JOURNEY Trivia — 51 Entries
51 sourced facts about JOURNEY.
Trivia
The band's own materials do not agree on when it started. The official site's profile says Neal Schon founded Journey in 1972; the official site of the band-sanctioned documentary, and an official press release from 2023, both put the formation in 1973. On one point the sources do agree: Schon is the only member never to have been absent, having played on every album and every tour.
Columbia Records signed the band in November 1974. The debut, Journey (1975), and the two that followed — Look into the Future (1976) and Next (1977) — each charted higher than the one before. They were on the road nine months a year in that period, playing music Schon has described as a rock and roll version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra.
Steve Smith was not brought in from outside. He had been Journey's drum roadie. In 1978 they took him into the band proper, and his jazz-fusion playing went into the sound; Evolution, made with him in 1979, became their second million-selling album.
Escape, in 1981, was the band's first number one album in America. It stayed in the Top 40 for over a year and was certified eight times platinum. Then in 2021, forty years after its release, the RIAA certified it diamond — the mark for over ten million equivalent units.
Journey hold two diamond certifications. One is Escape; the other is Greatest Hits, the 1988 compilation, which passed fifteen times platinum and was certified diamond in April 2008. As of October 2021 it had logged 1,328 weeks on Billboard's Catalog Albums chart. The band's site says the compilation has at times sold close to half a million copies worldwide in a year, and puts their total sales past one hundred million records.
Neal Schon's search before he found Arnel Pineda was exhaustive. By the band's own account he had watched thousands of singers on YouTube and was on the point of giving up on finding a next lead vocalist. When he came across Pineda he then watched all forty videos that had been posted. The announcement came on 5 December 2007. It took a few days of rehearsal before everything clicked — by the third day it did — and once the jet lag had gone, Schon, Cain and Pineda went into a studio in Novato, California to start on some tracks.
Journey came together in San Francisco in 1973 around Neal Schon on guitar and Gregg Rolie on keyboards and vocals — both out of Santana — with Ross Valory on bass. Schon and Rolie had met in Santana; in between the two bands Schon played around the San Francisco area with various people while Rolie opened a restaurant in Seattle with his father.
The name came out of a competition — officially. On forming, the band ran a contest on the San Francisco radio station KSAN-FM to name themselves, offering the winner tickets to their shows for life. The entries were dreadful. The name Journey was in fact thought up by John Villanueva, who worked in the band's management, so they invented a winner: an imaginary listener by the name of Toby Pratt.
As a teenager Neal Schon turned down the chance to join Eric Clapton's band Derek and the Dominos. The band he did join was Santana — at fifteen, according to the official site of the band's documentary, where he stayed two years as a guitarist.
How Steve Perry came to be in Journey turns on something grim. Before joining he had a band called Alien Project, close to a deal with CBS Records in 1978. Their bass player was then killed in a car crash and the deal did not happen. For Perry, that led to the vocalist's job in Journey.
The decision to take Perry was made remarkably fast. The band's manager listened to his audition tape for fifteen seconds.
"Lights" is famous as a song about San Francisco. It was in fact written in Los Angeles, about Los Angeles — the city the band had relocated to — and Perry did not like how it sounded, so he left it alone. When he found himself joining Journey he changed the line to the bay instead, and it fell into place. He describes it as being exactly what you see crossing the bridge early in the morning, the sun coming up as the city lights go down.
"Wheel in the Sky" started outside the band, as a poem called "Wheels In My Mind" by Diane Valory, wife of the bassist Ross Valory. Robert Fleischman, the band's first singer, wrote new words to it, and Neal Schon worked out the melody on an acoustic guitar in the back seat of a station wagon while they drove between shows.
"Wheel in the Sky" was the first single with Perry and also the band's first single to chart at all, reaching 57 in the US. The three albums before him had sold modestly, but they were not a singles band: the sound was closer to progressive rock, with the playing ahead of the vocals and the words. What Perry brought was concise songs with large hooks, and a voice.
The melody of "Open Arms" had already been rejected once before it became a Journey song. Jonathan Cain had written it for his previous band, the Babys, and their singer John Waite turned it down as too syrupy. Having moved to Journey, Cain played it sheepishly on a portable Wurlitzer, and Steve Perry wanted it immediately. The rest of the band did not. By Perry's account Neal Schon hated the idea, and Cain himself was starting to think Waite might have been right.
Released over those objections as the third single from Escape, "Open Arms" became the band's biggest hit: number two on the Billboard Hot 100, where it sat for six weeks, blocked first by "Centerfold" and then by "I Love Rock And Roll." It is also credited with opening up the power ballad as a form — everyone had to have one after that, in Perry's phrase. John Waite, who had turned the melody down, would have his own biggest solo hit with a ballad, "Missing You."
