steve Perry for most of their existence.

Journey was formed in 1973, a union of several experienced musicians trying to create a new sound experience. As the jazz fusion project didn’t work as well as Journey had hoped, the band was forced to experiment with new genres and invite new members. The version of Journey we all know and love began in 1977 when Perry joined as the band’s lead singer and songwriter. As the frontman, he made history, using his vocal talents to turn hits such as “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “Open Arms” into the anthems of a generation.

Though Journey’s explosive success established them as one of the biggest musical influences of the 1980s, Perry left the band in 1987. It would be the first time, but not the last, that Perry and Journey went in different directions.

Why did Steve Perry leave Journey in 1987?

In 1987, Journey was at the peak of its success. Since Perry joined the band, they released hit after hit, attracting millions of fans to their live performances worldwide. However, to fans’ despair, Perry left Journey to pursue a solo career. 

The lead singer position gave Perry the attention he needed to ensure he would succeed in his solo career. Furthermore, since Perry had creative differences with Journey, he could focus his creative energy by flying solo without making concessions or negotiating with other band members. In addition, things were somewhat tense within the band before Perry’s departure, with the lead singer firing founding bassist Ross Valory and drummer Steve Smith during the recording of 1986’s Raised on Radio — the two would return to the band in 1995. Hence, his departure wasn’t entirely shocking. Still, Perry’s absence impacted Journey.

Journey would remain popular without Perry, but they never repeated the success of their 1980s run. Likewise, Perry is mainly remembered for the songs he wrote or co-wrote for the band, not for his solo career. Unsurprisingly, though, he would rejoin the group in 1995, a new partnership that lasted only three years.

Why Steve Perry and Journey parted ways in 1998?

With Perry back in the folder, Journey launched a new studio album in 1996, Trial by Fire . The album got three charting singles and a Grammy nomination , with fans eager to see the band hitting the road again for a new world tour. The tour plans derailed after Perry’s ski accident in the same year. He needed hip surgery to get back on stage in time for the tour, which he refused to get. His Journey companions waited for him until 1998, post which they decided the band’s future was more important than the selfish decisions of a single person.

The same year Journey hired voice-lookalike Steve Augeri, forging a successful partnership until 2006. In 2007, singer Arnel Pineda became the band’s lead singer, a role that is still his. As for Perry, he showed up on a few special presentations with the team but has primarily remained in the shadows. His story is a bitter reminder that a band is bigger than its frontman, no matter how important they think they are.

Source disclaimer : The article above is partly based on the book The Untold Story of Journey by Neil Daniels.

Rock And Roll Garage

Why steve perry left journey and what he has done since then.

Steve Perry was born in Hanford, California in 1949 and started his career in music in 1970. He first achieved fame as a member of Journey, band he joined in 1977, four years after the band’s foundation and after they had already four albums released.

“Infinity”, the first album he did with the band, released in 1978 changed completely not only his life but also the future of the band. In following years they released some of their best-selling albums and became one of the biggest bands in the world. They stayed together until 1987 when the band entered a hiatus, returning in 1995. However, after three years Steve Perry decided to leave the band for good.

But why did the singer decide to leave the band and what he did in the meantime until he returned to music in 2018?

Usually when a musician leaves a band, the most frequent reasons are fights, money or to pursue a solo career. But Steve Perry simply decided to leave Journey because he felt like he had lost his passion for music and singing. The musician felt like nothing in his professional career made sense anymore. He was still dealing with the loss of his mother and felt like he needed to reconnect again with who he was.

He recalled that in an interview with AXS TV in 2020 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage). “Well, it was a combination. The passion for music had left me, I could not find the honest passion for singing and because of that I was stepping into some, dare I say ‘party behaviors’ to argument my frustrations. Then I think my voice was also suffering. Everything started to suffer for me and it did not help restore my passion for music.”

“So eventually the feeling just got very clear to me that I needed to just stop. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know what I was going to do or where I was going to go. All I knew was that I couldn’t keep doing what I’m doing. I need to just stop, because this is not going anywhere good. Certainly drugs and drinking were part of it, of course. I mean, that came with the times.”

He continued:

“It’s a funny thing about success, when you do get a chance to finally live that dream that you wanted when you were 8, 9, 12 years-old. I’m not complaining, I’m just telling you my heart. When you finally get that and you’re loving it, it’s kind of at some point a little bit of a luster and starts to wear off over and over again. You keep touring and keep turning the same wheel over and over again. I think it leaves room for the opportunity of other enhancements, dare I say, to replace some of the lack of luster that it once had. (So) I walked away,” Steve Perry said.

