16-05-2025
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.