It may be a surprise that "Don't Stop Believin'" — the band's most famous song by a distance — only reached nine in America at the time. The singles from Escape ran: "Who's Crying Now" at four, "Don't Stop Believin'" at nine, "Open Arms" at two. The best-known song and the biggest hit were not the same one.
"Don't Stop Believin'" is built oddly. Where a song would normally repeat its chorus several times, here the chorus — and with it the title — does not arrive until about three minutes twenty in, near the end, and then runs to the fade. Much of why the song lodges in the head comes from that structure.
The phrase itself came from Jonathan Cain's father. Stuck in Hollywood and going nowhere, Cain asked him whether he should come back to Chicago and give the dream up; the answer was to stay the course, that it would happen, and not to stop believing. The song was written starting from that chorus. Cain went on to join the Babys, then Journey in San Francisco in 1980, and the song took shape there.
The phrase "streetlight people" came out of Detroit. During a run of shows there Perry could not sleep and was looking out of his hotel window. The lamps pointed downward so you could see nothing around them — and then people would walk out of the dark into the light. That was where the phrase came from. Detroit, he later said, was very much on his mind when they started writing.
The place named in the same song — South Detroit — does not exist. The city distinguishes an East Side and a West Side, and heading south out of Detroit takes you into Canada. Perry has admitted he was not much worried about geographical accuracy: he tried east, west and north, and nothing sounded as good or as emotionally true as South Detroit. He only learned in recent years that there is no such place, and says it does not matter.
The song's revival in the 2000s starts with the 2003 film Monster, where two characters skate to it in a roller rink. The director, Patty Jenkins, had played it on set and sent viewing copies to the band asking permission on a small budget. Perry rang her back, not only agreeing but helping choose music for the rest of the film; he is credited as a music consultant. The scene's reception made Hollywood stop hearing the song as a nostalgia cut, and requests for it started arriving from films and television.
The decisive use came in the last episode of The Sopranos, broadcast on 10 June 2007, where the lead character plays the song on a jukebox and the show cuts abruptly to black over it. Perry would not clear it until he was told how it would be used: if the closing moment was going to be a bloodbath, he did not want the song in it. They told him what happened, and made him swear to keep it to himself.
After The Sopranos the song's sales accelerated. In November 2008 it was announced as the first song from the pre-digital era to pass two million downloads on iTunes. By the late 2000s it had also become one of the most popular karaoke songs in America.
In May 2009 a version by the cast of the television show Glee entered the Billboard Hot 100 at four — five places above anything Journey's own recording ever reached. The same thing happened in Britain: on the singles chart dated 17 January 2010 the Glee version came in at five with Journey's original directly beneath it. Two versions of one song had not sat back to back on that chart since Alexandra Burke and Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" in December 2008.
In Britain the song had originally stalled at 62. In November 2009, after Joe McElderry sang it on The X Factor, it was reissued and reached 19. Simon Cowell wanted McElderry's version as his winner's single; Journey refused. Schon's account is that they listened to the proposal for a rearranged version and decided there was nothing wrong with the original. They knew this might be passing up a British number one — Randy Jackson, who had played bass in the band, pressed them to allow it on exactly those grounds — and they did not change their minds.
Jonathan Cain took about thirty minutes to write "Faithfully." He started it on a bus heading to Saratoga Springs; the next day he woke to find a napkin beside the nightstand with the opening line on it, and the rest of the song arrived at once. He wrote it down almost frantically, carried the napkin to a piano, played the thing through and decided it was good. Normally he would have taken a song to someone else to finish; this one he did not.
"Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" was written on tour during a bad stretch, with Neal Schon and Ross Valory both going through divorces under the strain of the road. Perry put it to Cain that there had to be a more soulful way of looking at it, and the two worked the song out in a hotel room on Cain's small Casio keyboard. The band put it together at soundcheck the following afternoon and played it that night. Cain's recollection is that Perry mumbled his way through half the words and the audience came apart anyway.
In 2007 Neal Schon went looking for a new singer on YouTube, and found Arnel Pineda singing in a Journey covers band in the Philippines called The Zoo. Pineda was announced as the new lead vocalist at the end of that year. Revelation, made with him in 2008, reached five in Billboard.
How he came in became a documentary, released in Japanese cinemas from 16 March 2013 as Journey: Don't Stop Believin'. Interviewed in Japan, Pineda said what the film carries is that if you believe in yourself and keep working there is somewhere you will get to. The drummer, Deen Castronovo, said nothing in it was scripted — it is all simply them. Pineda was filmed while exhausted and at his lowest, and says it never occurred to him to act for the camera.
Journey were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, in a class that also included 2Pac, Pearl Jam and Yes. Asked about it just before their Japanese dates, Neal Schon said it felt as good as it gets and Jonathan Cain that the wait had been worth it. Ross Valory said what pleased him most was for the fans and friends, with the press and the industry all making so much of it.