What Steve Perry did after he quit Journey?

He became a recluse person, living in his hometown. He first bought a motorcycle and decided that it was going to be his new passion. “(After that) I bought a Harley-Davidson in Visalia, California, because my hometown was Hanford, California, about 18 miles away. I would drive that Harley in the summertime. (I haven’t been into motorcycles before), I decided that was going to be my new passion. So I bought this Harley and there was no helmet law back then and my long hair would be flying 20 feet in back of me, you know (laughs).”

“I rediscovered parts of my life that I completely forgot about. So I was reconnecting with my childhood and actually reconnecting with the loss of my mother, that I lost, she died before. I went out to visit other departed relatives pretty regularly. Just to try to reconnect with my life where it is right at that time. Because when you re-enter the earth’s atmosphere of your life after a ride like that you gotta do something. You got to ground yourself somehow. So I did a lot of that,” Steve Perry told AXS TV.

A promise made to his late girlfriend made him return to music

He didn’t sing, recorded or wrote any music for years. It was only after meeting Kellie Nash, a psychologist who would become his girlfriend that he decided he would go back again to music. They met in 2011 and quickly fell in love. He first saw her on TV, in a show one of his friends worked on. One day when they were hanging out he asked who was the woman who had appeared on the show that day and asked for her e-mail. After that they went out to dinner and had a deep connection. As he told Good Morning America in 2018 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage),  “It was more than love, it was inseparable. I never experienced the word connection before honestly. It was beautiful.”

In an interview with 106.7 in 2018 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage), he talked about the promise Kellie asked him to make. She didn’t want him to be isolated again if something happened to her. “This is a deep thing, honestly. Kellie and I had conversations that were the types that I never had in my life. When we got together she already had been fighting breast cancer for three years but you would never know. She looked amazing, ‘stunning’ is the word. So I just had a connection with her that I never had before in my life. So there were conversations that were pretty intense, like one night she said: ‘Honey, I need to ask you something. I need you to make me a promise.”

Steve Perry continued:

“If something ever happens to me, make me a promise that you won’t go back into isolation. Because when I met her I was pretty isolated though (I was) riding my motorcycle, going to movies and the fair comes to town every summer. I was living life but wasn’t talking to people like yourselves, recording, singing, wasn’t writing music. I didn’t miss it (those things) because I wasn’t doing it,” Steve Perry said.

She sadly passed away, a victim of cancer, one year later in 2012. In 2017

Journey reunion and Perry’s return to music

Journey briefly reunited on stage when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame . Steve Perry was present at the ceremony with the band but he did not perform with them. However, one year later, in 2018 he released “Traces”, his first solo album in 24 years.

Many songs were inspired by the loss of Kellie and since then he released two more albums. One is an alternative version of “Traces” (2020) and in 2021 “The Season”, a Christmas album was released. He had already released a Christmas EP called “Silver Bells” in 2019.

I'm a Brazilian journalist who always loved Classic Rock and Heavy Metal music. That passion inspired me to create Rock and Roll Garage over 6 years ago. Music has always been a part of my life, helping me through tough times and being a support to celebrate the good ones. When I became a journalist, I knew I wanted to write about my passions. After graduating in journalism from the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, I pursued a postgraduate degree in digital communication at the same institution. The studies and experience in the field helped me improve the website and always bring the best of classic rock to the world! MTB: 0021377/MG

Steve Perry Still Believes

By Andy Greene

Andy Greene

It’s a Monday afternoon in August, and Steve Perry is cheerfully belting out the Backstreet Boys’ “As Long As You Love Me.” Perry is visiting a buddy at his house in San Francisco, and the singer — who grew up on Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and the Kingston Trio, and doesn’t listen to much current pop — is giving an example of a relatively modern song that caught his ear. “I love songs like this,” he says of the tune, a Max Martin–penned ballad from 1997. “I’m a sappy guy.”

