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Journey Lead Singers In Order: History and Band Members

In this article, we delve into the captivating history of Journey, an iconic rock band that has left an indelible mark on the music industry. From their humble beginnings to their meteoric rise to fame, Journey has mesmerized audiences worldwide with their unique sound and timeless hits. Join us on a journey through time as we explore the remarkable story of this legendary band.

Formation of the Band

Journey was formed in 1973 in San Francisco, California, bringing together a group of highly talented musicians. The founding members included Neal Schon, Gregg Rolie, Ross Valory, Aynsley Dunbar, and George Tickner. With their combined musical prowess and creative vision, they set out to create something extraordinary.

Early Years and Musical Style

During their early years, Journey experimented with a fusion of rock, jazz, and progressive influences, creating a distinctive sound that set them apart from their contemporaries. Their self-titled debut album, released in 1975, showcased their musical versatility and marked the beginning of their incredible journey.

Evolution and Breakthrough Success

In 1977, Journey underwent a significant change that would forever shape its destiny. Steve Perry joined the band as their lead vocalist, injecting new energy and unparalleled vocal range into their music. This lineup change proved to be a turning point for Journey, leading to a series of chart-topping albums and unforgettable songs.

Chart-topping albums and Hit Singles

Journey’s breakthrough came in 1978 with the release of their album “Infinity,” which became a massive success. The album spawned the hit singles “Wheel in the Sky” and “Lights,” propelling Journey into the mainstream spotlight. They continued their winning streak with subsequent albums, including “Evolution” (1979) and “Departure” (1980), which produced hits like “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin'” and “Any Way You Want It.”

The Iconic Album: “Escape”

In 1981, Journey released their most iconic album to date, “Escape.” This album elevated their status as rock superstars and solidified their place in music history. Featuring the mega-hits “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Open Arms,” and “Who’s Crying Now,” “Escape” became an instant classic, captivating audiences with its emotionally charged lyrics and powerful melodies.

The Power Ballad Era

Journey’s success continued into the mid-1980s, defined by the rise of power ballads that struck a chord with fans worldwide. Songs like “Faithfully,” “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart),” and “Send Her My Love” showcased the band’s ability to create heartfelt and anthemic ballads that resonated deeply with listeners.

A Change in Direction

As the 1990s approached, Journey faced challenges and underwent significant lineup changes. Steve Perry departed from the band in 1987, leading to a period of transition as they searched for a new lead vocalist. Despite these challenges, Journey remained resilient and continued to produce music that captivated its loyal fan base.

Journey’s Enduring Legacy

Although the band’s popularity waned in the late 1990s, their music never faded from the hearts of their dedicated fans. Journey’s timeless classics continue to resonate with audiences of all ages, thanks to their emotional depth, infectious melodies, and inspiring lyrics. Their songs have become anthems for perseverance, love, and the power of music itself.

Past Journey band members include the following:

Steve Perry (1977-1998)
Aynsley Dunbar (1974-1978)
Robert Fleischman (1977)
Steve Smith (1978-1985, 1995-1998)
Randy Jackson (1985-1987)
Steve Augeri (1998-2006)

Current Journey band members:

Neal Schon – Guitar (1973-present)
Jonathan Cain – Keyboards (1980-present)
Ross Valory – Bass (1973-1985, 1995-present)
Arnel Pineda – Vocals (2007-present)
Deen Castronovo – Drums (1998-present)

Lead Singers of Journey

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The Original Journey: Gregg Rolie’s Era

Gregg Rolie, a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, served as the original lead singer of Journey. He began his musical career as a co-founder and lead vocalist of Santana before joining forces with Neal Schon to form Journey. Rolie’s soulful voice and exceptional skills as a keyboardist and harmonicist contributed to the band’s early success. He showcased his talent on albums like “Journey,” “Look into the Future,” and “Next.” However, Rolie transitioned to co-lead vocals when Steve Perry joined the band in 1977.

Steve Perry: The Voice of Journey’s Greatest Hits

Steve Perry, widely recognized as the quintessential Journey lead singer, propelled the band to unprecedented heights during their most commercially successful era. Born with a gift for singing, Perry’s powerful and emotive vocals struck a chord with audiences worldwide. With Perry at the helm, Journey released a string of chart-topping albums, including “Infinity,” “Escape,” and “Frontiers.” Iconic songs like “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Open Arms,” and “Faithfully” became anthems for a generation. Perry’s remarkable songwriting abilities and magnetic stage presence contributed to the band’s enduring legacy.

Current Lead Singer: Arnel Pineda

Following Steve Perry’s departure in 1987, Journey experienced a series of lead singer changes. Steve Augeri, known for his vocal range and stage charisma, took over from 1998 to 2006. Jeff Scott Soto briefly joined the band in 2006, leaving his mark with his distinctive style. However, it was Arnel Pineda who breathed new life into Journey as the current lead singer. Pineda’s incredible vocal resemblance to Steve Perry, coupled with his dynamic stage presence, won the hearts of fans worldwide. Since 2008, Pineda has seamlessly integrated into the band, injecting fresh energy and passion into their performances.

Journey’s Enduring Discography: Albums That Defined an Era

Over the past five decades, Journey has released a diverse and extensive discography, showcasing their musical prowess and creativity. Let’s explore some of their most iconic albums:

“ Infinity ” (1978): With Steve Perry as the lead singer, “Infinity” marked a significant turning point for Journey. It featured hit singles like “Wheel in the Sky” and “Lights,” solidifying their place in the rock music landscape.

“ Escape ” (1981): This album became a monumental success, boasting chart-topping hits such as “Don’t Stop Believin'” and “Open Arms.” “Escape” catapulted Journey to international stardom and remains one of their most beloved records.

“ Frontiers ” (1983): Building upon their previous success, “Frontiers” showcased Journey’s evolution with tracks like “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” and “Faithfully.” The album’s polished production and memorable hooks solidified Journey’s status as one of the biggest rock bands of the 1980s.

“ Raised on Radio ” (1986): Released during the band’s final years with Steve Perry, “Raised on Radio” featured a more radio-friendly sound and produced hits like “Be Good to Yourself” and “I’ll Be Alright Without You.” Despite tensions within the band, the album showcased their ability to create catchy, melodic rock tunes.

“ Revelation ” (2008): With Arnel Pineda as the lead singer, “Revelation” marked a new chapter for Journey. The album featured new recordings of their classic hits, reaffirming Pineda’s vocal prowess and rekindling the band’s popularity among longtime fans and a new generation.

“ Eclipse ” (2011): Continuing their musical journey with Pineda, Journey released “Eclipse,” a record that showcased their ability to evolve while staying true to their roots. The album demonstrated their enduring songwriting skills and featured tracks like “City of Hope” and “Edge of the Moment.”

“Escape & Frontiers Live in Japan” (2019): As a testament to their enduring appeal, Journey released a live album featuring their performances of the “Escape” and “Frontiers” albums in their entirety. The release showcased the band’s timeless hits in a live setting, capturing the energy and excitement of their concerts.

Journey’s Impact and Legacy

Journey’s impact on the rock music landscape cannot be overstated. With their infectious melodies, anthemic choruses, and powerful vocals, they carved out a unique sound that resonated with millions of listeners. Their music transcended generations, becoming the soundtrack to countless moments and capturing the hearts of fans worldwide.

Steve Perry’s tenure as the lead singer marked the band’s most successful period, and his distinct voice became synonymous with Journey’s sound. His emotional delivery and ability to connect with audiences elevated their songs to new heights and created an unparalleled legacy.

Arnel Pineda’s addition to the band injected new energy into Journey and allowed them to continue their musical journey. Pineda’s remarkable vocal resemblance to Perry breathed new life into the band’s live performances, earning him a dedicated fanbase and ensuring that Journey’s music lives on.

Journey’s timeless hits continue to be celebrated and embraced today. Songs like “Don’t Stop Believin'” have become cultural touchstones, appearing in films, TV shows, and sporting events, and capturing the imaginations of new generations of listeners.

Journey Band Member’s Ages

Here, is the list of all the Journey member’s ages. It seems like all of the Journey band members are above 50 and below 80.

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Steve Perry Gives His Honest Opinion on New JOURNEY Singer Arnel Pineda

August 20, 2021
1 minute read

During a recent conversation with SiriusXM, classic Journey vocalist Steve Perry talked about the band’s new singer Arnel Pineda , who’s been a member of the fold since 2007.

Steve reached the topic while discussing Journey ‘s 2017 Rock Hall induction, saying (via Blabbermouth ):

“When I walked out there, that was a real thrill. They had a whole worked-up thing – they had a big teleprompter, and I said, ‘F that.’ I pulled out my piece of paper. I said, ‘I got some things to talk about here,’ and I just sort of did my thing. The fans, they were so wonderful.”

Asked on why he didn’t perform at the ceremony, Steve replied:

“I’m not in the band. I haven’t been in the band for quite some time. Arnel’s been in the band for almost 10 years, I think. He’s a sweet kid – he’s a wonderful kid. He sings his heart out every night. It’s his gig.

“There was a gentleman who we recently lost named Harry, part of the management team. Harry was there with me and he said, ‘Steve, listen, I don’t know if you know, but Arnel’s running up and down the halls. He heard you’re here, backstage.’

“I said, ‘Well, where is he?’ He said, ‘I think he’s outside.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll come out.’ I walked out and he was there, and he comes up to me… there was something endearing about the way he looked at me. He was meeting, like, a grandfather. [Laughs] He’s got the gig. It’s his gig. He’s doing great.”

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49 comments.

Bring Steve back, ideots

the idiot is the one who can’t spell idiot

Why couldn’t Paul Rogers be a man like Steve Perry. Paul treated Brian Howe like sh*t.

Maybe he is not as good as Arnel’s voice almost copied almost same voice of Steve Perry that’s all I can say

Savage!!!!!😂😂😂

Both ” Arnel and Steve, and add, ” Taka” the lead singer from,” One O.K. Rock” all three would put on the show of shows!

He really is an edyot…

You’re damn right😁🤪.

You re very right!

Hey Andy, Speaking of IDIOTS!!

Bring back Steve Perry to the group so that Arnel may have substitute for vocal …just like john lennon paul mc cartney combination 🙏🥰💥

Steve doesn’t want to come back. He walked and was done with band. Why don’t you go back to an old job? Idiot

Steve can’t sing anymore. How he can do the things you want?

FUNNY HE JUST CAME OUT WITH A NEW AULBUM . HE CAN’T SING. LMFAO

welll idiot steve does not want back if he did he would be sooooo your the idiot idiot

Steve knew he can’t bring back the voice where the Journey was once before..Great that he recognize Arnel as the new lead singer of the band

Lmafol, how you spell Capital I•D•I•O•T🤣🤣🤣

Before I die, I would love to see the original Steve Perry and Journey together performing we need to do

Are you kidding me? Steve Perry- what grace and dignity you bring with this. Well done. Clearly your spirit, your conscience, is every bit as beautiful as your voice. ???

Got to love a class act like Steve Perry much love and respect ?

YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT AND i JUST MET SOMEBODY WHO MET Steve Perry AND SAID HE WAS GREAT AND HUMBLE GUY AND VERY HUMOROUS.

Well done, Steve.

Awe yes, but he’ll never ever be you❤️

Steve Perry can never be replaced!

And can never sing his song exactly the same as what he did when he was at his prime with the band… that’s why he will never want to come back because he can’t do the same thing as what he did before like what arnel do at the present.

I sew him in concert 3 years ago and he was amazing Steve you will allways be number 1 but agree with Arnel is amazing Think journey is in good hands with him I would of like to seen you perform at the rock roll hall fame cearmoney but I think you were varry kind to say this is arnel crow dosin,t want to over well him I think you made a great choice but thir will allways be 1 Steve parry and that’s you. I’m going see them again next month with billy idol I can’t wait.

No one’s trying to replace Steve. He is Steve Perry. He is Arnel Pineda. Immature ppl don’t get it.

ABSOLUTELY CORRECT, DID YOU SEE ARNEL PINEDA FACE OF APPRECIATION WHEN THEY MET BACKSTAGE AT THE AWARDS. ARNEL SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOWN ON THE STAGE DURING THE AWARDS SHOW TOO, BUT HE THOUGHT BECAUSE IT WAS FOR THE ORIGINAL GROUP ONLY. HONESTLY IT SHOULD NOT HAVE MATTER, ARNEL IS THE MAN FOR JOURNEY NOW. THERE IS ROOM FOR A NEW HISTORY MAKING MOMENT FOR TWO FRONT MEN FOR JOURNEY AND THIS WILL BRING ON TOGETHER LEGIONS OF NEW FANS FOR JOURNEY OF BOTH MEN AND EVEN THE UNDECIDED UNDER ONE UMBRELLA TO SQUASH THE DEBATE ON WHOSE BETTER.

DID YOU SEE THE REACTION OF ADMIRATION FOR STEVE PERRY FROM ARNEL PINEDA WHO COVERS STEVE PERRY MUSIC DURING HIS YOUTH AND NOBODY HAS DONE IT BETTER THAN HIM AND i HAVE TRIED MYSELF AS MY VOCALS JUST DON’T MAKE THE GRADE TO COME CLOSE TO THE LIVING LEGEND. IF JOURNEY DON’T JUMP ON A HISTORY MAKING MOMENT TO HAVE TWO GREATIST FRONTMEN TO HAVE LED JOURNEY INTO THE FUTURE SOMETHINING IS WRONG IF YOU CAN’T GET THESE TWO TO WORK TOGETHER. SEAL THE LEGACY WITH AN ENTIRE DUET OF THESE TWO ON ANOTHER REBIRTH OF JOURNEY…WE ALL NEED A NEW FRONTEIR. WE HAVE TWO SUPERHEROES FOR JOURNEY. MAKE BOTH OF THEM A LEGEND BY HAVING THE ONLY GROUP TO EVER HAVE TWO FRONTMEN ACTUALLY WORK TOGETHER. UNLIKE THE FAILURE OF VAN HALEN WITH SAMMY HAGAR AND DAVID LEE ROTH. THAT WAS OIL AND WATER MIX.

Perry isn’t coming back. Isn’t that obvious? He felt he was screwed/betrayed. Schon mentions trying to communicate with Perry, just to say hi. Perry won’t answer. Does that sound like someone who would want to return even if the offer was made?

Every time someone says “Bring back Perry!” I just shake my head.

STEVE WOULD COMEBACK IF IT WAS WORTH SAVING JOURNEY, BUT AS HE SAID IT IS ARNEL TIME TO SHINE TO CARRY JOURNEY. ARNEL HAS PROVEN HIMSELF AS THE FAN HAS APPROVED HIM MUCH BETTER THAN THE PAST REPLACEMENT WHO DID A DECENT JOB BUT NOT THE POINT WHERE THEY MATCHED OR EVEN CAME CLOSE TO STEVE VOCALS THE WAY ARNEL VOCALS SOUNDS SO ORIGINALLY CLOSE. WHY WOULD STEVE WANT TO COMEBACK UNLESS THEY INVITE HIM BACK TO PERFORM WHICH JOURNEY MEMBERS SHOULD HAVE NO PROBLEM LETTING STEVE PERFORM LIVE WHENEVER HE WANTS TO PERFORM AGAIN. IF THIS IS SO TO HAVE TWO OF THE GREATEST FRONTMEN TO REVIVE A GROUP FOR AN EVEN LONGER LONGEVITY FOR FUTURE FANS.

