Journey's Steve Perry Calls Van Halen 'Musically Simple'
Iconic frontman recently gave an interview with Classic Rock where he talked about his origins with the band and what led to their first big hit album, .
In doing so, Perry talked about their first headlining tour where the rock band Van Halen was the opening act, and he might have leveled a bit of a back-handed compliment at the group.
Perry says that Van Halen was opening for Journey, yet they were "killing" Journey every night, and he admired how "musically simple" they were.
"Van Halen were the opening act on the tour,' said Perry. 'They were a brand-new band back then. We were doing 3,000-seat auditoriums, and they were killing us every night. It was eye-opening. We were keeping up with them, but they were certainly making us be a better band. They were so musically simple."
The context is that it was on this tour that the other members of Journey realized that drummer Aynsley Dunbar wasn't a great fit for their sound because his jazz-style of drumming was too complicated, whereas Van Halen's drummer, Alex Van Halen, was just a straight-up rock and roll percussionist.
"I was a drummer before becoming a singer, and one of the things about being a drummer is that I'm kind of hard on other drummers," Perry recalled. "Foundationally, you can have a really great band, but if the drummer doesn't measure up, you're not going to do very well. But if you have a mediocre band and a great drummer, you're going to do better.
"So we'd do soundchecks and sometimes Aynsley might not be there or be off doing something like radio promotion, and I would do soundcheck for him – set his drums up and play a few songs. It started to be apparent to Neal [Schon] and to myself that the band sounded different with me because I'm a slamming R&B-style drummer, as opposed to a jazz-fusion drummer like Aynsley."
After the Infinity tour, Dunbar was replaced by drummer Steve Smith, who was with the band until 1985. He has taken periodic breaks since then, but kept performing with Journey into the 1990s and 2000s, most recently in 2020.
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The venue expected 10,000 attendees in its 15,000-person arena, and even though many of the concertgoers were adult men with no knowledge of the Perry catalog, the thousands of preteen and teenage girls in the crowd made for an earsplitting audience. Security winced through every teenage screech, even with earplugs. Throughout the Paycom Center, girls were dressed up either in Taylor Swift runoff clothes (white cowboy boots, bedazzled dresses, denim jackets, and friendship bracelets—I'm sure Perry would love that) or in Perry cosplay. Some arrived dressed as the candy dots Perry wore in the 'California Gurls' video, or in grass skirts à la 'Roar,' or as Kathy Beth, Perry's loser alter ego in 'Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),' headgear and all. But even those showing up in their Friday-night best couldn't quite muster up much enthusiasm for Perry when asked. A group of eight work friends had come to the show together in matching 'Lifetimes' shirts. 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'My husband is a pilot, and I know how much work that takes,' one woman told me, walking toward the merch line for a $50 tank top. 'She's not an astronaut.' Two 11-year-old girls with front-row seats, vibrating with excitement over their first concert, were still unimpressed about the jaunt to space. 'It was stupid,' one said, adjusting her baby-pink iridescent T-shirt. 'She could have given that money to animals.' It's worth comparing the Perry we got in interviews from a decade ago with the Perry we got in her post–space exploration interview earlier this spring. Perry in 2015, when interviewed about her forthcoming Super Bowl appearance, cutely quoted Marshawn Lynch, saying, 'I'm just here so I don't get fined.' Meanwhile, postspace Perry was speaking in a word salad so impossible to understand that you have to read the whole thing to even wrap your head around its meaninglessness: 'I feel super connected to love. This experience has shown me you never know how much love is inside of you, how much love you have to give, and how loved you are until the day you launch.' She thanked NBC News—with what seemed like genuine gratitude and humility—when it congratulated her for becoming an 'astronaut,' an accomplishment that typically requires a master's degree and 1,000 hours of aircraft experience. She was still holding on to the daisy she had brought for her daughter (to … space). She seemed almost like the kind of character that 2015 Perry might parody in a music video: a beautiful woman floating off into space, divorced from every single reality happening on Earth. Going to space didn't just betray Perry as a sincere dork—it also revealed her to be a hypocrite. While plenty of Democrats glad-hand with billionaires, Perry's version of it—hanging out with Bezos on election night, taking him up on the offer to go skyward and framing it as a feminist cause—was at odds with her work for the Harris campaign. In October 2024, Bezos killed a Harris endorsement from the Washington Post, the paper he owns. In November, 24 hours before Harris would lose the election, Perry performed at her Pittsburgh rally. 'I've always known her to fight for the most vulnerable, to speak up for the voiceless, to protect our rights as women to make decisions about our own bodies,' she said of Harris during her performance. 'I know she will protect my daughter's future and your children's future and our families' future.' Between those two events? Perry's Orient Express–themed 40th birthday party in Venice, where Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sánchez, were present. They actually hang out a lot; Sánchez's 24-year-old model son, Nikko Gonzalez, goes skydiving with Orlando Bloom, Perry's husband. Midtour, Perry flew to Paris for Sánchez's bachelorette party. Perry isn't the first or only or last celebrity to mingle with the uberrich while wearing the skin of a progressive. Beyoncé, too, campaigned for Harris while on the verge of billionairedom herself. (Her husband is already one, twice over.) But Perry has spent years staking her reputation on being a social renegade, someone who rebuffed her parents' conservatism and religious fervor. She stumped for abortion and gay rights, she vacationed with the guy who killed a Harris endorsement in his own paper, and she has been entirely silent about Harris' loss or Trump's actions since he returned to office. In truth, though, Perry's progressive politics have always been flimsy. For the 2022 L.A. mayoral race, she proudly voted for Rick Caruso, a billionaire who spent more than $100 million (mostly of his own money) to lose to Karen Bass. Perry, despite her own staunchly pro-abortion stance (in public, at least), was