It’s somewhat surprising to hear Perry, 69, sing a hit by a boy band a generation behind him. What’s really surprising, though, is that Perry is singing at all. Virtually nobody has seen him do this since he parted ways with his band, Journey , 20 years ago. Perry and Journey became famous in the Seventies and Eighties for big, soaring arena-rock hits about devotion, passion and seizing the moment, some of them a little sappy indeed, all of them driven by Perry’s skyscraping vocals, which exerted a massive influence on generations of wasted karaoke warriors. In the process, Journey basically invented the power ballad. Critics often dismissed the band as cheeseballs, but that wasn’t fair; songs like “Faithfully” and “Lights” stand up as beautiful and plainspoken showcases for Perry’s remarkable voice. “We certainly were part of pioneering [the power ballad],” Perry says. “I didn’t care what the critics thought about the band. I really didn’t. All I knew is every night we would get at least one to two encores. That was my critical review for me every night.”

Perry left Journey in 1987, but he never had sustained success as a solo artist. After the commercial failure of his second solo album, he got back together with his former bandmates in the mid-Nineties. They made a comeback album, scored a radio hit with the romantic ballad “When You Love a Woman” and earned a Grammy nomination. Irving Azoff, who had just made the Eagles a fortune for their reunion album, was brought in to manage the band. The future looked bright.

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Everything changed when Perry took a long hike in Hawaii and felt a horrible pain in his hip as he reached the top of a mountain. He was just in his mid-forties but discovered he had a degenerative bone condition that would require hip-replacement surgery. Terrified at that prospect, Perry experimented with alternative treatments that did little to address the problem.

Eventually, Perry’s bandmates started getting restless. “They wanted me to make a decision on the surgery,” Perry says. “But I didn’t feel it was a group decision. Then I was told on the phone that they needed to know when I was gonna do it ’cause they had checked out some new singers.” Perry begged them to reconsider, but then postponed the date of his big surgery. “I said to them, ‘Do what you need to do, but don’t call it Journey,’” he says. “If you fracture the stone, I don’t know how I could come back to it.”

They didn’t listen. Journey found a Perry soundalike named Steve Augeri and launched a tour that continues to this day. In 2008, Arnel Pineda — a Filipino singer they found on YouTube — took over on vocals, and the group began selling as many tickets as it did in its Eighties heyday, quite possibly thanks to Pineda’s uncanny ability to sound more or less exactly like Perry, whom he grew up worshipping. Understandably, Perry is a little uneasy talking about all of this, but he’s never made any attempt to reunite with his former mates. He showed up for Journey’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017 and made an acceptance speech, though he didn’t perform with the band. “What they do is none of my business,” he says. “When I walked away from it, I did not go to any of the shows, nor did I listen to any of it.”

While his former bandmates were making millions on the road, Perry was doing, well, not all that much. He rode around aimlessly on his motorcycle and moved from the Bay Area to San Diego, though he routinely flew back for San Francisco Giants games. Perry lived off his royalties (he says he carefully tucked away money from his Journey days) and avoided the spotlight, rarely giving interviews and politely turning away fans who begged for a photo. Basically, he became the J.D. Salinger of arena rock. “I didn’t sing in those years,” he says. “I didn’t write music. I must have gained 50 or 60 pounds. I got a butch haircut. I just said, ‘I’m going to just become a plump kid in my hometown again.’ I’d already lived the dream of dreams and didn’t know how I could come close to being anything like what I was before.”

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Rumors about Perry began to pile up. “They say I’m a recluse with long nails saving my urine in jars and living on an island with a morphine drip,” he says. “They think I’m in a hospital somewhere with cancer. And they say I can’t sing anymore.”

That last one stings the most, and as he sings the Backstreet Boys song it’s clear it’s not true. Perry’s voice is certainly deeper than in his Journey days, when his upper register could rival any rock singer’s, but it’s still unmistakably Steve Perry: rich, raspy, expressive and overflowing with the sort of pulsating emotion that caused even Journey’s fiercest critics to compare him to his idol, Sam Cooke.

Perry hasn’t lost his voice, but he has lost a lot over the years: his grandparents, who had helped raise him in rural Northern California after his mom and dad split; both of his parents; and his stepfather, who gave Perry work in his construction business to help him make ends meet in the pre-Journey days. “You want to know what I did after I left the band?” he says. “I visited my mom’s grave a lot.”