Journey is a great group band but who run the group is stupid. ..we filipinos dont need journey for ARNEL PINEDA..we LOVE ARNEL PINEDA with his GREAT TALENT and his GREAT VOICE n SKILL…if there is no stupidity @ journey why steve perry left the group …🤨🤔

I WANT TO SAY THAT I LOVED HIS STREET TALK SOLO MUSIC AND HIS NEWEST ONE HE RELEASING TO WHAT i HEAR STILL CLASSIC STEVE PERRY. YOU CAN RELATE TO THE WORDS HE WRITE OR SING WHAT WAS WRITTEN FOR HIM. EITHER WAY HIS MUSIC IS ALWAYS GREAT.

Why didnt axl join journey during the nevermind days?

Steve Perry is a real gentleman. I salute him for speaking his heart out.

Schon Lechon is a devil in disguise. He must change his contaminated heart and mind before the Journey becomes NOBODY LIKE HIM.

you are the only ones who think that someone will replace steve even arnel doesn’t think like that infact arnel’s favorite singer is steve perry and he never thinks that he is replacing steve, the only problem is you narrow minded journey fans.

I can’t agree more bro. , a lot of people just keep on complaining and comparing between the which is really non-sense, Steve is Steve no matter what same as Arnel. They are unique in their own way in my opinion. It’s just plain stupid a lot of fans out there keep bashing Arnel for what he is, in reality Arnel has been with the Journey longer than Steve! Since Arnel took over as the front man I think he did the Journey a big favor in joining them as they can’t find any replacement until they discover Arnel on his Youtube channel.

You are one of the greatest artists Please come back to the world The one and only…..no replica No one can ever replace you

Love always B From Canada 🇨🇦

J Cain once said Arnel is not filling in Perry’s shoes. Arnel got his own shoes that shines.

Steve Perry is one of a kind a class act and amazing performer to this day i listen to Journey when Steve Perry sang

THE ONLY SATAN IN THE GROUP IS SCHION. WHO FEELS HE CAN MAKE JOURNEY ALIVE AS IT WERE IF NOT WTHOUT HIM. THANKS TO ARNEL, SCHION WOULD HAVE BEEN IN A NURSING HOME ON ROCKING CHAIR ROCKING HIS WAY TO OBLIVION. SO WATCH UR MOUTH SCHION

People, note that, Arnel Pineda did not replace Steve Perry he replace or took over the position as the lead singer.

Steve Perry really handled that well. Arnel really admires Perry and knows that he’s a legend. Star struck. Steve Perry is not coming back to Journey and can you blame him? It’s a drama and a mess of a band.

Jrny has always been evolving their music, line up ect. Perry was okay with it till it was his turn to take a pause He could have came back after his hiking accident but he didn’t So they moved on and have done well

Steve is Steve and Arnel is Arnel, both are great singers and should not be a topic for a battle of comparison. Steve Perry is done doing Journey and he won’t be back and that’s all there is to it. The international success is just the icing on Arnel’s cake, but with or without Journey he is doing well as a recording artist with his original band “The Zoo”. That “Bring Back Steve Perry” bandwagon is just very immature and silly, to say the least.

Everyone knows that nobody could ever be a “Steve Perry” However, Arnel Pineda—- I must say that you are very impressive and I love the way you came in and Rocked every single Journey song! Arnel, you’re amazingly BLESSED with a powerhouse of a voice, a great demeanor, and swag outta this world! I definitely am super happy that Journey continues!

Arnel Pineda

Who Is Arnel Pineda?

After a series of unfortunate events in his childhood, Arnel Pineda found success in Asia as the front man for the group The Zoo. In 2007, he was discovered by Journey guitarist Neal Schon, after a series of YouTube videos were posted of him covering American songs, including the famous hit, "Dont Stop Believin'." In December 2007, Pineda became the new lead singer of Journey. His is noted for having a strikingly similar sound to former Journey front man Steve Perry.

Troubled Childhood

Arnel Pineda was born on September 5, 1967, in Sampaloc, Manila, in the Philippines. Throughout his childhood, Pineda endured grave misfortune. When he was just 13 years old, his mother, who was 35 at the time, passed away after a long battle with heart disease. Her medical costs left the family in serious debt, and Pineda's father could no longer provide for Pineda and his three younger brothers, Russmon, Roderick and Joselito.

While relatives were able to take in his brothers, Pineda was left on his own. He spent the next few years homeless, often sleeping outside in public parks and scraping for any food or water that he could afford. When possible, he would stay at a friend's house, who offered him a cot outside. Eventually, Pineda was forced to quit school and take up odd jobs collecting scrap metal and bottles at the pier and selling newspapers to support his family.

Early Career

Pineda's love of music started at a young age. He began singing at just five years old, and had entered many singing contests as a child. In 1982, when he was 15, Pineda was introduced to a local band called Ijos, and was encouraged by his friends to try out as their new lead singer. He sang the Beatles' "Help" and Air Supply's "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All." Although they were concerned with his lack of training, Ijos members were wowed by Pineda's powerful voice, and took him on as the new front man of the band. One of the band member's friends even offered to pay Pineda's salary, 35 pesos a night, out of his own pocket, and Pineda was offered a tiny room to sleep under the guitarist's front stairs.

In 1986, some members of Ijos joined together to form the new pop-rock band Amo. The group found success covering songs by hit groups Heart, Queen and Journey. In 1988, they turned heads when they won the Philippines' leg of the Yamaha World Band Explosion Contest. Although they were disqualified in the finals due to a technicality, the event was broadcast on TV in Asia, widening their fanbase. The band continued performing at popular clubs and arenas around the Philippines.

In 1990, the members re-grouped yet again, under the new name Intensity Five, and re-entered the contest. The band came in as runner up and Pineda won the Best Vocalist Award. After a series of unfortunate health problems in the early '90s, including the brief loss of his voice, Pineda re-emerged in 1999 with a new solo album with Warner Brothers. The self-titled album had several hits in Asia.

After brief stints with a few different bands, Pineda found success again in 2006 with The Zoo, a band that he formed with Monet Cajipe, a guitarist/songwriter who had been in all his bands during over the previous 20 years. The Zoo performed at several popular clubs in the area and, in 2007, released an album by MCA Universal titled Zoology . Soon the band began covering songs by groups such as Journey, Survivor, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles and more, with more than 200 performances uploaded to YouTube.

On June 28, 2007, Neal Schon, guitarist and member of the band Journey, saw a video of Pineda on YouTube and immediately contacted him. The band had been looking for a new lead singer, and Pineda's voice sounded strikingly similar to Steve Perry, Journey's legendary former front man. After speaking with Schon on the phone, Pineda made arrangements to fly to the United States and audition with the band in San Francisco. On December 5, 2007, Pineda was welcomed as the band's new lead singer.

Right away, Pineda went on tour with the band, performing two shows in Chile and two in Las Vegas. Both were a huge success. After a series of guest show appearances and magazine features, Pineda gained popularity within the American public. On June 3, 2008, the newly organized Journey released their first album, Revelation , which came in at No. 5 on the U.S. charts. The album was their highest charting album since Trial by Fire (with Steve Perry), and reached platinum status by October 2008.

Soon after the album's release, the band continued touring around the world with Pineda. The documentary, Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey , slated to be released in 2012, will chronicle the band's "Revelation Tour," and Pineda's first years with the band.

Personal Life

When he is not on tour, Pineda resides in the Philippines with his wife, Cherry, their children, Cherub and Thea. He has two other sons—Matthew, 19, and Angelo, 13—from past relationships.

QUICK FACTS

Name: Arnel Pineda
Birth Year: 1967
Birth date: September 5, 1967
Birth City: Sampaloc, Manila
Birth Country: Philippines
Gender: Male
Best Known For: Arnel Pineda is best known as the new lead singer for the rock group Journey.
Astrological Sign: Virgo
Nacionalities

CITATION INFORMATION

Article Title: Arnel Pineda Biography
Author: Biography.com Editors
Website Name: The Biography.com website
Url: https://www.biography.com/musicians/arnel-pineda
Access Date:
Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
Last Updated: July 20, 2020
Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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Steve perry’s ‘oh sherrie’: where is she now (video).

Although their love didn't last beyond the '80s, the Journey singer and his former muse remain friends.

By Michele Amabile Angermiller

Michele Amabile Angermiller

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Steve Perry's 'Oh Sherrie': Where Is She Now? (Video)

For those of us who grew up during the 1980s, the love story of Journey lead singer Steve Perry and his girlfriend, Sherrie Swafford , was the Romeo and Juliet of our teenage time.

Beginning with power ballad “Open Arms” and on through the megahit “Separate Ways,” among other Journey classics, there was no doubt Perry and Swafford were crazy about each other — so much so that when Perry released his first solo album, 1984’s Street Talk , he serenaded his lady love in the video for “Oh Sherrie,” an MTV favorite.

The song — another monster ballad celebrating the joys and pains of being in love — was given new life via the Broadway production of Rock of Ages , in which lead character Drew (played best by Constantine Maroulis ) belted the chorus (“Oh, Sherrie / Our love / Holds on”) to his love interest. But what happened to the real-life Sherrie?

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Like a line straight out of “Faithfully,” loving a music man ain’t always what it’s supposed to be — and it turned out the pressures of touring finally ended the romance. Since then, little was heard of Swafford. Until now.

Marc Tyler Nobleman , author of the blog Noblemania , caught up with Swafford while researching an article locating all of the women who originally appeared in the “Separate Ways” video . While Swafford declined a full interview, she acknowledged that Nobleman is the “only person [who] has ever received a response.”

However, she did give a brief statement to the blogger about what she’s been up to.

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“MTV, VH1 [contacted me and] I did nothing and hoped they thought it was the wrong number! I am an esthetician, teach yoga, never married, no children. Love my animals, planting flowers and life. Cherish my friends (including Steve) and my privacy. It was so different for us! It was just Love, nothing else!”

In a November 2011 interview with the Tampa Bay Times , the now-64-year-old Perry, who no longer tours with Journey, sweetly recalled his time with Swafford, telling the paper: “Sherrie and I were crazy in love, I can tell you that. And it was a very tough time because the band was peaking. And if any woman out there thinks that it would be real exciting to be the girlfriend of somebody in a band like that and that it would be all peaches and cream, the truth is that it’s hard to navigate a relationship when you’re in the midst of such a ride.”

Watch Perry’s iconic video below:

Twitter: @THRMusic

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Steve Perry on Journey’s Arnel Pineda: ‘He’s Their Lead Singer’

Former Journey lead singer Steve Perry's long-awaited return to the stage late last month has naturally fueled speculation as to whether the vocalist would ever reunite with his former band. But in a new interview, he is once again quick to both dash those rumors and pay his respects to the man who has held that position for over seven years now.

Speaking with Fan Asylum , Perry confirms that "there is no reunion" plan in the works between him and Journey. Asked what he thought of current singer Arnel Pineda 's respectful and presumably not literal offer to step aside so that he could have his old job back, Perry says, "I don’t know who or what would make Arnel want to say such a thing. He's their lead singer and I wish him all the best."

Perry also adds that he was very surprised by how strong a reaction his return garnered. "I woke up in St. Paul, MN thinking I'd have a little YouTube leak about the gig and that would be it. After 20 years of not singing live I really thought I could just stick my toe in the Waters of Love and then go home and start blowing the rust off my pipes……. but that's not what happened."

After getting a taste for the stage in St. Paul, Perry subsequently joined Eels for two other performances: one in Washington, D.C., the other in Los Angeles. But aside from hinting at a new solo record, Perry has not shared what his future plans may hold.

This is not the first occasion of Perry denying that a Journey reunion was in the works. Earlier this month, Perry stated that his return to the live performance arena was strictly for fun . Journey is currently on tour with the Steve Miller Band and Tower of Power. You can get all their latest tour dates here .

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New Times, New Thinking.

Steve Perry of Journey: “Things happened to me as a child. There was nowhere to talk it out, so I sang it out instead”

Journey wrote “Don’t Stop Believin’”, the most downloaded song from the 20th century. When their lead singer quit, the band spent years trying to replace him. Finally out of hibernation, he tells his strange story.

By Kate Mossman

In the small hours of 14 June 2007, the Queen guitarist Brian May sat worrying at his computer. The American rock band Journey had fired another lead singer: 41-year-old Jeff Scott Soto had been erased from the group’s website – shed, Brian observed in his blog, like a used pair of boots.

It wasn’t that Brian didn’t sympathise with the pressures on a middle-aged rock band burdened with touring millions of dollars’ worth of hits when their original frontman was indisposed. He laid out Journey’s options. 1. Throw in the towel. 2. Find a look- and sound-alike. 3. Go out under a different name (“unrewarding”). 4. Find a new frontman who steals a bit of the limelight for himself.

Journey are responsible for “Don’t Stop Believin’”, the most-downloaded song written in the 20th century. They have had five lead singers to date. The single component they’ve spent three decades cyclically seeking to replace is the voice of their frontman, Steve Perry, who came and went, and came and went – then disappeared. Any Journey singer needs to sound exactly like Steve Perry, and that is not easy. He must have a high “tenor altino”, reaching F#2 to A5, with a tone somewhere between Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin. The first time Perry quit the band was at the height of their fame, in 1987. He’d been nursing his dying mother, and considered retraining as a neurologist.

The second time he left, ten years later, was because the band were pressing him to have a hip operation, and he refused. The girlfriend of keyboard player Jonathan Cain dimly recalled a guy from another group she thought could hit notes as high as Perry could – so founder member Neal Schon tracked him down, and found him working as a maintenance manager for Gap, enjoying the security of his first pension plan.

The new singer, Steve Augeri, became known as “Steve Perry with a perm”. He took Journey’s hits to the arenas of middle America. As he did so, the real Steve Perry – who’d co-written those hits – rode a Harley Davidson through the San Joaquin Valley in California, back to where he was born.

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Perry has been a virtual recluse for 20 years. He sits before me in a Whitehall hotel, dissecting a chocolate muffin and carefully dabbing crumbs from his lap. He speaks in metaphorical language: he once said that leaving his band was like “re-entering the earth’s atmosphere with no heat tiles on my face”. The San Joaquin valley reached 110°F in the summer, with fields of almond trees, cotton and alfalfa. The alfalfa became a symbol of his escape. “It holds so much moisture that when you come to an area where there’s an alfalfa field on the left and right, the temperature drops 15 degrees. So I’m out on my motorcycle, and those were the days before ‘helmets’ [he makes quote marks in the air] and the wind is in my hair and all of a sudden, well, I cooled off.”

No one knew what Perry did next. There was a rumour he’d invested in a small bovine insemination business in California’s Central Valley, but it turned out to be a rogue edit on Wikipedia. In what some might call a terrible irony, the band he left behind enjoyed an unexpected, international renaissance without him, attracting a new generation of fans. In the 21st century, “Don’t Stop Believin’” was used on the soundtracks of the Oscar-winning 2003 film Monster , Scrubs, Family Guy, Glee and perhaps most memorably, in the final eerie moments of The Sopranos . It inspired long-read journalism on the magic of song craft, and it even formed the plot of the Broadway hair metal musical Rock of Ages .

Perry banked the cheques – but he missed the shows, because there was a new lead singer in the band who sounded just like him, and this time everyone was talking about it. Arnel Pineda was a Filipino fan who’d spent two years living homeless on the streets of Manila as a child – Neal Schon had found videos of him singing Journey songs on YouTube. Pineda has enjoyed the most successful stint in the job since the man he is imitating. Find a frontman who steals a bit of the limelight for himself, said Brian May, and “the sky’s the limit”.