backing a candidate who had donated to anti-abortion groups and who had plans to 'end street homelessness' while also operating several luxury apartment complexes with no affordable housing. Still, Perry hasn't handled anything as badly as she has handled her continued working relationship with Dr. Luke. In 2023 singer Kesha and Dr. Luke reached a settlement after almost 10 years of lawsuits between the two of them stemming from allegations she made that he drugged and raped her, and his consequential claim that she defamed him. A year later, Perry announced she would be working with Dr. Luke on 143. Kesha tweeted, seemingly in response, 'lol.' It's already gauche to work with a producer accused of raping a fellow pop star, but it's especially off-kilter considering that the first song that came from this Dr. Luke–produced record was 'Woman's World.' Released a few months before Harris would lose the election, Perry's uninspired, insipid reheating of 2008 pop feminism met a political climate that seemed to disagree with the song's very message. The Guardian gave it one star, writing, 'It sounds less like a roar of triumph than the echoing cry of someone falling down a large ravine.' If you're going to work with someone who's been accused of harming women, it's perhaps ill advised to have that work be a feminist anthem. But this kind of disjunction has become endemic to Perry's career. In Oklahoma City, plenty of her fans weren't plugged in enough to know about Dr. Luke, or about the song's production credits, or about Perry's political and personal associations. The ones who were aware seemed downright pragmatic about it. 'If every single dollar you had to spend had to be accountable to some social issue, you would not be able to spend one dollar in America,' 35-year-old Stephen Fitzsimmons said while walking into the concert. 'I just want to see her sing 'Firework.' ' And Perry gave Fitzsimmons exactly what he wanted. When she emerged from the undercarriage of the stage, connected to futuristic-looking wires like an intergalactic science experiment, singing weakly into a microphone with a butterfly on the end of it, her audience was with her, screaming. Perry transmuted into exactly what she's known for: not a singer, not a dancer, but a performer. This crowd knew every word of all her classics, and when she played something more recent, attendees were still gamely dancing on their feet. Go to a Perry concert, bop along with little girls hyperventilating because they're mere feet from her and adult men who have no fucking clue what's going on, and it will feel impossible to reconcile this kind of enthusiasm with the culture's dismissal of Perry and her power. Even as her message got muddled—which, to be clear, the show's message certainly did—her audience still loves her. For these fans, it wasn't necessarily ever about just being funny or quirky or sexy or clever or cute. She was so sincere, so truly and firmly herself, so willing to dance around like a dork onstage, that she's still laudable. They believed, through and through, that Perry is just being herself, and facing consequences for it. Perry's fans and detractors alike think they know her and see her clearly. Of all the footage that betrays Perry's essence, one clip from her 2012 documentary comes up again and again among her supporters. Sitting in a makeup chair before a stadium show in Brazil, Perry weeps while her staff whispers around her. Her then husband, Russell Brand, now accused of sexual assault multiple times over, broke up with her over text right before she was set to perform. For true-blue Katy Kats, this moment is emblematic of what makes Perry worth rooting for: Despite her devastation, she pulls it together, sobbing all the way to the stage but then performing without missing a beat. She's just like us, picking up the pieces of her heart and doing her job anyway. But what feels even more emblematic of who Perry is as a performer is a recent pep talk she gave her team before one of her shows. It's simple, it's lightly disillusioned, and it's exactly right. 'You know this is just a fun game, right? Don't be so serious. This is entertainment; this is show business; we're storytelling. You're having fun. You don't have to be perfect,' she said. It's another very 2025 lesson: Nothing is that important, because this is all for fun. There are real tragedies around. Perry knows exactly who she is and what she's here for. 'When you're perfect, consider yourself dead,' she says, before guiding her team out onstage in front of thousands of excited fans, and even more strangers on the internet ready to call her a loser. 'We are not dead tonight: We are living.'
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a day ago
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Handwritten ‘Don't Stop Believin' lyrics up for auction as part of Steve Perry's new charity effort
The former Journey frontman is auctioning off more than 50 items from his personal collection, including handwritten 'Don't Stop Believin' lyrics, vintage tour merchandise, signed guitars, test pressings, and gold and platinum records. 'Every item in this collection comes directly from my personal archive,' Perry said in a statement. 'These pieces have been carefully stored for many years, and now I feel it's the right time to pass them on from my hands to yours, to be enjoyed, remembered and treasured in your own personal collections.' Fans can bid on the rare items online now through noon on June 13. The auction is a partnership with Darkives Collectables, a new archival memorabilia site helmed by Dhani Harrision, the son of the Beatles' guitarist George Harrison, and Dark Horse Records. All proceeds are expected to benefit Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, a nonprofit providing financial assistance to musicians and other music industry workers. The organization will help distribute funds to victims of the devastating fires that swept Los Angeles in January. 'We're excited to have Steve Perry as our inaugural partner on the brand-new Darkives Collectables auction site,' Harrison said in a statement. 'His continued generosity makes him the perfect artist to help launch this platform, and we're honored to support the causes that matter most to him.' In another return to his former San Francisco rock band, Perry recently rerecorded its 1983 ballad 'Faithfully' for the first time in three decades with country music star Willy Nelson. The collaboration, released in May, celebrates the 40th anniversary of Farm Aid, Nelson's nonprofit that raises funds to support family farmers. Perry first joined Journey as lead singer in 1977, helping the group sell nearly 100 million albums worldwide, but he took a brief hiatus in 1987 before reuniting with the band from 1995 to 1998. Since then, his public appearances have been few and far between.
