Sometimes, even the greatest albums can have one or two crappy songs on them - as Journey guitarist Neal Schon knows only too well!
Most Journey fans think of the early ’80s as the band’s peak, when they delivered the classic albums Escape and Frontiers.
Escape features Journey’s most popular song, Don’t Stop Believin’, plus other hits including Who’s Crying Now and Open Arms.
Frontiers was released two years after Escape in 1983, and includes the anthem Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) and the hit ballad Faithfully.
“Obviously, Escape is one of our best records,” Schon said in a 2015 interview with Classic Rock. “But also I felt that Frontiers was – in a different seam.
“With Frontiers, the band was going boldly where nobody had gone before. It was an experimental record for us.
"I think some of it really hit right on the money and then some of it was a bit of a miss.”
Famously, the band recorded two classic songs for Frontiers that didn’t make the cut for the album – Only The Young and Ask The Lonely…
“That’s correct,” Schon said. “One of the biggest mistakes we ever made!”
Only The Young, written by Schon, Perry and keyboard player Jonathan Cain, was first recorded by the band Scandal, fronted by Patty Smyth, who later married tennis legend John McEnroe. Journey’s version of Only The Young was first featured on the soundtrack to the 1985 movie Vision Quest and later released as a single.
Ask The Lonely was first released on the soundtrack to the romcom Two Of A Kind, in which John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John were reunited on screen for the first time since Grease.
Only The Young and Ask The Lonely were dropped from the Frontiers album in favour of the songs Back Talk and Troubled Child.
When Classic Rock asked which songs should not have been on that album, Schon relied without hesitation: “Back Talk, definitely,” he said.
Schon also told Classic Rock about his relationship with Steve Perry, the singer who starred for Journey in those golden years.
“Steve and I had some really amazing times together – when we first got together and for years after that,” he recalled. “He was a very funny guy, and he liked to party with the best of us.
“In the beginning, when we wrote Lights and Patiently, the first two songs we wrote together, we realised immediately that we had chemistry. And the guy was really funny to be around, so we hung out all the time. We were very tight and close for years and years.”
Schon explained how this relationship eventually broke down.
“Things happen along the way – women come and go, and things sometimes go sideways, which it did, and I was sorry to see that happen, but it did.
“It wasn’t really a fault of anyone’s. We all had a lot of different things to deal with: you’re growing up, you’re in a big band, and you’re making lots of money. You’re doing whatever you’re doing and it’s not helping the situation. It’s hard to keep it all together. But things happen for a reason.”
He also stressed that he never wanted Perry to leave the band.
“I never kicked him out of the band,” Schon said. “He chose not to perform.
“He didn’t want to sing with us. He didn’t want to do a record. He didn’t want to do anything. That was pretty much where he was at. And he wanted us to sit still and not do anything too. But we all wrote the music together, and I think we’re all entitled to play it if we wish.”