Loneliness could creep in quickly. “One time I parked my car in front of the house I was raised in,” Perry says. “It was raining like crazy, the wipers were going and I was facing the house where I was raised, with my grandfather’s house to the right. I just started crying like a baby. I cried for the times we could have had together. I cried for the times that I took for granted. And they were all gone, and here I am, an only child, just missing them all. I used to think that if I became a performer and everybody loved me, that I wouldn’t have to go through these things. But guess what? There’s nowhere to run. If you’re alive, you have to walk through this eventually.”

All of the loss may explain why the frontman who radiated such passion in his Journey days no longer felt much like singing. There was another big loss to come, but this one would lead him back to music, and, eventually, to his new solo album, Traces. It’s a story about devotion, tragedy and a promise to a dying loved one. It’s so intense and heartfelt, it could be a Journey song.

Much of what happened to Perry in the past decade can be traced back to his most famous song. Perry wrote “Don’t Stop Believin’” with Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain and guitarist Neal Schon in 1981. The title phrase came from Cain’s father, something he’d say to encourage his son to keep going when he was a young musician eking out an existence in L.A.

Cain said he drew inspiration from characters he knew in the Sunset Strip rock scene of the early 1970s: These were the “streetlight people living just to find emotion” of the song’s lyrics. Perry has a different memory. “Jonathan and I scrawled out the lyrics about things that I had seen in Detroit one night after a show, looking way down to the street and seeing the streetlights light the streets,” he says. “I couldn’t see the lights, but could just see the glow of the lights facing down from about the 10th floor. I see people walking around at two, three in the morning. I thought, ‘Wow, streetlight people. That’s so cool.’” (He and Cain do agree on one thing: There’s no such place as South Detroit. They just needed an extra syllable before “Detroit” and weren’t familiar with the city’s geography.)

“Don’t Stop Believin’” hit Number Nine in 1981, though by the turn of the millennium, it was just one of Journey’s many hits, not even important enough to be mentioned by name in the band’s Behind the Music episode. But the song had one very important fan. Today, Patty Jenkins is one of the hottest directors in Hollywood, thanks to the Wonder Woman  franchise. Back in 2003, though, she was just a fledgling filmmaker who needed the perfect song for a scene in her low-budget movie Monster , about the life of serial killer Aileen Wuornos. During a key scene early in the film, Wuornos (played by Charlize Theron) roller-skates with her girlfriend. Jenkins figured that “Don’t Stop Believin’” would be the ideal song to punctuate the moment with a sense of unbridled optimism (before things went very, very bad, that is).

Jenkins had one big hurdle to getting “Don’t Stop Believin’” in her movie: persuading Perry to let her use the song. “Everyone told us the worst things about Steve,” says Jenkins. “They said he had disappeared, said no to everything, would never say yes and was all about the money.” Still, she sent him a rough cut of the scene along with her phone number. Much to her shock, he called her the next day and raved about the clip. “He gave us the song for practically nothing,” she says. “He just laughed at the rumors [I had heard]. The truth was, he said no to everything because he didn’t want the money. People weren’t understanding the song, and he didn’t want it to be sold out in that way.”

Monster became a surprise hit and won Theron a Best Actress Oscar. It also helped kick off the amazing second life of “Don’t Stop Believin’.” All of a sudden, the song was everywhere: On TV ( Glee used it six different times), on Broadway (it was the closing number in the musical Rock of Ages ), and even in the clubhouse of the 2005 Chicago White Sox, who made “Don’t Stop Believin’” their unofficial anthem on the way to winning the World Series. The song’s renaissance went into overdrive when The Sopranos used it in the show’s last-ever scene, in 2007.

There was something weirdly profound in the song’s sudden universal popularity: This slightly goofy Eighties anthem seemed to hit all of America in an emotional sweet spot that went way beyond mere “ironic” nostalgia, wiping out cultural barriers in an avalanche of cheesy optimism. It’s no wonder people literally sang it in the streets the night of Barack Obama’s election. The tune Perry was happy to sell for next to nothing had become the new national anthem. “It’s amazing to me,” says Perry. “All of my songs are like children to me. Once you send them out to the world you hope they’re strong enough to survive out there. All of them got the same attention, but the world decides which ones become the ‘Don’t Stop Believin’s,’ not me.”

For Perry, the song’s rebirth was important in another way. He and Jenkins became friends while she was working on Monster, and with plenty of spare time on his hands in the following years, Perry liked to lounge around the director’s editing suite and watch her work. One day in 2011, she was editing a Lifetime movie about breast-cancer patients when Perry saw a face on the screen that caught his eye. It was Kellie Nash, a Los Angeles psychologist. She was two decades Perry’s junior, and she was battling breast cancer. “I went, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, can you spool back to … stop right there. … Who’s that?’” Perry remembers. “Her smile killed me. I felt like I knew her somehow, and I never met her before.”