The February 2017 Japanese tour had one special night in it: on the last date, 7 February at the Nippon Budokan, they played Escape and Frontiers complete. It was the first time this had been done anywhere. Steve Smith, the drummer from their peak years, was back for that tour, alongside Neal Schon, Ross Valory, Jonathan Cain and Arnel Pineda. The run opened at Osaka-jo Hall on 1 February and went through Aichi and Sendai to two nights at the Budokan.
By 2017 Arnel Pineda had been in the band ten years — longer than any other singer in Journey's history.
The records attached to "Don't Stop Believin'" have passed several thresholds. In March 2024 Forbes named it the biggest song of all time. By that point the RIAA had certified the single eighteen times platinum, and it stood as the best-selling digital track of any song made in the twentieth century, past seven million downloads.
In November 2025 Journey made a farewell tour known. Before that, on 17 October, keyboardist Jonathan Cain spoke on a radio programme about his own position. Then seventy-five, he said he intended to do the next two tours and wrap it up there — he did not want to end up dying on the road at eighty, and it felt like a good time for his family and grandchildren. He would never, he said, slip away without saying goodbye to the audience; he had always meant to do one last run. His spokesperson, however, issued a statement that Cain remains an active member of Journey, is committed to touring with the band over the next couple of years, and has spoken of retiring only at some later point.
Infinity, the fourth album and the first with Perry, was produced by Roy Thomas Baker, whose credits include the Rolling Stones, Queen and the Cars.
One more player was brought in for Freedom in 2022: the bassist Randy Jackson, who had already played on Journey's Raised on Radio back in 1986 — returning to a Journey album thirty-six years later.
Before they were Journey, the band went by The Golden Gate Rhythm Section.
The early personnel arrived from places that were already known. Ross Valory had played bass for the Steve Miller Band; the first drummer, Prairie Prince, was in the Tubes — and after a few shows with Journey decided he would rather stay in the Tubes. His replacement, Aynsley Dunbar, had played with Jeff Beck, John Mayall, Lou Reed and David Bowie, and later joined Jefferson Starship.
Infinity, the fourth album, released in 1978, was the band's first platinum record. The first three had not reached commercial success; Perry's arrival in 1977 changed that quickly. Evolution followed in 1979 and reached 20 in the US, and Departure in 1980 reached 8.
Gregg Rolie, a founder, left the band, the reason given being the wear of touring. Jonathan Cain came in to replace him, settling the five-piece — Neal Schon, Steve Perry, Ross Valory, Steve Smith and Cain — that would make Escape in 1981.
Neal Schon was frightened of the Glee use at first — he took it for a teenybopper show and thought it did the band no favours. What it did instead was open the band's music to a younger audience. He describes himself as a rock and blues player and says the running joke among them is that whatever he finds too schmaltzy usually turns out to be big.
Randy Jackson played bass in Journey before he became known as a television judge. While judging American Idol he asked Steve Perry to come on as a guest. Perry declined: he does not feel right sitting in judgment on anyone's honest passion or talent. If someone wants to perform, in his view, they should do it whatever anyone tells them.
There is an in-house nod in the words of "Faithfully." The line about needing the clowns around to make you smile was, according to the liner notes to the band's Time3 compilation, a tribute to Journey's road manager Pat Morrow and stage manager Benny Collins.
In 1987 Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain formed Bad English with John Waite — the singer of the Babys, Cain's band before Journey, and the man who had turned down the melody of "Open Arms" as too syrupy. They had a number one in 1989 with "When I See You Smile."
That same year, 2013, Journey toured Japan for the first time in four years. The Budokan show on that run was their first there in thirty years.
In October 2024 Journey came to Japan for the first time in seven years, as part of a 50th Anniversary Tour marking fifty years since the band formed: Asue Arena Osaka on the 19th, Pacifico Yokohama on the 21st and the Nippon Budokan on the 23rd.
A small but definite fact about Neal Schon: he pronounces his surname "sh-on," not "sh-own." What bothers him more, though, is the spelling of his first name — he is frequently listed as Neil. It is Neal.
Steve Perry had thought from the start that the song had it in it to be a single. Radio was not much interested when it came out, though it always worked live. What convinced him something was really happening was seeing it used in Patty Jenkins's film Monster. As for the words, his description is that they are a strong statement about not giving up and also about being young, hanging around, and looking for something everyone is looking for.
For Arnel Pineda the song's subject was his own long before he joined. Speaking in 2012 he said that even before he came across "Don't Stop Believin'" it had been his motto not to stop believing in himself: through everything he had been through, he never stopped believing that something remarkable would happen to him.
The drummer, Deen Castronovo, sings more than occasionally. His lead vocals in Journey include "A Better Life" from Generations in 2005 and "After Glow" from Freedom in 2022, and on tour it has become normal for him to sing "Lights," the band's 1970s standard. He also fronts the band Revolution Saints.