The Ever Bitter Herbie Herbert
Apr 15, 2006 0:22:01 GMT -5
Post by arden on Apr 15, 2006 0:22:01 GMT -5
This guy is a real piece of work. Proves Perry isn't the reason Herbie isn't with Journey anymore IMO. He says he "wasted his life on a bunch of losers" !!
It also seems to me that he is rewriting history a bit with his version of how Steve Perry came to be in Journey.
The story of Neal and Jon giving Steve a hard time in the studio when he was recording Open Arms just shows Jon has always been a jerk.
If you are offended by crude language, you may not want to read this "CRUDE" is Herbie's middle name.
www.classicrockrevisited.com/Interviews06/herbieherbert06.htm
CRR: Gregg and Neal weren’t completely sold on the idea of Perry as the new front man were they? How did you finally convince them that this was the guy who was going to play a pivotal role in changing the direction of the band?
Herbie: Absolute force of will, for which no good deed goes unpunished. When I initially talked the label into doing it, the head of product development at CBS had a singer that he liked who was managed by Barry Fey the promoter out of Denver.
CRR: This was Robert Fleischman?
Herbie: Yeah, Robert Fleishman. I brought him out and tried him out and the band loved him. I put him in the band and put them out on tour to see how he’d do and the guy just proceeded to just totally gross me out. He was such a fuckin’ poodle. We were playing this arena in Fresno, Steve Perry’s hometown. Steve Perry had been coming in and out of my life for years and years. He was a jack off. He would give tapes to Jack Villanueva and Jack would throw them away because he lived with another friend named Larry, who grew up with Perry in Fresno. Perry would come up and snort their blow, smoke their weed and basically tell them if they didn’t take care of him and give him everything he wanted that he would rat out what Larry was doing to his mother. So, they just considered that to be a shanghai, you know?
He would always be asking them to introduce him to me and give me his tape. One night at a show at The Kabuki, where I was trying to get the band Azteca a deal, Perry walks up to me and gives me the big spiel and gives me a real-to-real tape of himself. The problem was I didn’t have a reel-to-reel player. It just sat in my office and my buddies who I grew up with, Tower of Power, were looking for a singer to replace Rick Stevens, who had murdered somebody. I said “The guy on this tape might be able to sing . Why don’t you take the tape?” They did and they listened to it and they liked it. They auditioned him and a month later I asked them “Hey, did you ever check that tape out?” They said, “Yeah, it was good. He can really sing.” I said “Why didn’t you put him in the band?” They said, “He was white; we wanted a black guy.”
CRR: Steve Perry actually auditioned for Tower of Power?
Herbie: He actually did. When I was on the Golden Gate Bridge driving across with John Villanueva, I was on my way to meet with Cindy Fey, Barry’s wife, to negotiate the deal for Robert Fleishman, I looked at John and he looked at me and we both just said “Steve Perry.” I thought what the f**k, why does this guy keep popping into our heads? I still hadn’t even heard the m*th*rf**k*r. So, while we had Robert Fleishman touring with the band, and I’m dealing with his nonsense, we happened to be in Hawaii and our product manager Charlie Coplen, who was in charge of Journey’s product at CBS records, is having lunch with me. He says “Man, I almost left the label.” There was this act that his best friend played drums in, Craig Kramph, and none of the labels wanted to sign them. They had had a showcase where they had all the mangers in town. He believed in them so much, and nobody was interested. I said to him, “Charlie, I bet you’re gonna tell me the singers name is Steve Perry.” He goes “How’d you know?” I said to him, “Send me a copy of this tape which blew your skirt up” and he did. I listened to the tape for about 60 seconds, turned it off and dialed the number on the box.
Steve Perry’s mother answers the phone. I said “Could I speak to Steve?” She says “He’s at work but he’s left the music business.” I go, “Why is that?” And she says, “He’s 29 years old. He’s made so many demos and no one ever wanted to do anything. He got sick worrying about it, so now he cleans turkey coops and on the weekend he works with his step-father building houses trying to pay off his debts. He’s through with the music business.”
