Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ is one of the best-loved rock anthems of all time - with more than 2 billion streams on Spotify alone.
But for the man who sang and co-wrote the song, there was a moment of panic when he feared that his masterpiece might be used as the soundtrack to the bloodiest scene in TV history.
“To be honest,” Steve Perry said, “I was very concerned.”
Don’t Stop Believin’ was originally a top 10 hit in the US in 1981, and was written by Perry with the band’s guitarist Neal Schon and keyboard player Jonathan Cain.
In a 2015 interview with Classic Rock, Perry said of the song’s uplifting melody and lyrics: “I give all of my songs the same heartfelt time as you would children. You try to give them the information they need to go out in the world and emotionally survive. They all got the same amount of love and consideration and focus. But why some end up becoming something that the audience really gravitates to… gee, I don’t know.”
For many years after its original release, Don’t Stop Believin’ received sustained airplay on classic rock and pop radio in America, and in 1998 it was featured in the Adam Sandler comedy The Wedding Singer. But according to Perry, the 2003 movie Monster, starring Charlize Theron, was the catalyst in the turning an old hit song into a global phenomenon.
As he told Classic Rock: “I can tell you the arc that I know was fairly responsible for its resurgence. It started with Patty Jenkins making the movie Monster.
“I loved the way the song was used. It was such a perfect emotional expression of love – [quoting his lyrics] ‘People livin’ just to find emotion, hidin’ somewhere in the night…’ It was really a beautiful usage of it.
“Because it was an independent film, it wasn’t a large budget situation, so we kind of gave the song away, and that started the whole process.
“And then eventually it ended up in the last, closing scene in the last episode of The Sopranos.”
This is when things got a little scary for Steve Perry.
“I loved the movie Goodfellas,” he said. “I loved the movie Casino. So here’s the The Sopranos, a TV equivalent of that. I felt it was great.”
But when David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, requested permission to use the song for the show’s climactic finale, Perry feared that this scene might be a bloodbath.
“Before I said yes, I said I want to know what’s going to happen during the playing of the song in the scene,” he said. “I really didn’t want my song playing while a whole family got whacked!
“I was very concerned about where David Chase was going take that final episode. It could be a Scorsese kind of moment. So I thought maybe David Chase was going to go there and do something incredibly massive at the end of it all.
“And they were so tight about the last scene, obviously, that they would not reveal it. I said, ‘I’m really sorry. I wish I could give my approval in the dark, but I can’t.’ So what happened was this…
“On the Thursday before the episode aired on the Sunday night, I get a call from the girl who handles my sub-licensing, and she tells me that David Chase has got hold of her and says if I swear to not reveal he’ll tell me.
“So she was told how it ended, she forwarded it to me, and I was secure with it being used. I said, ‘Fine, go ahead and approve it.’
“But they did not tell me how that scene ended - that it goes to black and there’s a big mystery. They kept that to themselves. So I was in the dark just like everybody else was.”
In the end, Perry was delighted in how it all turned out, especially the moment when lead character Tony Soprano selects Don’t Stop Believin’ on a jukebox.
“I loved seeing Tony Soprano sitting in a booth in a diner with a little jukebox playing,” he said. “He’s thumbing through the pages looking at what’s available, and he flips it and it’s Journey and then something by Tony Bennett. So then your mind says, ‘Oh, he loves Tony Bennett! Come on, he’s a New Jersey guy, he’s going to play some Tony Bennett.’ And then he reaches into his pocket, pops a quarter in there, pushes some buttons and Don’t Stop Believin’ starts. It was the most perfect throw-the-scent-off thing that David Chase did in that moment.”
As for the popularity of that song, Perry said he found it difficult to comprehend.
“I don’t think there’s a really clean answer for that,” he said. “But you can only be grateful that some magical thing like that happens at all. You can’t plan something like that. If you could, you’d do it every time.
“That song just has a life of its own, and I’m very grateful for that. It has just continued to be embraced by generation after generation. It’s kind of overwhelming for me.”