When not riding his motorbike through the San Joaquin Valley, Perry attended the local fair, which came to his home town in June as it had done in his childhood. “I was drawn to the circus life, because they’d come into town – it was lights, Ferris wheels, it was moving, it was fantasy – and the next thing you know they’re gone,” he says. The circus was, he admits, not unlike a rock band.

“I saw Pinocchio as a child, and there was something evil about this special place where all the children could go. They’d go on the rides, but their ears would grow – and they turned into asses, actually, I guess.”

Rock bands are a ruthless business, but in Journey it’s hard to say who holds the power – the mutable frontman who forced the band in and out of hibernation for a decade, or the founder member who turned the frontman’s voice into a million-dollar franchise. Perry once claimed that he’d never felt part of the group. Schon replied: “How can you ‘not feel part’ of something you’re almost completely controlling?”

They only communicate through their lawyers now. But their songs play in every sports bar and mall in America, instantly and innocently evoking the pain and passion of ordinary human life.

“It’s like your boyfriend saying to you: drop a few pounds, get your nose fixed at the same time. Fuck off!”

Perry has watched his replacements come and go, but once, he was the replacement himself: in 1977, aged 28, having failed in several bands, he’d returned home to work mending coops on his uncle’s turkey ranch when he got the call from Neal Schon, asking him to join a jazz fusion band who couldn’t get a hit. Perry asked his mother, and she advised him to go for it. Schon tried him out by bringing him on the road and telling everyone he was the roadie’s Portuguese cousin. He sang a song at soundcheck when the official singer was away from the stage.

The clichés – “married to music”, “a band is like a family” – are well worn, but for the generation of men who became millionaire rock stars in the seventies and eighties (for it is men, and it is one generation) they are the only way to understand their motivations, not least because it is a language they invented themselves. Solo albums were referred to by Journey’s manager Herbie Herbert as cheating on your wife (both Schon and Perry cheated). Of the hip operation stand-off, Perry says: “When they told me they checked out some new singers, it’s like your boyfriend saying ‘Look, I really love you, but I need to know if we’re getting married or not because I’ve checked out some other chicks.’”

But it was more than that, wasn’t it? They were telling him they’d only take him back if he underwent major surgery.

“OK,” says Perry. “It’s like saying, ‘By the way, drop a few pounds, too. Get your nose fixed at the same time.’ FUCK OFF.” He then asks if we can talk about his new record, Traces , his first in 25 years.

When Perry was 16 years old, he heard “I Need You ” by the Beatles, released on the Help! album, and he felt they could have done better. Why had they done a kind of bossa nova he wondered, when it clearly cried out for R&B? He has reworked the song on his new album, which he wrote and produced on his own – “No one had their foot on my neck saying, ‘Are you done? Are you done?’ FUCK OFF.” he says.

When he was very young, Perry would “mumble hook lines” for potential songs, and it was in Journey that he was able to “apply everything I had ever dreamed of”. Their audience – suddenly full of girls – had a new and emotional relationship to the band via their commercial power ballads.

“You can’t solo for 18 bars,” he recalls telling Neal Schon – who was such a good guitarist that he’d been recruited by Carlos Santana aged 15, in the summer of 1969. “You can have about eight bars. And if it’s going to be eight bars, it has to be something beautiful.”

The first time the pair were put together to write, they finished Perry’s love letter to San Francisco, “Lights ” , in about ten minutes. He describes a song idea as a “sketch” – a framework of chord changes, a couple of melody ideas and a loop for rhythm. “But my problem is, I hear it completed already.”

Songs, he says, should be “like pancakes – stacked high with layers of feeling”. Modern writing is an “industrial assembly line because everyone’s on the grid. There’s 20 people writing these songs – they’re trying to maximise the individual assignments, like when they’re making a film, to increase the opportunity for a hit. But a song should be all about selling a feeling .”

Selling a feeling – is that the essence of power ballads?

“It’s the essence of music,” he says.

“Songs should be like pancakes, stacked high with layers of feeling”

“Don’t Stop Believin’” has had a lot of analysis in recent years, as interest has grown in the industry’s backroom magic. It is a power ballad with a strange minimalism, full of barely-there figures – “strangers waiting” and “streetlight people”. Unable to sleep in a Detroit hotel room, Perry had looked down to the street and noticed the way in which walkers would pop up suddenly in circles of light. The lyric’s “midnight train” was a musical madeleine, designed to take you back to Gladys Knight. The song was self-consciously cinematic, but states that life is a movie that never ends. Its thin but powerful sense of hope was so abstract, it applied to everyone – from the gambler in the lyric, rolling the dice “one last time”, to the real John Doe hearing “Don’t Stop Believin’” in a bar on a Friday night. It started with a refrain written by Jonathan Cain: what Cain heard as a chorus, Perry heard as a “pre-chorus” – suggesting that a “chorus of choruses” should be held off till the very end. It does not appear until three minutes and 20 seconds, delaying the climax. Perry gets a bit antsy discussing it.

“I don’t want to talk about the music because then you won’t listen, and it won’t be yours,” he says. “Your definition – what the song does to you, and the next person – are totally different. You hear music differently based on your life, your experience, what you are. When something resonates with a massive number of people, that is exactly what is happening.”

In 2007, he was approached by HBO for permission to use the track in the final seconds of The Sopranos . He refused to give it over without knowing what scene it would accompany, concerned that the entire Soprano family were going to “get whacked” to the song. For a few weeks, he was one of the only people in the world who knew how the series ended.

Another, equally effective modern-day licensing of the track was in Patty Jenkins’s Monster , when the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, played by Charlize Theron, meets her lover at a roller rink. A jukebox and a skating rink were just the kind of places you heard Journey every day, growing up, reinforcing the sense of their music as part of the wallpaper of American life. Perry, now 69, loved high school, “a magical time, when innocence is running your life.” Its memories are his songwriting metaphors: a concert venue, he says, rather strangely, is “the backseat of a car”.

“Everything I write comes back to high school. I know it sounds funny, but everything. It all comes from the emotions I grew into during my adolescence. Those moments are not to be tossed away.” He becomes emphatic. “If something means something to you, go back and get it and make it part of your life. And anyone who doesn’t understand how important that is, you tell them to FUCK OFF,” he advises, before breaking off to reveal he is desperate for the bathroom.

He was one of the only people in America who knew how The Sopranos ended

Perry was born to Portuguese parents in 1949. His father, Ray, was a singer – a baritone – who had tried to break into the business, and performed in the local theatres of his hometown. What kind of music did he sing?

“‘Pennies from Heaven,’” Perry replies.

His parents eloped because his mother’s father didn’t approve of a singing career. He tells their story as though music were some kind of hereditary condition or family curse, which in the case of Perry, you kind of feel it might be. His parents split when he was eight years old, and he, an only child, moved with his mother to his grandparents’ dairy farm – which might explain the rumours about his subsequent career. As with many rock stars, from Roger Waters to Lennon, the absent father was significant. I ask him why he became a singer.

“People don’t become performers because they don’t have needs,” he says. “Singing, though it can be very lovely, is essentially a primal scream. And I was screaming pretty loudly – and quite big.”

He was an invisible child, he says, but also a silenced one.

“There was a lot going on but nowhere to take it. Things happened to me as a child that I still can’t talk about – nothing to do with my parents, but things did happen. It happened to a lot of kids, as I find out.”

How old was he?

“About nine. But there was nowhere to take that stuff back then. One of my needs to perform was the need to get myself heard. Now, please, do understand, I’m not complaining – but there was nowhere to talk it out, so I got to sing it out instead.”

He spoke to a professional at the age of 63 about what had happened to him at nine. He was advised to do so by the woman he calls the love of his life, Kellie Nash, a psychology PhD candidate. But like everything else that has happened to Perry, theirs was not a conventional story.

During his mysterious, fallow years, Steve Perry seems to have investigated an alternative career in filmmaking. He was “shadowing” Monster director Patty Jenkins: “I love editing, I love directing. So with Patty I watched and learned a lot.” Jenkins was working on a TV film called Five for the Lifetime Network, exploring the impact of breast cancer. Being a methodical director, she surrounded her cast with real patients in remission. One of them – Nash – caught Perry’s eye. Jenkins then told him that Nash’s cancer had returned, was in her bones and lungs, and that she was fighting for her life. He went ahead anyway.

“I’d lost my mother,” he says. “I’d not reconnected with my father – which was another clean-up waiting to happen. I’d lost the grandparents who raised me. And I’d lost this career that I’d wanted so much, because I’d walked away from it.”

Was he so accustomed to losing things that a date with Nash didn’t scare him?

“I don’t know,” he says. “I justified it by telling myself, well, she’s a PhD psychologist, maybe I need another shrink?”

They had a year and a half together before Nash died in 2012. One night she said, “Promise me you won’t go back into isolation, for I feel that would make this all for naught.” He repeats the strange words, wide-eyed: all for naught . It was then that he decided to return to music.

“Life gets undone,” he says. “You try to come up with a plan, but it’s good for ten minutes a day. Some people have an ability to make belief systems work for a lifetime, but I think they’re hard to keep up.”

In 2014, he made world news when he turned up unannounced at a gig by the indie band Eels and performed their song “It’s a Motherfucker ” along with two of his own. He’d not sung live for 19 years but, explained the band’s Mark Everett, “For some reason only known to him, he feels like tonight in St Paul, Minnesota, it feels right.”

Perry, the once-invisible only child, still talks about Journey as a “nucleus” he could never break into. It is fair to say that the band didn’t want him at first – it was only under the orders of their manager that he was hired at all. They came to epitomise corporate rock. “There are still things I don’t like about it,” Neal Schon once said, “but this is the way I make my living.”

You suspect that, creatively, both men might have been better off without the band – the jazz rock boy-wonder, and the hit-writing soul mogul who really wanted to be on his own. But you take whatever route to fame is presented to you – and you follow the money: “I’d rather fail at being what I wanted to be,” Perry says, “than be successful being someone I didn’t.”

“Traces” by Steve Perry is released on 5 October through Hear Music

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Watch CBS News

How Steve Perry started believin' again

October 7, 2018 / 9:55 AM EDT / CBS News

If you were alive in the 1980s (or really any time in the last 30 years), you probably know the words to at least one Journey song. And for some fans, Steve Perry is, once and forever, "the voice."

"What were you hoping for when you joined Journey?" asked correspondent Tracy Smith.

"I just wanted to write music with the guys that mattered," the 69-year-old said, "that people would love and embrace and take into their hearts. There's nothing else that meant more to me than to be part of that."

Steve Perry and Journey perform "Don't Stop Believin'":

With Perry out front, the band had a slew of Top 40 hits in the '80s, and was back on a commercial roll in the '90s, when he left it all behind.

What was that like? "It was tough, really tough," he said.

Smith asked, "What'd you do?"

"Therapy!" he laughed. "Went back to my hometown, went to the fair in the summertime that comes to Hanford."

You might understand a little more about why Perry left when you know where he came from.

Hanford, California, population 56,000, is in the heart of the Golden State's sprawling farm country. For young Steve Perry, it was the world. "When I was living here, I was really loving being here," he said.

But Perry's father left when he was seven. At Hanford's historic Fox Theatre , he talked about how it's a loss he still feels today.

"He used to sing to me. He used to sing to me, yeah, like when I was three or four years old he'd sing to me," Perry said. "And when the divorce happened it was an incredible loss to me."

There are happier memories in Hanford, too, where much has stayed the same.

steve-perry-with-tracy-smith-hanford-california-620.jpg

Hanford's Superior Dairy has been in the same spot for nearly 90 years. And around here, they do ice cream in a big way: A single scoop is roughly the size of a cantaloupe. Sundaes are colossal … and Steve Perry is still a favorite son.

And of course they still make his favorite flavor. "It's like a milk chocolate. One bite and I'm home. That's all there is to it."

The ice cream made Perry emotional. "Excuse me for a second … It's so good. Wow. Sorry."

Smith asked, "Is there kinda like a flood of memories and feelings?"

"I've had so many memories in this place and it's still the same. No matter what happens, no matter how successful or unsuccessful, you can always come back and have some ice cream. And it's gonna be okay."

And he was living here in Hanford when he got the call that would change his life forever.

After bouncing around a series of small-time bands, Perry joined up with Journey in 1977, and helped give the world some of its best-loved songs.

Journey performs "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'":

But after years of touring, he was getting tired of the grind. He was also nursing a severely injured hip, and when the band pressed him to get it fixed, he balked.

"It was really your heart, not your hip?" asked Smith

"It was my heart," he said. "It became a group decision, major surgery, and I wasn't very happy about that. So I chose to put it off and decided when to do it, and they checked out some other singers, and we went our separate ways."

In time, Journey settled on Arnel Pineda – who sounds a lot like Perry – to be their new lead singer.

And except for a few things, like the 2005 Walk of Fame ceremony, Perry stayed out of sight, and away from music.

He stopped singing. "Completely, Tracy, I swear," he said.

"Were there moments where you thought, 'What have I done?'"

"No. I just wanted to move forward. And in moving forward, I found Kellie."

"Kellie" was psychologist Kellie Nash, whom Perry spotted in a made-for-TV movie about the impact of cancer, "Five."

They connected through mutual friends, and the sparks flew.

"And when someone who has stage 4 cancer turns to you and says, 'I love you,' you're gonna feel it for the first time, which is what happened," he said.

For a time, a new clinical trial kept Kellie alive, but in the fall of 2012 things got worse, and she and Steve had the talk that would bring him out of retirement.

Perry said, "One night she said that, 'If something was to ever happen to me, promise that you won't go back into isolation, for I think that would make this all for naught.' I had to make the promise, and I said, 'I promise.'"

Kellie Nash died in December 2012. Perry says he mourned for two years … and then headed for the studio.

To hear Steve Perry perform "No More Cryin'," click on the video player below:

"Traces" is his first new studio album in more than 20 years – and it's a promise kept.

Smith asked, "I'm sure you think, when you're playing this music, 'What would she think of all this?'"

"I think she would love it. I really do," he replied.

"The voice" seems as strong as ever, but there aren't solid plans for a tour yet … or anything else.

"So, have you totally closed the door on playing with Journey again and singing with Journey again?"

"Look at you! I can't believe you'd go – you open my heart and then you just completely, like, you know, stick a poker in there, you know?" he laughed.

"Because this is about passion, and we're talking about the same thing."

"I know. I know. I understand your question. All I can think about is where I'm at right now."

"But at least you're not closing any doors? I mean, you know there are millions, literally millions of people out there who would love to see it happen. So, I guess I'm asking from their perspective: Is the door at least still open?"

Perry said. "I love going forward. I love going to the edge of what's next. And for me, that would be a return. I have to do, at this point in my life, what really makes me feel purposeful at this moment and on the right track for me."

"That sounds like a no."

"If you're looking for the answer I have right now, then that's the answer I have."

So yes, Steve Perry is back, but looking ahead: Happy to be making music again even if he's doing it alone.

"Look, I'm not doing this for money, honey. I don't need any money. I eat too much already! I can only drive one car at a time. This is about the passion. But maybe it took a broken heart to get there, a completely broken heart."

Smith asked, "Is your heart still broken?"

"Yes! Yes, it is still broken," he said. "But it's open . That's okay."

To hear Steve Perry perform "No Erasin'," click on the video player below:

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Steve Perry: ‘My Heart Bleeds Daily to Be in Front of People And to Sing for Them’

By Andy Greene

Andy Greene

Steve Perry has kept a low public profile ever since he shared a lockdown rendition of the 1963 Beach Boys classic “In My Room” in April, but he tells Rolling Stone that since that time, he’s been busy creating new music. “I have a studio and I’m always writing and always recording stuff,” he says. “I have lots of music, so much stuff.”

