What Would Journey Do?

SF Weekly devotes its cover to a question that has been burning up America for the last seven years: How has Journey been surviving in the post-Steve Perry era? Many interesting bits here: Did you know that American Idol's Randy Jackson played bass for the wimp-rock supergroup back in the colonial era? That a star on the Hollywood Walk-of-Fame is easier to get than, say, a Congressional Medal of Honor? The hero of the story—which (spoiler alert) ends with a bittersweet surprise meeting between Perry and his estranged bandmates in Tinseltown—is the band's manager, who mercifully turned Journey from a prog-rock brontosaurus into a hitmaking triceratops, and who alone seems to understand the limitations of a single band in an indifferent pop universe. There's even a cadre of fans clustering around replacement singer Steve Augeri:

Donna is one of a small but loyal core of Journey fans who have in fact stopped believing in Steve Perry, enthusiastically embracing his replacement instead. Her California license plate, which she holds above her head, reads "*AUJRNY." When Steve Augeri signed her left breast after a show, she headed straight to a tattoo parlor. This is not a woman who dwells in the past.

"He's just class," she explains about Augeri. "For this band, he's Number 1. He can sing, he's good with the crowd, he's great with his fans."

Well, not all of his fans. "That's not Journey! No Steve Perry, no Journey!" says a woman named Laureen who protests from behind the barricades. "This guy's a fraud. He's a really nice man, but he's a fraud. He's just trying to sound like Steve [Perry]."

The funny thing is, nobody really denies this. When David Lee Roth left Van Halen, the band replaced him with a completely different voice in Sammy Hagar. But when Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain and Ross Valory decided, seven years ago, to move on without Perry, there appears to have been very little doubt that Journey wasn't going to be Journey without Perry's sledgehammer tenor -- even if he wasn't the guy wielding it.

"So what if it's not exactly the same?" Schon says of Augeri's pipes. "It's damn close enough for people to have a good time."

Screaming fans still trump screaming reviewers.

True to his reputation, Augeri himself handles the question with grace and candor. "Frankly, I know where my bread is buttered," he says, "and the reason why I'm here in the first place is because I sounded like Steve. And I accept that with open arms."

(Yes, people, "open arms.")

Though I've never been a fan of Journey in any of its instantiations, I learned a useful lesson in the pointlessness of rock cred while watching the hilarious Journey: Behind the Music. The left-behind Journeymen passionately hate Perry for nixing a reunion tour due to what was pretty clearly a psychosomatic hip ailment. But watching Schon and the other schmos bellyaching about how Perry's syrupy sounds destroyed the band's arty fusion roots put me solidly on Perry's side. A band that would barely have merited an appearance on Comcast local cable's San Francisco Sound became the most successful musical act since Pan, and they're badmouthing the guy who did it for them because he was too fruity. By the time the story got around to Perry's hysterical illness, I was applauding him for leaving the no-talent ingrates in the lurch. Even in powerpop, Atlas shrugs!

I believe there was a similar situation with Dennis DeYoung and his former Styxmates. But there are only so many notes of bad music the ear can hear in a single evening…