So you already stashed your red sweat band, multi-colored sun visor, your high school sweetheart’s pink plastic bracelets, your wife’s white leg warmers and yellow blazer jacket with bulky shoulder pads which she wore the first time you met each other, your worn out Doc Marten’s boots and Converse sneakers, your best friend’s cassette tape collection of your favorite grunge, rap, new wave and rock music and the rest of your precious 80’s and 90’s paraphernalia …. safely hidden in a large bin at the top shelf of your closet so you can share the great memories of your wonderful, carefree and adventurous Gen X days with your future Generation Z kids one day.
1981 seems such a faraway place … a magical time when the world was still young, full of promises and rocking to a boom box in cuffed acid washed jeans, knee high socks and viewing life through rose-colored Ray Ban sunglasses.
It’s 2011. Thirty years have already passed since you bought your first Journey album, “watched” your favorite song in a video on MTV, had your first real kiss and dreamt of being an astronaut in an orange spacesuit exploring Mars someday.
Well, your someday never came but at least Neil Armstrong and the rest of his crew reached the moon. That’s enough to justify your not so far-fetched space fantasies. Now that you’re not wearing your mullet haircut anymore and are holding quite a decent job, you sit comfortably on your memory couch to revisit the past and dig out some significant events that happened 30 years ago just to see how they fared over time.
Let’s start with your favorite legendary rock band.
In 1981, Gregg Rollie, the original keyboardist and vocalist of Journey, left the band and recommended pianist Jonathan Cain of The Babys as his permanent replacement. With Cain on board, Journey released their eight and biggest-selling studio album Escape whose sales skyrocketed to a whopping nine times platinum. The album included the hit Don’t’ Stop Believin which is now the top selling catalog track in iTunes history and which has been certified recently by the Nielsen Company's SoundScan Division as the number one most downloaded song of the 20th century.*
Journey’s commercial success in the 80’s as one of America’s most successful arena rock bands has been attributed largely to its charismatic third vocalist Steve Perry who is hailed by many as The Voice of Journey. Perry’s tenor voice and soulful rendition of their famous hits like Faithfully, Open Arms, Separate Ways, Any Way You Want It and Don’t Stop Believin gave Journey its legacy sound which earned the band a massive following from fans across the globe. Through the whole band’s expert collaboration of musical genius and craftsmanship, Journey has produced multi-platinum albums one after the other selling more than 80 million copies worldwide which cemented their ultimate presence in the rock industry particularly during the Gen X era.
After staging gigantic concert tours in sold out stadiums and releasing multi-platinum albums Frontiers and Raised on Radio, the band went on hiatus albeit a few stage performances until the release of their reunion album Trial By Fire in 1996. In that same year, Steve Perry decided to discontinue his role as lead vocals for Journey which left the band looking for his immediate replacement.
While Steve Augeri ably though briefly continued the band’s “journey” with his Perryesque vocal proficiency, Journey did not seem to recapture the following and legacy that Steve Perry had left behind. Steve Augeri was replaced by another vocalist Jeff Scott Soto in 2006 due to vocal problems. However, due probably to Soto’s different vocal orientation, he remained with the band only for a year.
In 2007, in a Cinderella story-like fashion, iconic lead guitarist Neal Schon discovered Arnel Pineda, a cover band singer from the Philippines, through the magical powers of the Internet via You Tube. After a strenuous audition with the band, Pineda got the job and was officially introduced as Journey’s new lead vocalist through a series of concerts which culminated in Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas in March 2008. Since then, Journey has already toured the world with Pineda on board staging concerts and gigs in primarily sold out venues. The band raked in more than 35 million dollars in concert revenues for their 2008 tour which made it one of the top grossing concerts of the year. Journey has already been invited to perform in the Super Bowl Pre-Game Show, the European Download Festival and Graspop and has graced TV shows such as Ellen, Oprah and the Today Show to name a few. They have already released their RIAA certified platinum album Revelation and their new concept album Eclipse with Arnel Pineda on vocals.
Since Pineda’s hiring, there had been extensive debates and bashings which proliferated online and on print over Journey’s New Voice which Pineda currently holds the title of. Initially, Journey’s hardcore fans could not accept Perry’s “replacement” for various reasons ranging from Pineda’s race, vocal differences and/or creepy resemblance to Perry’s, distracting diction and intonation to Pineda’s haircut and youthful exhibitions onstage. However, over time, Pineda has slowly gained respect and adulation from recent converts and Pineda’s own growing fanbase which surprisingly includes a lot of younger fans … blame it on Glee, Pineda’s youthful looks, charming personality, wholesome character and his out of this world, exceptional vocal pipes .
In their 2011 album Eclipse, Pineda has exhibited vocal maturity and prowess with his flawless delivery of Journey’s epic mantra interweaving with the grand musical talents of his band mates. As Pineda showcases his powerful tenor voice, he seems to have already found his rightful place in Journey, not as a clone of Perry, but as his own vocalist soaring freely in his newfound domain alongside his colossally talented and seasoned older brothers in music.
With this sudden rebirth in their musical careers, the question remains. Will Neal, Jon, Arnel, Ross and Deen reach another milestone as in the early Perry days? At this point, maybe they already have ... not in their younger-days-sold-out-stadium-overwhelming-reception kind of way but in their own musical goals in life. And who’s to say? Maybe they are already in the process of gaining their turf back. After all, they all told us a story. It says anything is possible … Don’t stop believing.
Next in line. The magnificent radio on tube. Your MTV.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
*Sources : Wikipedia/ USA Today
Comments