First up is an acoustic version of his 2018 comeback LP Traces that he plans to release on December 4th. “It’s eight songs from the Traces record done acoustically and I’m really proud of it,” he says. “It’s called Traces Alternate Versions and Sketches . I cut the vinyl in Abbey Road. I’m really pleased with the sonics and I’m really pleased with the simplicity of the song and the lyric and the chords, which is basically what it’s stripped down to.”

Perry dropped out of the public eye in 1998 when he was sidelined by a hip injury and Journey opted to hire a new vocalist to take his place. “I had my time,” he says, “and I was very pleased with all the history I was fortunate to be around and I was proud of my musical contributions to any of it.”

He was drawn back to music after losing girlfriend Kelly Nash to breast cancer in 2012. “I made a promise to her that I would not go back into hibernation,” he says. “If something was going to happen to her, she asked that I wouldn’t do that because she felt it would make everything for naught. Those were her words. I kept that promise.”

He released Traces in 2018 and went on an extensive media tour to support it, but he didn’t play any live shows. Perry last toured in 1995 and the only time he’s played to a live audience since then took place in 2014 when he joined the band Eels at three shows.

“E [Eels frontman Mark Oliver Everett] and I became friends and he kept busting my balls saying, ‘When are you going to come out and just sing a couple of songs on our little tour?'” Perry recalls. “We’d always laugh, but I’d always go to his rehearsals because I love the band. He said, ‘Is this the year you’re going to do it?’ I said, ‘OK, what do you want to do?’ We worked up a bunch of songs and lowered the keys so I’d feel comfortable.”

The first appearance took place May 25th, 2014, at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota. Perry joined Eels for their original tune “It’s a Motherfucker” before closing the show with the Journey tunes “Open Arms” and “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’.”

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“Oh, my God,” Perry says as he thinks back to that night. “I forgot what it was like to be in front of people. I had forgotten that this voice [I have onstage] doesn’t belong to me. In a studio, I can probably get 80 or 90 percent of it. But that extra 10 or 20 percent only happens in front of a crowd.”

The three Eels appearances raised fan expectations that Perry might finally return to the road. It hasn’t happened so far, but the singer says that a tour remains a real possibility. “It’s always been on my mind,” he says. “My heart bleeds daily to be in front of people and to sing for them.”

One thing holding him back is the physical toll any tour would take on his body. “I’ve got some physical injuries from touring,” he says. “It’s a tough thing, touring. People don’t realize. It’s like sports. I’m watching baseball these days and there’s injuries. People’s backs and necks start to go out. It’s a young man’s game, but I do miss it.”

During Perry’s long absence from the road, Journey reinvented themselves as a touring powerhouse, especially after Arnel Pineda took over on vocals in 2008. But it’s been a contentious journey marked by persistent band infighting. Earlier this year, the band parted ways with drummer Steve Smith and bassist Ross Valory after a business dispute over the band’s copyright.

“I have no clue what that’s all about,” Perry says when the matter comes up. “I’ve been out of that band since May of 1998.”

When told that fans continue to fixate on his tenure in the band and pray for some sort of reconciliation, he laughs. “I don’t know what people think rock & roll is about,” he says. “Are we supposed to be like Bo Peep, sheep herders that are kind and loving? No. We bump heads like motherfuckers. But from that comes beautiful music like ‘Open Arms’ and other songs.”

Still, fans will likely never let go of the fantasy that everything can go back to the way it was in 1981 when it seemed like the band was in harmony and singing “Kumbaya” together offstage. “I don’t understand what these people base their thinking on,” he says. “There never was any ‘Kumbaya’ with us. But were the Chicago Bulls singing ‘Kumbaya’? How about the [San Francisco] 49ers with Bill Walsh? What are we talking about here?”

For now, Perry is focusing strictly on his own career, far away from the battles of Journey. “The acoustic Traces is going to close the Traces chapter,” he says. “Then I’m opening up another chapter next year at some point.”

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Journey co-founder George Tickner dies at 76, band member says

George Tickner, co-founder and original rhythm guitarist of the rock band Journey, has died at age 76, band member Neal Schon said in a Facebook post .

Schon, a fellow Journey co-founder and the band's lead guitarist, announced Tickner's death July 4, praising the musician for his "incomparable contributions" to the band in a statement on Facebook.

"Godspeed, George... thank you for the music," Schon wrote in the post. "We will be paying tribute to you on this page indefinitely. Our condolences to his family and friends, and to all past and present band members."

George Tickner, guitarist for Journey, photographed in San Francisco, 1981.

A representative for Journey did not immediately respond to TODAY.com's request for comment.

Tickner, Schon, keyboardist and vocalist Gregg Rolie, bassist Ross Valory and drummer Prairie Prince founded Journey in the early 1970s. Tickner and Valory were both previously in the band Frumious Bandersnatch, which was based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"Journey," the band's eponymous first album, was released in 1975 and was the only album to include Tickner in the lineup. Before leaving Journey to attend Stanford University, Tickner contributed to writing songs for the band's next two albums, "Look into the Future" and "Next."

“He came up with chordings I have never heard,” Rolie said in the liner notes of Journey’s Time3 box set, Music Times reported . “He had these massive hands, and he would de-tune his strings and come up with these voicings that nobody else could.”

Journey would eventually go on to become one of the most prominent rock bands of the 1980s, earning over 100 million record sales globally. According to Journey's website , the band's 1981 song "Don't Stop Believin'" is the most downloaded song of the 20th century.

After leaving Journey, Tickner stayed close to the music industry and co-founded a recording studio with Valory called The Hive, according to Variety.

Tickner was present for Journey's induction ceremony into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005, where he reunited with Schon and Valory, as well as Journey members who succeeded him, including lead singer Steve Perry.

Schon again paid tribute to Tickner after his death in an Instagram post July 6.

"Prayers for George, farewell old friend," he wrote in the caption.

Tickner’s cause of death was not immediately clear.

Esther Sun is an intern for TODAY.com. She loves café-hopping and watching cooking TikToks she knows she will never try.

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Biography - Steve Perry

Who is steve perry.

Steve Perry is a singer and songwriter by profession and American by nationality. He is best known as the lead singer of the rock band Journey .

Steve Perry (Image: theguardian)

Steve Perry – Age, Parents, Siblings

Steve Perry’s birth took place on January 22, 1949, in Hanford, California, USA. He was born Stephen Ray Perry to his mother Mary Quaresma and his father Raymond Perry.

Education, Ethnicity

For education, Steve Perry attended high school in Lemoore, California. After graduation, he went to the College of the Sequoias. Other details of his early life such as his childhood and the identity of his siblings and family are not known.

His parents are of Portuguese ethnicity.

Steve Perry – Girlfriend, Wife, Children, Divorce

Perry was in a serious relationship with his girlfriend Sherrie Swafford, who inspired him to write his hit Oh Sherrie . But the couple never married.

Speaking to The Guardian Steve Perry reveals, “I was too scared of it (marriage) after what I watched my parents go through. And I was around a band that went through several divorces in the course of our success. I saw them lose half of everything multiple times.”

He was in a romantic relationship with Kellie Nash, a psychologist who had been undergoing cancer treatment and had first seen her in his friend Patty Jenkins’ film about breast cancer. The couple dated for a year and a half, until her death. He grieved her death for two years, did not go back to isolation, and began to write songs and perform.

Currently, he seems to be single, sans wife, and children and as Steve Perry has never married, divorce is out of context.

Steve Perry, Kellie Nash in 2011 (Image: Getty Images)

Steve Perry – Career

Early career.

Growing up Steve Perry loved to sing and his parents encouraged him to do so. At the age of 16, he started a band named Ice with Scott Mathews, now a music producer. They co-wrote songs played drums and guitar and sang.

After Ice disbanded, he moved to California, where he joined the band named Alien Project .

With Journey, Steve Perry has released 14 studio albums including Infinity (1978), Evolution (1979), Departure (1980), Escape (1981), Frontiers (1983), Raised on Radio (1986), and Trial by Fire (1996).

As a solo artist he has released three studio albums Street Talk (1984), For the Love of Strange Medicine (1994), Traces (2018), and EP Silver Bells (2019).

Steve Perry’s fellow Journey members are Steve Augeri, Robert Fleischman, Jeff Scott Soto, and Deen Castronovo.

From left - Gregg Rolie, Steve Perry, Neal Schon, Ross Valory, Jonathan Cain of Journey in 2017 (Image: wire image)

Steve Perry – Net Worth, Salary

His net worth is estimated at around $70 million while the figure on his annual salary is not shared with the public.

Steve Perry – Instagram, Twitter, Facebook

On social media handles including Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, Steve Perry is active with thousands of followers and counting. He also has an official website – steveperry.com and a Vevo YouTube channel.

We endeavour for accuracy. If you believe our content has any misinformation, violates your copyright, or you want to propose an update, please feel free to contact us.

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Journey's Neal Schon says he and Steve Perry are 'in a good place' before band's 50th anniversary

On the cusp of turning 50, the band that etched “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” and “Faithfully” into lighters-up lore is entering “a cleaned-up chapter of Journey.”

That’s according to Neal Schon, the band’s ace guitarist, lone original constant and de facto CEO.

Despite decades of fluctuating lineups and snarly lawsuits among band members , Journey endures.

On July 8, the band released “Freedom,” its first new album in 11 years that also presents the return of Randy Jackson (as in "American Idol") on bass. The 15-song collection is steeped with vintage-sounding ballads (“Still Believe in Love,” “Live to Love Again”) and soaring melodic rockers (“United We Stand,” “You Got the Best of Me”).

Journey – including longtime keyboardist Jonathan Cain, peppy singer Arnel Pineda , drummer Deen Castronovo and keyboardist Jason Derlatka, adding bassist Todd Jensen for live shows – will hit Resorts World Las Vegas this month for shows backed by a symphony orchestra before rolling through more arena dates this summer and in early 2023, the band’s official 50th year.

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Journey in pop culture: Quarantined family perfectly re-creates 'Separate Ways' music video at home

Regular road warriors who consistently pack arenas and stadiums – their 27 shows this year grossed $28 million, according to Billboard Boxscore – Journey relies on a solid catalog of mega-hits and a devoted fan base that appreciates the familiarity.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Famers also received a boost from Netflix’s ’80s-centered “Stranger Things” when the show used “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” in the trailer for the just-ended season, launching the song onto Billboard’s Rock Digital Songs chart. The affable Schon, 68, talked with USA TODAY about the band’s complicated legacy, his relationship with former frontman Steve Perry and plans for Journey's golden anniversary.

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Question: Are you amazed at how the Journey train keeps rolling after almost 50 years?

Neal Schon: It’s quite an accomplishment and I’m very proud of what we’ve done and how we’ve gotten through emotional and personnel changes and survived. It’s pretty mind-boggling but also a lot of hard work.

Q: Does the title “Freedom” refer to anything specifically?

Schon: Our ex-manager Herbie Herbert wanted to call the (1986) “Raised on Radio” album “Freedom” because he always came up with these one-word titles. Steve (Perry) fought him on that and got his way, so we sat on it for many years. When we got through the lawsuit with the ex-bandmates, we made the new LLC Freedom (JN) and when we were tossing around album titles said, why not just call the whole thing “Freedom?" It's for the times right now.

Q: There’s been a bit of a revolving door in the rhythm section. Deen Castronovo is back for the live shows, but Narada Michael Walden played drums on the album, and Randy Jackson is back in the band, at least on record?

Schon: Deen is singing and playing his butt off. He’s such a musical sponge, this guy. He’s been like my little brother for close to three decades and is such a joy to work with. Randy, he’d been working with me diligently this whole time. He’s so many things beyond being an amazing musician and bass player.

Rock in the rain: Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Poison, Joan Jett combat weather during The Stadium Tour

Q: Will Randy play at any of the upcoming live shows or is Todd Jensen handling those duties?

Schon: Randy is still recovering from some surgery and he stays very busy and Todd fits like a glove. Having said that, I think with our 50th anniversary next year, there’s room for everybody to jump in if they want to participate. We did go through an ugly divorce with (Steve Smith and Ross Valory) with the court proceedings (in 2021, Schon and Cain settled a $10 million trademark lawsuit with the band’s former drummer and bassist). But definitely, if Steve Perry wanted to come on and sing a song, yes. If (original Journey singer) Gregg Rolie wanted to come sing a couple of songs, yes. Randy Jackson (can) come sit in on some of the material – he played on a lot of hits on “Raised on Radio.”

Q: Do you talk much with Steve Perry?

Schon: We are in contact. It’s not about him coming out with us, but we’re speaking on different levels. That’s a start, even if it’s all business. And I’m not having to go through his attorney! We’ve been texting and emailing. He’s a real private guy and he wants to keep it that way. We’re in a good place.

Q: Do you think, after 15 years, that people have accepted Arnel?

Schon: I was diligent in that I wanted to show the massive size of our audience, so I hired photogs to come out every show and shoot the audience and show the size of the crowd to make everybody see, what am I missing? From putting up the different photos every night and the reviews from the fans online, I saw very little of “This is not Journey, man.” I think we just shut everybody up.

Whatever Happened to Journey’s Original Singer Steve Perry?

W ith the recent announcement that Journey ‘s hit song “Don’t Stop Believin'” has been named the “Biggest Song of All Time” by Forbes, it begs the question… whatever happened to the band’s original singer and frontman Steve Perry ? He performed with Journey from 1977 to 1987, and again from 1995 to 1998 but in recent years has been either MIA or focusing on his solo work.

When Forbes declared the 18-times-platinum certified song the biggest ever, a tune that likely everyone around the entire world has heard, Perry admitted that he was “emotionally stunned.” He got emotional on social media, writing a post that read, in part, “To be part of such a moment as this made me reflect on my parents. By that I mean, though I lost them both years ago, I was so happy for them because they are truly the reason this is happening. My dad was a singer and both of them were very musical. So on behalf of my Mom and Dad, I thank every one of you for so many years of support.”

Steve Perry opened up about the Journey song “Don’t Stop Believin'” being named the “Biggest Song of All Time”

While those young and old know the song to be a classic that you just can’t help but belt out, it wasn’t always a sure thing that it would be a hit. Perry admitted in an older interview that he felt it was a hit with live audiences but it wasn’t getting enough radio play in the 1980s. The song was released in 1981 on the band’s seventh studio album and was instantly praised by critics as “a perfect rock song.”

Perry said about the song, “The lyric is a strong lyric about not giving up, but it’s also about being young, it’s also about hanging out, not giving up and looking for that emotion hiding somewhere in the dark that we’re all looking for. It’s about having hope and not quitting when things get tough, because I’m telling you things get tough for everybody.” While Perry left Journey because he said he lost his passion for singing and had gotten into some party behaviors, he didn’t give up his singing career altogether. He has released several solo albums including 1994’s For the Love of Strange Medicine , 2018’s Traces (plus an alternate version of the album in 2020) and 2021’s The Season . Unfortunately for fans, he did not go on tour with his newer album releases.

Can you guess which one it is?

However, he did please fans when he reunited with his former bandmates to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005. Now, Journey continues to tour and play music without Perry. They are going out on a massive stadium tour this summer with Def Leppard including frontman Arnel Pineda, Neal Schon , Jonathan Cain, Deen Castronovo, Jason Derlatka and Todd Jensen. Although Perry is not involved in the upcoming tour, he has some exciting announcements of his own.

