There was another big loss to come, but this one would lead him back to music, and, eventually, to his new solo album, Traces. If you’re alive, you have to walk through this eventually.”Īll of the loss may explain why the frontman who radiated such passion in his Journey days no longer felt much like singing. I used to think that if I became a performer and everybody loved me, that I wouldn’t have to go through these things. And they were all gone, and here I am, an only child, just missing them all. I cried for the times that I took for granted. I cried for the times we could have had together. “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. “One time I parked my car in front of the house I was raised in,” Perry says. “You want to know what I did after I left the band?” he says. 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. 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. That last one stings the most, and as he sings the Backstreet Boys song it’s clear it’s not true. “They think I’m in a hospital somewhere with cancer. “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. 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.” 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. 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.
While his former bandmates were making millions on the road, Perry was doing, well, not all that much. That was my critical review for me every night.” All I knew is every night we would get at least one to two encores. “I didn’t care what the critics thought about the band. “We certainly were part of pioneering ,” Perry says. 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. In the process, Journey basically invented the power ballad. 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. Virtually nobody has seen him do this since he parted ways with his band, Journey, 20 years ago. What’s really surprising, though, is that Perry is singing at all. It’s somewhat surprising to hear Perry, 69, sing a hit by a boy band a generation behind him. “I love songs like this,” he says of the tune, a Max Martin–penned ballad from 1997. 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. Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey
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