I got his number at work and talked him into painfully taking a week off. I told him I’d make up for his salary. I had to get permission from his father and I had to negotiate every iota of it, but I got him up there. I said to him, “I love this tape, I wanna manage this band.” This was the 4th of July weekend in ’77. Steve said, “Call me after the weekend and we’ll discuss it.” I called him on a Tuesday after the four day weekend and he was really upset. I asked him, “What’s up?” and he goes, “The bass player in the band just died in an accident over the weekend; he’s crucial, the band is no more. Forget it, I’m done.”
I eventually called him back and convinced him to just come and hang with me; maybe I would do something different. It wasn’t until then that I thought that maybe this guy could be a viable replacement for Fleishman. We were on tour with ELP and I got Perry to come to my house and I got him to go to some shows. I told everybody he was John Villanueva’s Portuguese cousin. He spoke fluent Portuguese and he certainly looked fresh off the boat, so everybody believed me. I had him watching and observing but he wasn’t all that interested. When we were in Long Beach, I made sure that Fleishman was completely preoccupied doing interviews so he couldn’t make the sound check. I just went up there and said, “I want you to do ‘For You’ which was an original song that they hadn’t put out. It was one that Robert sang. Perry knew the lyrics so I handed the mic to Perry and said, “This guy’s going to sing it.”
The band played it, he sang it and ushers, stagehands and security came from all over the arena -- they’re all there watching this guy sing this song and when it was over they all applauded like it was scripted. I just grabbed the mic after the song and the band was like, “What was that?” I said, “Never mind, just a little experiment.”
When we played Fresno, Pat came out to the mixing board and said “Herbie, Robert says if he doesn’t sing the whole show, from beginning to end, he’s quitting.” I go “Are you serious? Is that a promise, a threat or a personal favor?” What we would usually do was start the show and Gregg Rolie would do 2 songs. Then, he’d introduce Robert and he’d do the balance of the show. It was the right way to handle it but this guy was just power tripping. A few nights before, at the Oakland Coliseum in the dressing room, he said “Would you get all these people out of the dressing room, they’re smoking.” He was just being a poodle; I wanted to slap him. I told Pat that he should go back and tell Robert to not get too sweaty or anything. I told him to tell him just to go out the back door and not look back. If he was still there after the show, he could have got his ass kicked severely. Sure enough, he does the show the way he’s supposed to and he tries to behave. I ran from the mixing board at the end of the show and I grabbed the towels that Pat usually distributed. They all came off and headed backstage and I put a towel around Robert and had him leave towards the back door and I said, “Robert, you must not have heard the instructions. Listen carefully, pick ‘em up, lay ‘em down, if you look back I’ll beat you so fuckin hard you’ll have to eat dinner through a straw for 2 years.” You don’t get a second chance to give me a ration of nuts. That was the end of that. I went into the dressing room and I’m eating from the deli tray or whatever and I’m talking to the guys and they go “Hey where’s Robert?” I say, “Robert is no longer with us.” Neal says, (adopts Neal’s voice), “What do you mean?” I said, “He’s no longer in the band anymore; he pissed me off so I showed him the door.”
Neal really wanted to stand up to me at that point and he made a big deal about not wanting Perry. I went outside and gave the cassette tape to Neal’s wife at the time, Tina. I said, “Tina put this in the stereo and when Neal wakes up hit the play button. When he finally asks, ‘who is that?’ just dial my number and hand him the phone.” She actually pulled it off and did exactly that. All of a sudden I hear “Hello” and I go “Neal, that’s Steve Perry, the new singer in Journey.” It happened exactly like that.
CRR: How would you describe the initial chemistry in the songwriting between Steve and Neal?
Herbie: I brought him in and said, “Let’s talk about songs and material” and he basically played “Lights” and “Stay Awhile.” They were impressed. As the tour went on, they were in Denver; Neal and Steve got together and within the first half hour they collaborated and wrote the song “Patiently,” which I think is a brilliant, beautiful tune.