Steve Perry shares his upcoming plans for his solo music

In May of this year, Perry opened up about his career and admitted that he signed with a new label and has a renewed passion for singing. He joined the band The Effect as they released their version of Journey’s “It Could Have Been You” featuring new vocals by Perry.

Plus, Perry revealed , “I just signed with a new label. I’m very excited about it, and I’ll have an opportunity very soon to work with these very, very musically creative people. I’ll probably announce who I signed with very soon. That’s about as much as I can say, but I’m excited about that, and I am working on stuff.”

As to why he has been avoiding touring, he said, “Well, it’s a long story. Uncle Steve is up in age, and everybody at this age has some aches and pains and things like that. But it’s a really good question that I’ve been asking myself too. And Trev’s been busting my balls about it for a long time, to be honest with you. It’s something that I’m absolutely missing terribly. I can’t even tell you how much, but there’s been a big soulful reclaiming of this original feeling that I had about singing that I needed to get back to. I didn’t want to go out and just turn the wheel or turn the crank.” He added that it is his dream to tour once again, so here’s to hoping!

As far as his personal life goes, the 75-year-old is very tight-lipped about his family. He said in 2019 that he does have a daughter and grandchildren but will not share any details about them.

Thousands of fans respond to Steve Perry and Neal Schon's posts on Facebook.

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Journey celebrates 50th anniversary: Rock band members then and now

Journey was formed in february 1973 by neal schon, gregg rolie and herbie herbert.

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Journey recently celebrated 50 years since the band first formed.

The band's most well-remembered lead singer, Steve Perry, was spotted on a walk in Los Angeles earlier this month. The 74-year-old was the frontman and prominent songwriter for the band for 10 years alongside Neal Schon, Gregg Rolie, Ross Valory, Jonathan Cain, Aynsley Dunbar and Steve Smith.

Current members of the band include Schon, Cain, Deen Castronovo, Arnel Pineda, Jason Derlatka and Todd Jensen.

Here is what Journey band members from the Perry era are up to now as the band's 50th anniversary tour comes to a close April 25 in Palm Springs, California.

STEVE PERRY WOWS CROWD AFTER 19 YEAR ABSENCE FROM STAGE

Steve Perry

Steve Perry was brought on as a replacement for lead singer Robert Fleischman and was the frontman during the band's most prosperous era. (Shutterstock/SplashNews.com)

Steve Perry joined the band as a replacement for Robert Fleischman, making his debut as the frontman in October 1977. As well as acting as the band's lead singer, Perry also was one of the band's principal songwriters. He was nominated to the Songwriter's Hall of Fame in 2020.

Although fans were skeptical of Perry when he first joined the band, he was able to win fans over after the release of his first album, "Infinity," which had a much different sound than Journey had created in the past. They then began getting more radio airplay. He sang lead vocals on the albums "Evolution," "Departure," "Dream, After Dream," "Captured," "Escape," "Frontiers," "Raised on Radio" and "Trial By Fire."

Perry went solo for the first time in 1984 when he released "Street Talk," which sold over 2 million copies and featured the singles "Oh Sherrie" and "Foolish Heart." He was also featured on the 1985 benefit song, "We Are the World." He attempted to reunite with Journey. However, he was caring for his ill mother and couldn't be present for a majority of recording, and the band went on break in 1987 after its "Raised on Radio" tour.

In 1988, Perry began working on a second solo album, which he never released, eventually releasing a successful second album in 1994, called "For the Love of Strange Medicine."

Perry sang lead vocals on the albums, "Evolution," "Departure," "Dream, After Dream," "Captured," "Escape," "Frontiers," "Raised on Radio" and "Trial By Fire." (Michael Putland/Getty Images)

The singer once again reunited with his former band in 1996 to record the very successful album, "Trial By Fire," which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard charts and went platinum by the time the year was over. To capitalize on the success of the album, a tour was planned, but it had to be postponed due to Perry injuring his hip while hiking in Hawaii.

A doctor determined his injury required surgery, but Perry was reluctant to agree to go under the knife. The decision delayed the tour longer than expected, which angered his bandmates. They eventually went on tour without Perry, and he announced his permanent exit from the band.

"I had to have a hip replacement, and the band was telling me when they thought I should do it," Perry said in an interview with MelodicRock.com in 2011. "And I said, ‘Major surgery like this is not a band decision.' I said that I would get it done, but I didn't get it done quickly enough. They just wanted to get on the road, and there was an ultimatum given to me. And I don't respond well to ultimatums."

FORMER JOURNEY FRONTMAN STEVE PERRY REVEALS WHY HE LEFT BAND AT ITS HEIGHT

Following his departure from the band, he released his "Greatest Hits + Five Unreleased" compilation album, which featured songs from his 1988 unreleased album. In 2005, Perry joined a few of his former bandmates when Journey was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2009, he was voted one of the ten greatest rock singers of all time, and Rolling Stone placed him at number 76 in a list of "The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time."

Journey at the band's rock and roll hall of fame induction

Perry joined his former bandmates on stage in 2017 for the band's induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. (Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Rock & Roll Hall of Fame)

For the next few years, Perry continued singing and writing, appearing on background vocals or on stage with various bands and artists. In 2017, he appeared on stage with Journey for the first time since they were together on the Walk of Fame in 2005 to accept the honor of being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He did, however, opt out of performing with the band.

In 2018, Perry released another solo album, "Traces," which performed well, with a deluxe version debuting in 2019. In December 2021, he released a Christmas album, "The Season," and in 2023 he announced he would be singing background on Dolly Parton's new album.

Perry has a daughter and grandchildren but has chosen not to speak about them publicly to protect their privacy.

Neal Schon is a founding member and guitarist for the band Journey. (Getty Images)

Neal Schon is a founding member of Journey and is the longest-serving original member of the band. Prior to helping create Journey, he was a member of the band Santana, playing guitar on the albums "Santana III" and "Caravanserai."

He briefly played with the band Azteca before founding Journey with Gregg Rolie and their manager Herbie Herbert. They initially called the band the Golden Gate Rhythm Section, however the name was changed after their roadie John Villaneuva suggested Journey.

Along with playing on the albums "Journey," "Look into the Future," "Next," "Arrival," "Generations" and "Revelation with Journey," Schon also released several solo albums, including "Late Nite," "Beyond the Thunder," "Piranha Blues," "The Calling," "So U" and "Universe."

The guitarist also produced two albums with keyboardist Jan Hammer and was a member of the supergroup Bad English. He also has fostered collaborations with Sammy Hagar as part of Hagar Schon Aaronson Shrieve and Paul Rodgers. Schon also plays guitar on Michael Bolton's album, "The Hunger.

Schon performed with his band at the 2017 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, where Journey was being honored. (Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Rock and Roll Hall of Fame)

In 2005, Schon was present at the Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony to accept the honor of receiving a star alongside his fellow bandmates. They reunited again in 2017 when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where he and some of the other band members performed.

Schon is performing with Journey for the band's 50th anniversary tour, which also features Toto.

JOURNEY'S NEAL SCHON SLAMS BANDMATES OVER TRUMP MEETING

In September 2011, Schon confirmed his romance with former "Real Housewives of D.C." star Michaele Salahi, while also revealing they dated briefly in the '90s. Just a little over a year later, in October 2012, Schon proposed to her on stage while performing at a charity benefit, and the two were married in December 2013.

Neal Schon and his wife Michaele at the Hard Rock

Schon is married to his fifth wife, Michaele Salahi, a former "Real Housewife of D.C." (Gabe Ginsberg/Getty Images)

Schon was previously married to Tena Austin from 1976 to 1986. He was then married to Beth Buckley from 1987 to 1992, and had two children with her, Miles and Elizabeth, before splitting up. He then married Dina Gioeli from 1993 to 1999, and then Amber Kozan (from 2001-2008), with whom he has two children, Aja and Sophia. He also has a daughter named Sarah.

Gregg Rolie

Gregg Rolie was a member of Santana before forming Journey and was the lead singer on the first two albums. (Getty Images)

Gregg Rolie was a founding member of Santana before branching off to join what would become Journey. For the band's first six albums, he was the keyboardist, and he was the lead vocalist for the band's first two albums. Once Perry joined the band, Rolie sang co-lead on a few songs on various albums.

The musician chose to leave the band in 1980 and started a successful solo career. His first solo album was "Gregg Rolie," and he followed up with "Gringo" in 1987.

"I left because I didn’t like my life anymore," Rolie told Rolling Stone in 2019. "I’ve said this a million times. And I know there’s people that say, ‘That’s not the reason.’ But I left because I was unhappy with what I was doing in my own life. I loved the management. I loved the music. I loved what we built. I just wasn’t happy, so I had to blow the horn on it and just stop it."

A few years after releasing his second album, Rolie formed another band with Steve Smith and Ross Valory from Journey in 1991 called The Storm. Rolie worked as the keyboardist for this band. The band's eponymous debut album was a huge success, reaching No. 3 on the Billboard charts. It also featured a top 10 hit, "I’ve Got A Lot To Learn About Love."

Rolie left Journey in 1980 and started a solo career before founding another band. (Getty Images)

They did not reach the same amount of success with their second album. It was shelved by their record company before finally getting released in 1996. In 1998, Rolie and a few other members of Santana reunited to form the band Abraxas Pool, ultimately releasing one eponymous album.

Also in 1998, Rolie was inducted, along with the other members of Santana, into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He became a two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee in 2017 with Journey.

In 1999, while working on an album with Ron Wikso, they formed The Gregg Rolie Band, which featured Kurt Griffey on the guitar and Wally Minko as a second keyboardist. Together, they released the album "Roots" and a live CD, "Rain Dance," in 2009.

From 2012 to 2021, Rolie toured as a member of Ringo Starr and his All Star Band, during which he sang many of the hits he is known for, including some from his time in Santana. While performing, he also recorded an album with original members of Santana in 2016, "Santana IV."

Neal Schon and Gregg Rolie on stage for Journey's 50th anniversary tour

Rolie frequently appears on stage with Schon and the rest of Journey during their 50th anniversary tour. (Rob Loud/Getty Images for Journey)

Rolie reunited with Schon in 2018 to perform some charity shows and occasionally joined Journey on stage during its most recent tour.

The keyboardist married his wife Lori in 1980 after first meeting her while on a flight in 1979. The two have remained together and live in Texas. They have two children together, a son named Sean and a daughter named Ashley.

Ross Valory

Ross Valory was an original member of Journey, which he joined after forming and releasing one album with the Steve Miller Band. (Getty Images)

Ross Valory was an original member of Journey, which he joined after forming and releasing one album with the Steve Miller Band. As a bassist, he has played on all the band's albums, except 1986's "Raised on Radio" and 2022's "Freedom."

During the band's hiatus in the late ‘80s and early ’90s, Valory played on Todd Rundgren's album, "2nd Wind," and released two albums as a member of The Storm, "The Storm," and "Eye of the Storm."

He returned to playing with Journey in 1996 on the "Trial by Fire" album. Valory was kicked out of the band in 2020, and he was once again replaced by Randy Jackson, who also took over for him in "Raised on Radio."

His 2020 exit came on the heels of a lawsuit involving him and Steve Smith, filed by their Journey bandmates Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain. Schon and Cain claimed Valory and Smith attempted to take over Nightmare Productions to gain control of the Journey trademark.

Journey's management announced the two parties came to a settlement, releasing a statement in April 2021.

Ross Valory, right, was sued by his former bandmate, Jonathan Cain, left, for trying to gain control of the band's trademark. (Gabe Ginsberg/Getty Images)

"Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain acknowledge the valuable contributions that both Ross Valory and Steve Smith have made to the music and the legacy of Journey," the statement said. "Ross Valory and Steve Smith wish their former bandmates well and much success in the future. Journey looks forward to continuing to tour and make new music for their dedicated fans around the world."

Valory was once married to Diane Oakes, however the marriage ended in a divorced. He later married his current wife, Mary Valory.

Steve Smith

Steve Smith replaced Aynsley Dunbar as the drummer for Journey. (Getty Images)

Steve Smith replaced Aynsley Dubar as the drummer for Journey, joining the band in 1978 and staying on until 1985. His first album with the band was "Evolutions" in 1979, and he left for the first time following 1986's "Raised on the Radio."

During the band's hiatus, he joined Valory and Rolie in the band, The Storm, appearing on their two albums. He also started a second band, Vital Information, and released several albums with them in that time, including "Vital Information," "Orion," "Global Beat," "Fiafiaga" and "Easier Said Than Done."

He returned to Journey in 1995 for a comeback album, "Trial by Fire," staying on for a few years before leaving a second time after the release of 1998's "Greatest Hits Live" album. He continued to release music with Vital Information, including "Ray of Hope," "Where We Come From," "Live Around the World" and 2017's "Heart of the City."

Smith left Journey and started his own band, Vital Information. (D Dipasupil/FilmMagic)

Smith was also a part of the jazz group Steps Ahead and can be heard playing on their albums "Live in Tokyo," "N.Y.C," "Yin-Yang" and "Steppin' Out." As a musician, he can also be heard on albums for Jeff Berlin, Frank Gambale, Henry Kaiser and Neal Schon.

In 2001, Modern Drummer magazine named Smith one of the Top 25 Drummers of All Time, and the following year he was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame. Starting in 2007, he recorded two albums with Buddy's Buddies, a quintet made up of musicians who once played with Buddy Rich.

In 2017, Smith was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Journey. He performed with Journey during the ceremony.

Steve Smith and the rest of Journey at the Hall of Fame ceremony

Smith was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame alongside the other members of Journey. (D Dipasupil/FilmMagic)

Smith was also named in the lawsuit filed against him and Ross Valory when they allegedly tried to gain control of the Journey trademark. Like Valory, Smith was kicked out of the band at this time.

Jonathan Cain

Jonathan Cain was a member of The Babys before he left to join Journey, taking over the position Gregg Rolie held in the band. (Getty Images)

Jonathan Cain was a member of The Babys before he left to join Journey, taking over the position Gregg Rolie held in the band. Cain's first collaboration was on the album "Escape." He was also one of the composers of the band's longstanding hit, "Don't Stop Believin'."

JOURNEY'S JONATHAN CAIN RESPONDS TO CEASE-AND-DESIST ORDER, SAYS BANDMATE SHOULD 'LOOK IN THE MIRROR'

One of his most well-known contributions to the band was when he wrote the ballad "Faithfully," a song about what it's like to live life on the road. Cain went on to play the keyboard on the albums, "Frontiers," "Raised on Radio" and "Trial by Fire."

Prior to "Raised on Radio," Cain reunited with his former Babys bandmates and formed Bad English, releasing two albums before breaking up in the early 90s.

Jonathan Cain promoting his memoir at Barnes and Nobles

Cain wrote a memoir about his experience as a member of Journey in 2018, called "Don't Stop Believin': The Man, the Band, and the Song That Inspired Generations." (Brandon Williams/Getty Images)

Along with his albums with The Babys, Bad English and Journey, Cain recorded eight solo albums, including "Windy City Breakdown," "Back to Innocence," "What God Wants to Hear," "Bare Bones" and "More Like Jesus." He has primarily focused on making Christian-based faith music since 2016.

In 2018, Cain published a memoir, "Don't Stop Believin': The Man, the Band, and the Song That Inspired Generations," about his time as a member of Journey.

Cain married his first wife, singer Tane McClure, for which he wrote the song "Faithfully" before calling it quits.

In 1989, he married Elizabeth Yvette Fullerton, and together they had three children — a daughter Madison and twins Liza and Weston. The two divorced in 2014 after 25 years of marriage. In 2015, Cain married his third wife, a minister named Paula White.