Perry asked for her e-mail address, but Jenkins said he should understand her condition before reaching out. Nash’s cancer had spread to her lungs and her bones. There was no exact timetable for how long she had left, but the prognosis was grim. “At that moment I had the opportunity to send no e-mail, pull back, no harm, no foul,” he says. “It just would all die at that moment. I would just go back to my safe life. Instead, I said, ‘Send the e-mail.’”

It placed him in a vulnerable position. “I didn’t want to go through another loss,” he says. “I was trying to continue moving through life on my own. But there was a simple gorgeousness about her that was just stunning.”

They met up at a restaurant near Nash’s house and talked for six hours. Before long, they were living together. For a few months, it was bliss. “Then one horrible day she said she was having headaches,” Perry says. “We got an MRI, and then later the oncologist called the house and said she had brain metastases. She fell apart right there in front of me, screaming and crying. It was the most difficult day in my life because she just melted in my arms in fear.”

Perry and Nash moved to New York so she could have access to an experimental treatment in the Bronx. His favorite time of day came in the evening, when he held Nash as she tried to fall asleep. One evening, she turned toward him with something very serious on her mind. “She said, ‘If something ever happens to me, I want you to make one promise,’” he recalls. “ ‘Promise me you won’t go back into isolation. If you do, I fear this would all be for naught.’” She urged him to make music again.

Nash died on December 14th, 2012. “Ever since I was a kid, and especially since I became successful in the music industry, I just wanted people to love me,” Perry says. “I never knew when someone did for real. I always had a reluctance to believe it. I think it comes out of my youth when my parents split up, but something inside me always had doubts.

“But let me tell you how I know. When you’re in love with someone like Kellie Nash and she looks you right in the eyes and says, ‘I love you.’ That’s how you know. She made me the luckiest man in the world.”

What Perry really wants to talk about — the reason he’s willing to sit down and revisit these parts of his life — is  Traces. It’s the result of five years of work (though there was an extended break in the middle for another hip-replacement surgery). He cut it at his home studio without any record label paying the bills or making him sweat out a deadline. The songs, many of them ballads, reflect on love, loss and the difficult moments in between. Some are directly about Nash, like “October in New York,” where he looks back at their final weeks together, while others are character-driven. The sound is a little more subdued than classic Journey: elegant, tasteful, soulfully autumnal. (Backstreet Boys aside, he avoids modern pop and has a particular aversion to drum machines; when a Top 40 station comes on one day over lunch, he insists on bolting from the restaurant to talk outside.)

Perry’s collaborators were delighted to find out he still had his voice. “When I first heard his demos, I was like, ‘Wow, there’s the voice!’” says guitarist Thom Flowers, a co-producer on the album. “But then in the studio, I got to see it myself. He likes to record in the control room, so we’d both put headphones on and he’d be two feet away from me. Without any warm-up, it just came out of him. It reminded me of watching a thoroughbred horse work.”

Perry almost couldn’t believe it himself when work on the album wrapped. “I told some friends of mine that I actually did something I said I’d never do again,” he says. “I made that commitment to Kellie and then a commitment to myself to actually complete it.”

“I always hoped that he would do this one day,” says Jenkins. “All along he’d been playing me these stunning tracks. I was always like, ‘Steve! What the hell? That’s a masterpiece!’ Hearing him give this to the world again is so moving.”

Perry may be willing to sit down for a series of extensive interviews, but there’s still an aura of mystery surrounding him. For example, his buddy Steve, whose home Perry is visiting. Steve — tall, kind, bald — lives in Mill Valley, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the Bay Area. After answering the door, he offers us coffee. There are photos on the wall of this Steve fellow with the pope. “He’s just a friend of mine,” says Perry, refusing to say anything about him. “An old friend of mine. Keep him anonymous.”

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Perry says he’s had a number of serious relationships in his life, but besides Nash and his 1980s girlfriend Sherrie Swafford (immortalized in Perry’s 1984 solo hit “Oh Sherrie”), he won’t talk about any of them. Perry concedes that he has never been married and is-currently single, but goes quiet when the subject of children comes up. (Internet sleuths theorize that a woman he’s often photographed with named Shamila is his daughter. She bears a striking resemblance to him.) “I don’t want to talk about [kids],” he says. “There’s a private part of my life that I won’t have if I talk about it.”