Jonathan Cain and his wife at the Hollywood Bowl

Jonathan married his third wife, Paula White, in 2015. (Vincent Sandoval/WireImage)

Cain and Schon are currently at odds and are in a legal battle over a shared American Express account.

Aynsley Dunbar

Aynsley Dunbar was the second drummer for Journey, taking over for Prairie Prince. (Getty Images)

Aynsley Dunbar was the second drummer for Journey, taking over for Prairie Prince, and played a big part in co-writing their first four albums, "Journey," "Look Into the Future," "Next" and "Infinity."

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Additionally, Dunbar played drums on albums for artists such as David Bowie, Lou Reed, Herbie Mann, Mick Ronson, Nils Lofgren, Ian Hunter, Sammy Hagar and Pat Travers.

Dunbar later joined Jefferson Starship and stayed with the band for three albums, including "Freedom at Point Zero," "Modern Times" and "Winds of Change." He then joined the band Whitesnake and stayed with them for two albums, including their eponymous record, which featured hits like "Still of the Night" and "What Is Love," and the album "1987 Versions."

Throughout the mid-90s, Dunbar played with some of the era's most notable bands and artists, including Aerosmith, Queen, Metallica, Black Sabbath, Pat Travers and Van Halen.

Aynsley Dunbar and the rest of Journey at the Hall of Fame ceremony

Dunbar was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, along with other members of Journey. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

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Aynsley has three children, Gretchen, Bibs and Taylor. In 2000, his 5-year-old son Dash died of brain cancer.

In 2005, Aynsley and the other members of Journey were honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In April 2017, Dunbar and the band were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for their contribution to the music industry.

Lori Bashian is an entertainment production assistant for Fox News Digital.

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The Secret to a Happy Marriage: Country Singer Melissa Etheridge, 63, Enjoys Sharing Birthday & Having Fun With Her ‘Supportive’ Wife Actress Linda Wallem

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The Power of Support

Iconic singer Melissa Etheridge, whose docuseries “Melissa Etheridge: I’m Not Broken” will soon be released on Paramount+, has offered insight into her marriage with actress and producer Linda Wallem.
The loving partners wed on May 31, 2014, on San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito, California, just two days after their 53rd birthday. They were both born on the same day and year, May 29, 1961.
Etheridge was diagnosed with breast cancer after discovering a lump in her breast in 2004. She underwent surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy to treat the cancer.

Etheridge, a breast cancer survivor who is known for her iconic 1993 hit “Come To My Window,” opened up to People in a recent interview about how their marriage continues to thrive, revealing “it helps a lot” that she and Wallem, who is also 63, share birthdays.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Melissa Etheridge (@melissa_etheridge)

Etheridge, who shares her two children, twins Johnnie and Miller, with Tammy Lynn Michaels, her former wife. She also has two children with her ex partner and film director Julie Cypher, whom she also shares to children with, Bailey, and Beckett, who passed away at the age of 21 from causes related to his opioid addiction.

Before marrying Wallem, Etheridge recalls the friendship they had for approximately 10 years before getting emotions involved.

Etheridge told People, “I had so much fun with her as a person. We were able to slowly step into it, and it was so perfect.

“Life is not just second chances — life is always chances. There’s no, ‘Well, that’s just the way it is.’ We can always make a different choice.”

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According to People, more of Etheridge and Wallem’s relationship is seen in the singer’s new docuseries— and she “can’t wait for the world to see it.”

In a statement shared on Etheridge’s website, the country star adds, “I’m excited for audiences to join me on this powerful journey and hear these remarkable stories filled with pain and struggle but also hope and healing.

“I hope that this docuseries shows viewers the challenges that women face in our prison system while also serving as a resource to those who currently are struggling.”

As for what her “I’M NOT BROKEN’ docuseries is about, her website explains it’s about “an inspiring story of healing and transcendence through the power of music when five female residents from the Topeka Correctional Facility, a women’s prison in Kansas, write letters to Etheridge that she uses as inspiration to create and perform an original song for them.

“Having recently lost her son to opioids, Etheridge works to understand and interrupt the cycle of addiction while connecting with these women who, so often, are forgotten by society.”

We’re happy to see Etheridge opening up to fans about her inspiring journey about healing, love, and music, as she’s certainly come a long way since she was diagnosed with breast cancer 20 years ago.

Additionally, as Pride month is upon us, we’re reminded that it’s been 31 years since Etheridge came out and she’s “never regretted it.”

She explained in a video shared on Instagram last June, “I’ve never regretted it … ever. Every time I can stand up and be myself, either on stage or in my neighborhood, it makes me a better person.

“So happy Pride month to you. Be proud. Pride means to look at yourself and love yourself. We can change the world that way.”

Melissa Etheridge’s Inspirational Cancer Journey

Etheridge’s life has not always been easy, and it’s certainly been a source of inspiration for some of her music. Part of her life’s journey includes a bout with breast cancer.

In 2004, she was on tour when she discovered a lump in her left breast. A biopsy confirmed her breast cancer diagnosis. Although her exact type of breast cancer isn’t publicly known, it was stage 2 upon discovery.

“It was a rather large tumor, but had only contaminated one lymph node,” she previously told ABC News.

WATCH: Should I Have a Lumpectomy or Mastectomy?

Etheridge had a lumpectomy to remove a 4-centimeter tumor from her breast. This procedure involves removing just the cancer and an area of healthy tissue around it. Her surgery also included the removal of 14 lymph nodes after discovering the cancer had spread.

She then received chemotherapy which involves giving the singer drugs designed to kill cancer cells. Chemo is usually administered either orally or intravenously. The “Angels Would Fall” singer also received radiation therapy. This kind of cancer treatment uses high-energy beams such as X-rays aimed at cancer cells designed to kill them.

In 2005, the singing cancer warrior bravely performed at the Grammy Awards while still bald from chemotherapy.

She said the morning of the awards show, she had undergone radiation treatment and felt weak.

“I remember halfway through, thinking in my mind, ‘Oh my God,” Etheridge said of her memorable yet inspiring performance.

Thankfully, her course of treatment proved to be successful and she’s still able to perform across the country with her most famous hits. The popular singer is currently touring and impressed the audience at this year’s CMT Music Awards.

What to Know About Breast Cancer Screening

As for breast cancer screenings, a mammogram is the primary test doctors use to check for breast cancer. The wide consensus is that women should have annual mammograms between the ages of 45 and 54.

And while leading organizations like the American Cancer Society say women should have the option to begin annual screenings between 40 and 45 , there is some disagreement among doctors as to whether this is beneficial.

For example, after saying for years that women shouldn’t begin mammograms until 50, an independent panel of experts called the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recently changed their guidelines to say that women of average risk should begin at 40.

Dr. Connie Lehman, a diagnostic radiologist who specializes in breast cancer at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says when you begin mammograms is a decision you should discuss with your doctor, as they can help you understand your specific circumstances and weigh the benefits and potential risks of earlier screening.

Life After Cancer Will be Different, That Doesn’t Have to be a Bad Thing

Your mammogram results may lead your doctor to recommend further testing with a diagnostic mammogram, ultrasound, or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). If these tests suggest changes that might be cancer, you’ll need a biopsy a test in which your doctor removes a small sample of tissue and has it checked for cancer in a lab.

Only a biopsy can confirm or rule out whether you have breast cancer.

Although it can be frightening to go through breast cancer testing, SurvivorNet’s doctors say not to fret. It’s possible for a biopsy to find that a lump is benign or not cancerous.

If you do receive a breast cancer diagnosis, you’ll learn what type of breast cancer you have and the stage of the disease. The stage means how far in your body the cancer has spread.

Though most breast cancers are not linked to inherited genetic mutations, knowing whether you have a mutation could affect the type of treatment you get. SurvivorNet experts recommend all women who are diagnosed with breast cancer be given genetic testing.

Based on your test results, preferences, and personal circumstances (such as your age), you and your doctor will make decisions about how to proceed with treatment, which we have plenty of expert resources on.

Power of Support

A support system, like how Melissa Etheridge has with her wife, can be made up of loved ones like family and friends. It can also be comprised of strangers who have come together because of a shared cancer experience. Mental health professionals can also be critical parts of a support system.

WATCH: Sharing details about your cancer diagnosis.

“Some people don’t need to go outside of their family and friend’s circle. They feel like they have enough support there,” psychiatrist Dr. Lori Plutchik told SurvivorNet.

“But for people who feel like they need a little bit more, it’s important to reach out to a mental health professional,” Dr. Plutchik added.

Dr. Plutchik also stressed it is important for people supporting cancer warriors to understand their emotions can vary day-to-day.

“People can have a range of emotions, they can include fear, anger, and these emotions tend to be fluid. They can recede and return based on where someone is in the process,” Dr. Plutchik said.

Meanwhile, licensed clinical psychologist Dr. Marianna Strongin says people faced with cancer should “surround [themselves] with individuals who care and support [them]” throughout treatment while also acknowledging their limits on what they can handle.

“Going through [cancer] treatment is a very vulnerable and emotionally exhausting experience,” Dr. Strongin wrote in a column for SurvivorNet . “Noticing what you have strength for and what is feeling like too much [is] extremely important to pay attention to as you navigate treatment.”

If you’re ever in a relationship where you feel overwhelmed by how your partner is trying to support you, Dr. Strongin says you should try to communicate your feelings. This may help you decide if your partner is the person you want beside you “during this arduous chapter” of life.

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Crazy town's shifty shellshock was homeless in the months before death, crazy town's shifty shellshock homeless in final months.

Seth Binzer -- the lead singer of Crazy Town -- was homeless in the months preceding his death -- according to his friend and sober coach Tim Ryan ... who tells us he was helping Binzer on his sobriety journey over the last few years.

As we reported ... the L.A. County Medical Examiner said Binzer - aka Shifty Shellshock -- died Monday at an L.A. home. According to Tim, Binzer was living in a tent in downtown L.A.'s McArthur Park, after bouncing from house to house following a recent relapse.

He tells us his wife, Jennifer Gimenez from "Celebrity Rehab" ... received a call last week informing her of Seth's whereabouts and Tim was planning to fly to L.A. to help locate Seth in the park and get him back into treatment ... but sadly, it was too late.

Seth's death came 2 and a half months after Tim last spoke to him. He says Seth was once again struggling ... something the TV star puts down to the soul-sucking, negative Hollywood influences which made it difficult for Seth to prioritize his recovery.

Tim adds the news is particularly heartbreaking, considering Seth was on fire just a year and a half ago ... before his 2023 DUI in North Carolina brought everything to a screeching halt.

Despite his challenges, Tim wants us to remember Seth for having a heart of gold and always helping others get into treatment or sober living rather than helping himself.

As we reported ... Seth manager's confirmed he died from an accidental drug overdose after mixing prescription drugs with street-purchased drugs. The medical examiner's official investigation is ongoing.

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Crazy Town Singer Shifty Shellshock Death Investigated As Possible Overdose

Crazy Town Tour Van Destroyed in Collision with Moose

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Celebrity Deaths

Shifty Shellshock, Crazy Town Frontman and 'Butterfly' Singer, Dies at 49

The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner confirmed that the musician died at his home on Monday, June 24

Shifty Shellshock, the frontman of Crazy Town, has died at the age of 49.

The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner shared on its website that the musician, whose real name is Seth Binzer, died at his Los Angeles home on Monday, June 24. The medical examiner has not yet listed a cause of death for the "Butterfly" singer.

A representative for Binzer did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.

Binzer began his journey in the music industry with fellow vocalist, rapper and band member Bret “Epic” Mazur in 1992. The pair formed a group called the Brimstone Sluggers, which would eventually become the rock band Crazy Town, in Los Angeles in 1995, according to Variety and Deadline .

The pair, alongside group members Rust Epique, James Bradley Jr., Doug Miller, Adam Goldstein and Antonio Lorenzo “Trouble” Valli, eventually released their debut album The Gift of Game under the name Crazy Town in 1999.

Jerod Harris/Getty

The band’s song “Butterfly,” which was the third single from the album, eventually gained popularity, shooting the band to fame and becoming a 2000’s anthem which even featured in Something’s Gotta Give starring Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton .

The group released a second album called Darkhorse in 2002 and broke up after it failed to reach the same levels of acclaim, according to Deadline . The band eventually got back together under the Brimstone Sluggers name in 2015 and then became known as Crazy Town X after Mazur left in 2017, per the outlet.

Fryderyk Gabowicz/picture alliance via Getty

Binzer also pursued a solo career after the band broke up the first time. He released the album Happy Love Sick in 2004 and collaborated with English music producer Paul Oakenfold on his song “Starry Eyed Surprise,” which was released in 2002 and reached No. 6 in the U.K. music charts.

However, the singer also dealt with substance abuse throughout his career, appearing on the VH1 shows Celebrity Rehab and Sober House. He also was hospitalized in 2012 after losing consciousness and falling into a coma, before recovering, according to Variety .

Chelsea Lauren/WireImage

That same year, Binzer was arrested on charges of battery and drug possession, according to a TMZ article at the time. He was also arrested in 2022 on DUI charges, per Variety , and reportedly got into an altercation with Crazy Town guitarist Bobby Reeves in 2023 after one of their shows.

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Several fans shared tributes to the Crazy Town rocker's final few Instagram posts following the news. On an April 27 post, one wrote, “RIP old friend… remember you best as a kid in a skateboard with the entire world in front of you… sending love to your family ❤️👏.”

Another commented, “Speechless... Rest in Peace, my Childhood Hero. Gonna miss you 💔.”

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Racing to Retake a Beloved Trip, Before Dementia Takes Everything

My dad always remembered his childhood journey through Europe. Now, with Alzheimer’s claiming his memories, we tried to recreate it.

The source images for the photo illustrations accompanying this article were taken by the writer’s father’s family during their trip to Europe in 1966. Credit... Matthew Brandt for The New York Times

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By Francesca Mari

Francesca Mari is a contributing writer at the magazine and an assistant professor of the practice in the literary-arts department at Brown University.

June 30, 2024

Before we begin, would you repeat these three words? Apple, penny, table . I had my dad do something like this, too.

The evening before he was supposed to catch a cross-country flight to me, in Providence, R.I., my 72-year-old father said he didn’t need to set an alarm because he always wakes up at 6 or 7, a statement I knew to be untrue — or, at the very least, unreliable. He lives near Half Moon Bay, Calif., and now that he is retired, he usually rests in bed until 10:30 or 11. I suspected he no longer remembered how to set an alarm, and I couldn’t stop myself from asking him .

“I don’t need an alarm!” he bellowed. And so I set mine for 10:30 a.m. my time, 7:30 a.m. his, to allow him a fat hour and a half to get ready. When the bells startled the silence of my office the next day, I called him, and he sent me to voice mail. I dialed again.

“I’m up!” he snapped, panicked. Then he hung up. Ten minutes later, he phoned: “Why didn’t you give me any information? I don’t know the flight number or anything. I’m flying blind here.”

I had texted and emailed him his itinerary several times and discovered, with surprise, that he had lost the ability to open emails and text messages on the phone he’d had for years. He lives alone. His wife, my mom, was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 7 and died when I was 10, and he never remarried. I have no siblings. He has no nearby friends on whom I felt comfortable imposing to help him. I decided that I should just instruct him to check in at the ticket counter. The only thing he really needed was his passport and a credit card.

“We have a problem,” he said, calling me again. “My passport is expired.”

“We only applied for your passport in 2018,” I said. It would be good until 2028, I told him.

“That’s not what I’m seeing,” he said. I imagined the 8, in his eyes, looking like a 3.

“Trust me,” I pleaded.

The cab I’d scheduled would pick him up at 9 a.m., and at 8:15 a.m., I called to make sure he was either showered or about to be. At 8:58 a.m., I called to tell him the cab would be outside in two minutes.

“Huh?” he said.

“The cab will be outside in two minutes,” I said.

“Hmph, OK, bye.”

I knew he would call, triumphantly from the cab as it descended the hill on which he lived, and so when I still hadn’t heard from him at 9:07, I called. “Just finishing up my cereal,” he said.

Who does that? The cab was going to leave.

Finally, at 9:21 a.m. his time, my phone rang, and to my relief, I could hear the familiar static — the sound of the interior of a car as it breaks down a hill, the hill I grew up on: “Is this ticket paid for? What do I do at the airport?”

Eighteen calls to get him from the door of his house into a cab. Step 1 of air-traffic-controlling a man with dementia on a voyage to Italy.

It has been a couple of minutes. Please repeat back to me the three words with which we began. Now spell “world” backwards. No, wait, you’re looking at the word. That’s cheating. State your Social Security number backwards. No looking at your phone — what day of the week is it? What is the date, month, year?

A few years ago, my dad faced a battery of similar questions. Tests like the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), administered by his primary-care doctor, helped establish that something really was wrong. My dad was convinced that the first two times he took the tests, earlier that month with the nurse or medical assistant, he was too nervous. Now, sensing his doctor’s impatience, he was even more so. “Is that all you got?” his doctor said, and I winced.

Years earlier, my father told me about watching his mother take these tests at the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, and desperately wanting to help her. Now, as I watched him search for keys and clocks within an image, I closed my eyes to stop myself from frantically scanning.

On test after test, my dad showed cognitive impairment, but he was in denial. I’d recently discovered missed payments, late payments, miscalculations and $150,000 worth of debt racked up on his personal credit cards, all for his beloved hi-fi audio-video business . He made the minimum payments when he came across a bill, forgetting that they didn’t actually pay down the debt. All the while, it was accruing interest at 20 percent. Credit-card companies kept sending him new cards; I found 14 of them in use. It turns out crashing credit scores are often an early indicator that someone is developing dementia. My dad still presented well, always had a plausible explanation for why stress was weighing on his performance. His primary-care physician hadn’t noticed any issues, but when I begged him to evaluate my dad’s memory, the tests shook out another truth. Seeing their results over two years, the doctor had agreed to stage an intervention. “Your cognitive abilities aren’t going to get any better,” he said. “You must close your store." It was like amputating his arms to save him.

What made discerning the disease so difficult was that intransigence is not entirely unlike my dad’s personality. Actually, as far as I can remember, it is his personality. Alzheimer’s was only a calcification of his most irritating tendencies, the ones I had to translate for my bewildered spouse. He exploded, for example, when, as requested, I emailed him flight options for my wedding in India five years ago. “I’m busy!” he erupted, and he hung up. I rang back, and he screened my call. Again and again and again, for days, as prices kept ticking up. I knew he wanted to come, that he wouldn’t miss it, that he would take more delight in it than nearly anyone else. Two weeks later, he called to tell me he had printed out my email to study. By then, those flights weren’t even options.

Was this the beginning of his Alzheimer’s, in 2019? Or was he just a man afraid of taking time off and traveling in a formidably foreign country? I’ll never know. What I do now know is that the disease can begin 10 to 20 years before it’s detected. And in the Alzheimer’s care community parlance, his was a classic “catastrophic reaction” — the outcome of being overwhelmed when called to process too many things at once. A brain short-circuiting. “Often a catastrophic reaction does not look like behavior caused by an illness that causes dementia,” Nancy L. Mace and Peter V. Rabins write in their caregiver guide, “The 36-Hour Day.” “The behavior may look as if the person is merely being obstinate, critical or overemotional.”

Then there was his visit to meet his 3-day-old granddaughter, Vidya, one of just a few times he had closed his store in 47 years. Taking her pruney, purplish limbs into his arms, he burst into tears, in awe but a bit forlorn. “Your grandmother would have loved to meet her,” he said. Over his weeklong stay in 2021, he was weirdly helpless. He lingered in bed and didn’t eat, and at some point, I asked him my daughter’s name. “Sethalina?” he said. What was bizarre wasn’t that he forgot her name; Vidya is hard. But there was no rationalizing the oddity of the name he generated instead. He ventured a second guess: “Citralina?”

“Your father has no insight,” a neurologist at the Memory and Aging Center at U.C.S.F. told me last year, after meeting him for the first time. Insight was defined by the psychiatrist Aubrey Lewis in 1934 as “the correct attitude to a morbid change in oneself,” and it has become a standard component of any patient’s evaluation, an influential factor in whether to hospitalize someone against his or her will. “In the starkest terms, insight measures the degree to which a patient agrees with his or her doctor’s interpretation,” Rachel Aviv writes in her book about mental illness and identity, “Strangers to Ourselves.” But a part of me wondered if my father rejected his diagnosis because he had all too much insight, the insight of someone who was a caregiver to his beloved mother, my Nonie, who suffered from the same disease and died at age 100. If you put any stock in the mind-body connection, denial was a better survival strategy.

When I was growing up, my dad, who has left the country only a few times, told me about the trip to Europe he took with his parents when he was 14, in 1966. He told me how much Nonie loved the immaculate Swiss streets and window boxes fizzing with flowers; the fireplace in the hillside home outside Lugano, where his father was born, with clever alcoves on either side for drying clothes or warming bread; the palpable poverty of the home in Pozzuoli, a city just outside Naples, where Nonie’s aunt lined her walls with newspaper to add insulation. Every so often, my father would drag out the projector and show me his Kodachrome slides.

As an adult, I spent years telling him that he and I should repeat the trip together — or at least a short version in which we went to Switzerland and Italy, Lugano and Naples, so he could show me where his family was from. But now that his Alzheimer’s was progressing, that proposal had taken on new significance. Revisiting the past would, I hoped, help him live better in the present. A few years ago, I read about a palliative treatment for those with memory disorders, called reminiscence therapy. The therapy involves triggering the participants’ strongest memories — those formed between the ages of 10 and 30, during the so-called memory bump, when personal identity and generational identity take shape. Reminiscence therapy can take many forms: group therapy, individual sessions with a caregiver, collaboration on a book sharing the patient’s story or just conversation between friends. But the goal is the same: to comfort, to engage, to increase connection — and to strengthen the bond between patient and caregiver.

One of the more immersive iterations of reminiscence therapy is a place called Town Square , an adult day care for those with dementia. I visited shortly after it opened in 2018. The day care consisted of an artificial village designed by the San Diego Opera to look like a town from the 1950s. It had a diner, beauty salon, pet store, movie theater, gas station and city hall. By replicating the time period during which participants’ brightest memories burned, Town Square hoped to improve their quality of life. The décor offered lots to talk about. A portrait of Elvis hung in the living room, for instance, and upon seeing it, a woman spoke of her teenage years, teleporting into her past. “There is no time machine except the human being,” Georgi Gospodinov writes in his novel “Time Shelter,” about a psychiatrist who develops memory clinics that simulate past eras. I was initially skeptical of the enterprise; warehousing people in a double-locked stage set where oldies played around the clock sounded grotesque. But what I witnessed there — spontaneous reminiscence in a cheerful setting — was perhaps the only positive vision of Alzheimer’s I’ve seen.

I wanted this for my father, wanted to give him a sense of joy now that he had shuttered his store, the place that was his world. While he wouldn’t submit to adult day care, perhaps retaking his 1966 trip would be like restoring him to a tableau of his youth. Truth be told, I also wanted to supplant memories of the last few awful years with some new ones, for me as much as for him. I had spent the past 16 months on countless calls to his doctors and banks and lawyers to negotiate discounts on the insurmountable interest. When he unwittingly undermined my efforts, making random small payments or denying he had a disease, I would snap, and he would never hold it against me. No. He would vow to do better. Sometimes he would yell back that I was a nag and a “pencil neck” (an exacting and officious know-it-all, I think). But even when I pressed him to the point that he hissed that I should get out of his house, I knew he loved me unconditionally and would soon apologize. He trusted me, even when I didn’t trust myself. For this, the ballast to my being, he demanded nothing in return, wielded not a single expectation. He never brought up a fight later, and not just because of his disease. He didn’t hold grudges the way I faintly did about the mistakes he amassed as his brain de-massed, though I knew none of this was his fault. Still: Why hadn’t he planned? Hadn’t he seen his own mother suffer and struggled to support her?

Here’s how he responded, in June, when I told him that I was going to take him on the trip we had always imagined: “Oh, GOD .”

But being a pencil neck, I believed I knew better.

“We look at the world once, in childhood,” the Nobel laureate Louise Glück writes in her poem “Nostos.” “The rest is memory.” But travel leases us childlike eyes. Novelty makes an impression, and I will never forget my dad’s first remark after we got out of the car and made our way through the cobblestone alleys of Como: “It looks like embedded eggs,” he said, with the infectious delight he brings to new encounters. A perfect description. We were a father and daughter navigating the world on indestructible eggshells.

Going on Hour 26 of wakefulness, we did, however, look worse for wear, especially compared with the Northern Italians, who were adorned, at 8:30 a.m., in coats and scarves of the finest natural fibers. “Italians have strong opinions about aesthetics and aren’t afraid to share them,” I had read in the Lonely Planet guide to the Italian lakes. “A common refrain in Milan is che brutta ! (How hideous!), which may strike visitors as tactless. But consider it from an Italian point of view — everyone in this fashion town is rooting for you to look good, and allowing you to step out in an unflattering get-up would be considered a serious failure of taste on their part.”

My dad had arrived in Providence with no pants other than the seafoam slacks he was wearing. I hated these pants, an emblem of the futility of my efforts. In the last few years, if he was stressed or waited too long to visit a restroom, he leaked — an Alzheimer’s thing or an aging prostate thing or both. And so these ’90s-era slacks that he had somehow resurfaced from his closet were faintly discolored around the crotch. I bought him two new pairs of pants — fancy Italian ones that cost more than any I owned — and reminded him to pack them.

In Providence, two days before our flight to Milan, I heard myself, in anguish, repeating for the fourth or fifth time, “I can’t believe you didn’t bring your new pants.” Something I knew I shouldn’t say, lest it provoke a catastrophic reaction.

“They were laying on my suitcase,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. Obviously, no one took them —” By which he meant his brain briefly entertained the possibility that someone did, in fact, take them .

I had been so fixated on his pants that I hadn’t noticed his shoes. Sipping my cappuccino in Como, I saw they didn’t match: same model of Mephistos, the style he’d been wearing for 25 years, but in different shades of brown, one more reddish than the other. They were splitting at the seams and had holes in the soles. I felt deeply protective of him, and I also felt wretchedly shabby myself. My black sweater was pilled and streaked with white impasto, my 2-year-old’s yogurty mark on me. Che brutta! When did we get so raggedy, so oblivious to the world in which we lived? “Time feeds on us,” Gospodinov writes. “We are food for time.”

Now here we were, copied and pasted onto a piazza in Italy, fast-forwarded into middle and elder age. I took a bite of my pistachio croissant — thick green cream oozed out, delicious. And then my phone, the device I so desperately needed to chaperone us on the drive from Como to our hotel in Lugano, Switzerland, died. The barista welcomed me to use the outlet behind the bar, but I needed a converter, and for that I needed to schlep back to the car, 10 minutes away. My father was sore from our flight, and I worried that the walk, doubled, would tire him unnecessarily. After some fretting, I told him to stay put, as I rushed off to the car, stepping on egg after egg after egg. Would he wander off? That hadn’t yet been an issue; he so rarely deviated from his routine. But he was anxious, and in those with dementia, wandering is a response to anxiety, often a behavior of those who wish to return to the security of home, whether literally or proverbially.

Twenty minutes later, a vulnerable look in his eye, he was seated just where I left him. The church bell tower directly ahead of us began ringing in 9 a.m. “Do you hear the long finish?” my dad asked. As an audiophile and salesman, he has always spoken about sound the way sommeliers speak about wine. The world sounds richer in his presence. We ambled toward the lake, in the security of each other’s company, and for a moment, I was assured that all would be well.

Retaking the trip from my father’s childhood meant visiting the Swiss home where his father was born and raised. But I didn’t have an address, only the birthplace on my grandfather’s birth certificate: Treggia, a hamlet 17 minutes away, so we would have to settle for simply seeing the surroundings.

Zigzagging up the hills in our white S.U.V., I let out light honks before blind turns, slightly anxious about the Audis — so many Audis — careering around corners.

“You didn’t go to college for nothing,” my dad said. And it was weird for this previously fearless (and excellent) driver to commend me on excessive caution. This was a man who once sped at 115 m.p.h. on Highway 1, effortlessly weaving between lanes, to shake off a tailgater, a man whose quick instincts averted many a near-crash. When I got my second speeding ticket before age 18 and was required to appear before a judge with a guardian, he left his store to accompany me without complaint or reprimand and maybe, just maybe, with a glimmer of recognition.

I drove on, following Google Maps, up the mountain in the rain. Clouds caught like lint on the trees below. After one hairpin turn, I saw a ruggedly well-dressed man in navy and brown with a felted fedora standing under a wooden overhang and looking at us. Almost to justify the sorry state of my slow driving, I decided to roll down my window, and in English, I told him we were looking for my grandfather’s house and asked if he knew any Maris.

Within a minute, he had his English-speaking wife on the phone: “Oh, there are so many Maris in this area that each bloodline has a nickname,” the woman translated for her husband. “Yours is Pionara ” — or so it sounded. A brother and sister Mari had lived a mile down the road in a white house until just recently, when they moved into a nursing home, she said. In the United States, I had never met another Mari; here we were ubiquitous.

We located the white house down the hill and parked when a neighbor appeared, flush with good cheer. I showed him the scan of our Kodachrome slide and stuttered something about casa di mio nonno . He pointed decisively at a pink house perched above. I said we should go up and look. My dad balked — later I would learn that his socks were soaked through because of the holes in his soles — but he wouldn’t be left behind. So, up an alley we trudged. I had my dad pose with the pink house, but as I continued to compare it with the slides, I began to think the yellow one next door was right after all. This was a cognitive test brought to life, asking us to find the hidden images: the dentil molding on the door, the iron bars over the right window.

I instructed my dad to move to the yellow house and then began snapping pictures of him smiling tentatively on the steps, in front of the door, under the pergola on which grape vines still writhed as they did in 1966.

Suddenly, the door opened, and out came a Brit. “Hello?” he said. He had thought our camera flashes were lightning. And when he glanced at his window to check, he saw my unseeing rat-face pressed against the pane.

“Would you like to come in?” he asked, when I explained why we were there. “It’s not my house, I don’t know its history, but you’re welcome.”

A loveliness of ladybugs streamed across the wall. And there it was. The fireplace. It was redone in white, modern and minimal. But it had the same proportions, the same alcoves as the one in the slides. The guest looked and thought so, too, and he would know. Beside his laptop sat a book about the architect Louis Kahn. The guest was himself a practicing architect and a professor on holiday with his girlfriend, an opera singer originally from Nevada. She had been invited to perform at Brown University, where I teach. “That’s hilarious!” my dad said. “How coincidental is that?”

He looked at our old slides. The fireplace, in a terra-cotta tile, was from a time when people sat in the alcoves during winter to keep warm. “I remember there was a chain here,” my dad said. “And they said you can put a pot of so and so here.”