I notice a gold pendant in the shape of a musical eighth-note around his neck. This gets him talking. “My mom gave it to me when I was 12,” he says. “She always believed in me. I wore it for years and years, but hung it up in May of 1998, just after the band and I legally split and I had a complete contractual release from all my obligations to the band and label. I put it back on about 10 years ago.”

As we spoke, Journey were hours away from taking the stage at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans — on a double bill with Def Leppard — one of 60 shows they played this summer. As they do every night, they’ll dedicate “Lights” to Perry. It’s a gesture of gratitude, and for good reason. When Perry joined Journey in 1977, none of the group’s albums had sold well, and the band was pumping out anonymous jazz fusion. Perry changed everything. In him, Journey found a singer who not only wrote big, concise, catchy songs, but also belted them to the cheap seats. Without him, Journey might well have been a prog-rock footnote.

Perry claims to feel no bitterness toward anyone in the band, even though he’s seen the members only twice, and briefly at that, in the past 20 years, and has rebuffed attempts to reconnect on a social level. Guitarist Neal Schon seems desperate for some sort of reconciliation and often tells interviewers he wants to create new music with Perry — not even necessarily for Journey. Schon has heard that Perry frequents his favorite coffee shop, and the guitarist hopes to run into the singer there. Pressed on this, Perry says he can’t imagine working with Schon in any capacity or even re-establishing the friendship.

“I’m not sure that’s possible without stirring up hopes of a reunion,” he says. “Please listen to me. I left the band 31 fucking years ago, my friend. You can still love someone, but not want to work with them. And if they only love you because they want to work with you, that doesn’t feel good to me.”

When I bring up Cain’s new memoir, Don’t Stop Believin ’ — an innocuous, uncontroversial book where he looks back on his life and heaps endless praise onto his bandmates, past and present — a look of disgust comes across Perry’s face. “I don’t really care to read Jonathan’s book,” he says. “And I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell me about it. I don’t need to know. It’s none of my business.”

But his mind is also on the future. Plans are still unclear, but Perry wants to launch a tour of some sort to promote Traces. He says he’ll sing the Journey hits again, meaning that “Faithfully,” “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” and, yes, “Don’t Stop Believin’” will come out of his mouth for the first time in nearly a quarter century. He clutches the eighth-note his mother gave him, the one he put back on around the time Nash came into his life, and tries to make sense of it all. “I’m not the only one that goes through life,” he says with a deep sigh. “We’re all going through it, and I’m tolerating it the best I can.”

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Former Journey frontman Steve Perry reveals why he left band at its height

Former Journey frontman, Steve Perry, reveals why he left the rock band and how he has rebuilt his life post-rock-and-roll. (CBS)

Former Journey frontman Steve Perry revealed in a new interview why he left the iconic band in the late '90s.

The rock 'n' roll star, who is set to appear Sunday on "CBS This Morning" in an interview with Tracy Smith, said he made the decision to leave the band after he fell out of love with music and wanted to embark on a new life journey.

The singer, who is known as the voice behind one of the band's biggest hits, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” also said that he was nursing a bad hip during the time he was considering leaving the band. Despite his bandmates urging him to fix his hip so they could continue rocking, Perry ultimately realized that it wasn't just his hip in the wrong place.

“It was really your heart, not your hip,” Smith says during the interview.

“It was really my heart,” Perry responds.

After leaving the band, Perry returned home to Hanford, Calif., and started a new life not centered on music.

“I stopped singing,” Perry tells Smith. “Completely, Tracy, I swear.”

And moving forward, the once-rocker found love with psychologist Kellie Nash.

Perry shared that the pair were connected through mutual friends, but at the time, sadly, Nash was battling late-stage breast cancer. Nash died in October 2012 and Perry credits her for inspiring him to make music again.

After mourning her death for two years, the former Journey member returned to the studio.

Though the singer has rediscovered his love for music, don't expect Perry to take a step back and reunite with his former bandmates. The 69-year-old told Smith that he plans to keep moving forward.

“I can only answer that question with the truth: that I love going forward. I love going to the edge of what’s next,” he says.

Perry's new album, “Traces,” is out now.

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