Or so we thought. “It’s a memory of a memory,” Reinhard Oertli, the home’s owner, told me later when I Zoomed with him. The white fireplace was a memory of the tile fireplace, which itself was a memory of the type of fireplace with alcoves for people to sit. But the alcoves in this fireplace had never been large enough to be functional in that way. This wasn’t a referendum on my dad’s memory, so much as on memory itself. Everything was a memory of a memory, each recollection fires neurons that rewrite the file, suggesting that the more you remember something, the more you degrade it; memory becomes myth, or archetype, a father and daughter returning to the motherland.

In the 1950s, the tendency of old people to reminisce was thought to be a sign of senility. The first long-term studies of healthy elderly people began at Duke University and the National Institutes of Health’s Laboratory of Clinical Science only in 1955 — and it wasn’t until the early 1960s that Robert Butler, a psychologist then at the National Institutes of Health, realized that nostalgia and reminiscence were part of a natural healing process. “The life review,” as Butler came to call it, “represents one of the underlying human capacities on which all psychotherapy depends.” The goals of life review included the righting of old wrongs, atoning for past actions or inactions, reconciling with estranged family members or friends, accepting your mortality, taking pride in accomplishment and embracing a feeling of having done your best. Interestingly, Butler noted that people often return to their birthplace for a final visit.

Sometimes the story is told to anyone who will listen; other times to oneself, in private. Some studies have shown that life review is as effective against depression as medication. Given that depression is more common in people with dementia, reminiscence work may help.

Butler believed life reviews weren’t the unvarnished truth but rather the reconciled one, more like the authorized biography. The edited narrative is born of psychological necessity. “People who embark on a life review are making a perilous passage,” Butler wrote, “and they need support that is caring and nonjudgmental. Some people revise their stories until the end, altering and embellishing in an attempt to make things better. Pointing out the inconsistencies serves no useful purpose and, indeed, may cut off the life-review process.”

Back in the United States, I found it hard to simply sit still with my dad when there were so many other responsibilities, but here in Switzerland, a three-hour drive from our next stop in Modena, all we had was time and a cache of memories with which to fill it. My dad told me how when he was last here, his famously dapper father, Guido, wore a black suit and a fedora — embarrassed of his baldness — and clutched his aunt’s arm, so happy was he to meet her. Guido died from a pulmonary embolism just a few years later, slumped over in the backyard, when my dad was 18 and home sick from school.

But now my dad remembered him alive, in Switzerland, hosting a catered outdoor luncheon for his Swiss relatives at a long table under the eaves. Frank, my dad’s uncle by marriage, who was traveling with them from San Francisco, drank too much wine and disappeared into the bushes to nap on his back, ankles crossed. I was happy to hear these stories, some of which I’d forgotten, and not least of all because he was happy sharing them. “The individual who conducts his or her life review alone is at much greater risk of depression than those who allow another person to share in the process,” Butler wrote.

I put the Beatles on the car stereo. Music opens old cupboards in the brain, and I remembered the way melody enabled some of the Town Square participants to surface memories — the beautiful woman with her long gray hair and matching red lipstick and nails, who could no longer speak, but whose friends urged her to sing for me, her voice a portal to another era, refined and light.

The music put my dad in a romantic state of mind. He began monologuing about various girlfriends from nearly 50 years ago — Miss San Francisco, a.k.a Margie Model, a strawberry blonde with freckles, and another woman who was an evangelical and handed out abstinence pamphlets she didn’t heed. My dad said he and this woman were lying in his teenage bedroom when his mom came home early. He chuckled at the memory, and when, during the course of our drive, he launched into the same story for the second time, I realized that despite the premise of the trip, what I really wanted was the opposite of reminiscence, which too often reminded me of his disease. What I wanted, while it was still possible, was to be with him in the present, stepping on embedded eggs and listening to the long finish of church bells.

While we were speeding down the straight highway, “Long and Winding Road” came on, and I was thinking about how some people in the Andes believe that the future comes up from behind you and the past is always in front of you. It seemed to me that this loop tightens as we age. The horizons of the past and the future narrow. Suddenly I heard my dad choking back tears.

“Do you know how some memories are so vivid?” he asked me. “I just remember your mom, our first date, and seeing her and thinking, Wow, she is so radiant. ”

My mom, the person who, by all accounts, would have wanted to go on this trip from the get-go, the person I have to assume that I am like, because I am so unlike my father. One of my last memories of my mom in motion: stiff and head-scarfed, sliced and poisoned and radiated into remission, leading us on a walk along the coast that she’d read about. Wild irises were in abundance. We’d brought scissors, and we filled our arms with her favorite flower. Every room in our house adorned.

Not long after that, while she was driving me home from school, her leg froze when we were stopping off at the post office. She sat in the driver’s seat, right leg in the car, left leg stuck straight out. She called out to a passerby and asked the stranger to lift her leg into the car. Somehow, my mom got us up that hill and home. She sat for a long time in the garage until at last she was able to get out of the car. This was how she learned that cancer had come back, a very rare kind in her spine. I have been told she was given two options: a surgery that would paralyze her from the waist down or a promising experimental treatment, which was meant to obliterate the cancer. If it didn’t work, however, it risked blasting the cancer throughout her body. She wagered on the latter and lost, cancer colonizing her brain.

With her death, all family adventures ended. My aunt, my mother’s sister and best friend, did her best to fill in. But my mother’s loss still aches decades later, an absence that strikes at both milestones and unexpected moments . I wish my mom, who valued education, could have seen me graduate from college, especially since I wasn’t a particularly strong student during her lifetime. I wish she could have held my newborn while I napped, could have been here now to help my dad or simply be his companion. Perhaps I feel her absence all the more because memories must travel between people. Without pollination, they wither. Families collectively remember, they maintain narratives, fill them in and round them out and keep people close long after they’ve left. My mom died when I was so young that my dad is my memory bank, one that I seldom tapped because the loss was too raw. But as his memory fades, the memory of her does, too.

By the time we arrived in Naples, my father seemed to be a younger man. I wasn’t sure if it was reminiscence therapy or something else. Was it possible that, by expecting a lot of him with no real stakes (venturing to new places, eating new foods, navigating new rooms), I had helped him roll back his disease by engaging in the present?

“I have come to believe less and less that biology is destiny,” Dr. Ellen Langer writes in her book “Counterclockwise.” In 1979, she famously took a batch of old men on a weeklong retreat at which they were asked to care for themselves and instructed to pretend that they were 20 years younger, living in 1959. They talked about the threat of communism, the need for bomb shelters and Castro’s advance into Havana. By the end of the week, men who could barely walk broke into a game of touch football. Their vision and hearing improved, and their arthritis decreased. Sixty-three percent of the group scored higher on their intelligence test, and everyone was rated by independent observers as looking younger.

“It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mind-set about our physical limits,” Langer writes.

Sure, at times my dad thought we were actually in Milan, which was good, because he was afraid of the pickpockets that he remembered from Naples in 1966. But in the morning, he called my hotel phone from his room, a feat unimaginable a week earlier. At home, he barely managed to walk around the block (admittedly, his home was on a steep hill), and now we were walking some 10,000 steps a day.

Before our trip, I asked Dr. Melinda K. Baker, director of education at the George G. Glenner Alzheimer’s Family Centers Inc., which runs Town Square, if she had any advice. “Empathy,” she said immediately. “I tell everyone this. They are trying the best they can.” Simplify, slow down. People with Alzheimer’s often experience sensory overload. If it’s too loud, find a quieter table or go outside. Change your expectations. Don’t treat your dad like a child. His role as father is an identity that still needs to be honored, even if he’s no longer capable of being in charge. In fact, honoring the role means less friction when relieving him of responsibilities. It turns out this was good advice for me, too. Because what I grieved most with his diagnoses was the sense that I was losing my existential protector, the only person who witnessed the worst parts of me and somehow saw the best. But that was intact. I was lucky. In the most fundamental sense, he is still my dad.

I thought that traveling with my dad would be like traveling with half a person, a toddler, if you will, and in fact I often used the parenting trick of offering two choices to give him control over simple decisions ( bolognese or cacio e pepe ?). But it turned out that it was like traveling with two people, or three. My mom, his memories of her and my memories of her absence were always on the trip with us. She would be almost 80 now, and I was strangely saddened to imagine her wrinkled and old. Sometimes my Nonie was present, too. In Naples, we stumbled upon the Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo . Its pyramid-studded facade gave it a campy look, like a church dressed for the San Francisco Pride Parade. My dad, a lapsed Catholic, knelt in the pew praying for his wife, while I looped around twice so that I could figure out whether the priest in purple robes sitting under a spotlight in a confession box was real or a mechanical fortune teller trapped in glass.

I lit a candle for my Nonie and my mother. I tried to keep hold of their little flickering flames among all the others and wondered whether it was inauspicious to drop U.S. currency in the donation box.

“She lasted a long time,” my dad said when he finally rose.

“Who? Nonie?”

“Yeah,” he said, remembering how she lived to 100. “I wonder if I’m going to last that long.”

“Do you want to?” I asked. For many years, while caring for his mother, he had spoken to me of euthanasia, had left op-eds about it on the pillow of my childhood bed for when I returned home to visit and said that if he ever had the disease, that’s what he would want. “Happy dementia” was beyond anything he could imagine.

“Probably, yeah,” he answered to my slight surprise. “To see Vidya grow up.”

The success of reminiscence therapy, like the success of a trip, can be hard to assess. “There’s no standardized way to do it,” Baker told me. “How do you do it? And how often do you do it?” Is it life review — the process of synthesizing one’s life narrative — or any reminiscence? How well does the facilitator know the participants?

Can you recall the three words with which we began?

On the final night, my dad and I were sharing a room to save money and also so I could ensure that he got up on time for the airport. It allowed another opportunity, too, though it did not occur to me until he went to the bathroom. On the trip, I had bought him a new pair of blue pants, and though the inseam was longer than he liked, he acquiesced to wearing them. Now I saw that his decades-old seafoam pants were lying across his suitcase. I walked over to them. They really were a pretty shade, the wool — merino? — from a finer time. As I heard him flushing the toilet, I wondered if I should try once more to wash them — a friend had recently recommended Lestoil — or if I should put them in my suitcase to search out something of similar cut and quality.

Then, the horizons of time cinching into a tight loop, inhabiting both my past and future selves, a naughty child and a jaded matron, I scanned the room, flung open the doors of a hulking wardrobe and tossed the pants in its dim corner. As my dad turned off the tap, I scrambled back to my bed, hoping he would not try to hang his coat and wondering if he encountered his crumpled pants, whether I would confess or play dumb. Was it compassionate to offer more information or less, to overload him or to patronize him, knowing I would contribute to his confusion either way? And then I thought: Maybe much of the confusion besieging him is me. I’m the loving spur in his side, the person clubbing him with reality, forcing him to confront his condition. I’m his best fiend, the one dragging him to places outside of his comfort, another instance of his genes coming back to bite him.

“I can’t believe it’s over,” he said, on the plane the next day. “It went so fast. Thank you for everything you did to organize this. I couldn’t have done it on my own.” He said he would pay for the next trip. It’s only fair. He was talking the way people do at the end of a vacation, like an addict itching for more. Would he even remember he loved this one? Did it matter?

“Wasn’t it amazing that we found the house?” I said to him after our rainy romp through Treggia.

“You couldn’t have planned that. And all those people willing to share information with us. Totally amazing.”

“I’m so glad we’re here,” I said. “Only I miss Vidya.”

He commented that my husband was really good with our daughter. “He’s really involved. Modern women, I’m sure, want to share responsibilities. Well, that’s what we did with you.”

“Although I think Mom took the majority,” I said, unable to check my impulse for accuracy. He worked full-time and took me on Sundays and Mondays; she reduced her nursing hours to part-time to take care of me more during the week.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “But there were days where she, you know, worked. And then obviously, she got sick. At least I wasn’t clueless.” Maybe even more so than my mother, he could get on his knees and enter a child’s world, could toss a stuffed bee back and forth for an hour. In fact, until my mother got sick, he was the parent I preferred, the fun one, the one who laughed even louder than I did while reading me Roald Dahl’s “The Twits,” my mother bristling in her room, it being well beyond bedtime.

“And then you were stuck doing everything,” I said. Every wake up, drop-off, pickup, dinner, soccer practice, all of it, for close to 10 years, with a teenager nit-picking him — for being late, for being simple, for not being my mom.

“I wasn’t stuck. It was just what I needed to do to keep everything moving along.”

“I bet it was a shock,” I said. “You didn’t bargain to become a single parent.”

“No. But look at the end result,” my dad said, his voice cracked, his face frailer than it once was. “It’s amazing.”

Source photographs from the Mari family

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The Journey rockers share how they discover their new lead singer, Arnel Pineda of the Philippines, through a Youtube video.Subscribe to People http://bit...
Journey Co-Founder George Tickner Dies at 76, Band Member Says
By Esther Sun. George Tickner, co-founder and original rhythm guitarist of the rock band Journey, has died at age 76, band member Neal Schon said in a Facebook post . Schon, a fellow Journey co ...
Net Worth, Journey, Wife, Children, Girlfriend Death
Steve Perry is a singer and songwriter by profession and American by nationality. He is best known as the lead singer of the rock band Journey. Steve Perry (Image: theguardian) Steve Perry - Age, Parents, Siblings. Steve Perry's birth took place on January 22, 1949, in Hanford, California, USA.
Toto's Steve Lukather and Journey's Jonathan Cain's Kids Trevor and
Toto's Steve Lukather and Journey's Jonathan Cain's Children Trevor and Madison Wed in L.A. The couple tied the knot in a romantic black tie wedding in Laurel Canyon after four years of dating ...
Journey (band)
Journey hired Steve Perry as their new lead singer on October 10, 1977. Perry made his live debut with the band at the Old Waldorf on October 28, 1977, stepping into His Master's Studios and Cherokee Studios from October to December.
Neal Schon interview on Journey's new album, Steve Perry before 50th
Journey's Neal Schon says he and Steve Perry are 'in a good place' before band's 50th anniversary. Melissa Ruggieri. USA TODAY. 0:00. 1:36. On the cusp of turning 50, the band that etched "Don ...
Whatever Happened to Journey's Original Singer Steve Perry?
Steve Perry, lead vocalist of the rock band Journey, watches the game between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium on May 8, 2009 in Los Angeles, California ...
Journey celebrates 50th anniversary: Rock band members then and now
Journey recently celebrated 50 years since the band first formed. The band's most well-remembered lead singer, Steve Perry, was spotted on a walk in Los Angeles earlier this month. The 74-year-old ...
Singer Melissa Etheridge Enjoys Sharing Birthday With 'Supportive' Wife
Etheridge, who shares her two children, twins Johnnie and Miller, with Tammy Lynn Michaels, her former wife. She also has two children with her ex partner and film director Julie Cypher, whom she also shares to children with, Bailey, and Beckett, who passed away at the age of 21 from causes related to his opioid addiction.. Before marrying Wallem, Etheridge recalls the friendship they had for ...
Crazy Town's Shifty Shellshock Was Homeless In the Months Before ...
Seth Binzer-- the lead singer of Crazy Town -- was homeless in the months preceding his death -- according to his friend and sober coach Tim Ryan... who tells us he was helping Binzer on his ...
Crazy Town Frontman Shifty Shellshock Dead at 49
Crazy Town frontman Shifty Shellshock, whose real name was Seth Binzer, died at his Los Angeles home at the age of 49 on Monday, June 24, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner.
Racing to Retake a Beloved Trip, Before Dementia Takes Everything
My dad always remembered his childhood journey through Europe. Now, with Alzheimer's claiming his memories, we tried to recreate it.