They realized then how good each of them was and the respect built but Perry was basically a primate -- more primate than human. He wanted to divide and conquer and get between the relationship Neal and I had, which was really a father/son kind of thing.
CRR: When did the relationship between you and Perry start to become strained?
Herbie: From the very first moment. Instantly with a person like that -- he is a real consummate piece of excrement. I haven’t seen the guy in years but he’s just a bad person. I wouldn’t piss down his throat if his heart were on fire.
CRR: It took the band awhile to develop a real solid steady lineup and just when things looked like they finally might stabilize, Gregg decided he was going to leave. How did you feel when he told you?
Herbie: I was devastated. We went to lunch in Frankfurt. We were on the Departure tour in 1980 and he told me he wanted to stop; he wanted to have a family. He felt that he had done really well with Santana and he’d made eight records with Journey and felt that he wouldn’t want for anything. I was devastated because he was the best client I’d ever had. It was no accident that he was the founding member of two multi-platinum acts. He was just a solid citizen by comparison to anybody else that I ever managed. I thought that it was fuckin’ bullshit. How was I going to fill his shoes? We had the Baby’s opening for us on that tour and Gregg told me their keyboard player, Jon Cain, could do the job. I hadn’t even noticed the guy he was so nondescript. He said “Yeah, well he’s kinda homogenized and pasteurized but he can do it.”
CRR: What were your initial feelings about him?
Herbie: He was a total piece of nuts; a fuckin’ not a very nice person.
CRR: Did he have his own demands and agenda from the beginning?
Herbie: I picked him up at the airport and I put his keyboards in the back of my Porsche. I get in my seat and as soon as he sits down in the car, he says, “This is a tape of my wife Tané Cain. You’re gonna manage her career, get her a label deal and make her happen or I’m just gonna get back out and unload my keyboards.” I had the band waiting at the rehearsal hall. We had never discussed this. I said “You’re gonna lay this on me right now?” He says, “Yeah, and you’re going to agree right now or I’m going to get out of the car.” I felt like I was over a barrel. I should have taken his keyboards out leaned them up against the wall and just driven away and found a real human being. I don’t care if you’re a high yogi in the Himalayas and you can levitate, you can’t get a tiger to change his stripes. This guy is never going to be a good guy. He’s going to be a guy that if you make him rich, holy nuts. They’ve even written about this in the Wall Street Journal. I read an article called “Situational Narcissism.” It said that when sudden fame and fortune come to people, they could develop narcissistic personality disorder. Really? What the f**k? Coming from the Wall Street Journal, I have a higher expectation -- let’s get real. This disease is so fuckin’ pervasive that for you to be writing about it at this late date, shame on you people. Their IQ increases geometrically, their fuckin’ thingy dimension increases, everything.
CRR: The Escape album was definitely the pinnacle for the band commercially; would you say it was artistically as well?
Herbie: That was a d**n fuckin’ good record and Cain did bring some real songwriting talents to the band. We were in the studio making Escape -- and this is another true story -- the guys should be fuckin’ embarrassed out of their minds about this one. Neal and Jon were in the control room behind Kevin Elson and Mike Stone, who were engineering and producing.
Perry was in the booth trying to sing this ballad called “Open Arms.” He is singing his heart out and these guys were just busting his balls, taking cheap shots and calling him Wayne, like Wayne Newton. They were doing all this really derogatory and negative stuff. I go, “What the f**k is the matter with you guys?”
This was a hit song and he was trying to do a monster job of it and here they were taking shots and f**k**g with him. I took them into the lounge and said, “This is unacceptable. He’s obviously written a fabulous song and this is exactly the type of song that will launch a career.” Jon Cain says, “I wrote it.” I said “You wrote the song and you’re taking potshots at him and teasing him, talking about how lame it is? You are a sick fuckin’ dog.”
They didn’t want the track on the record but I insisted on it. I sequenced all the records and I said “I’ll put it as the last song on side two but it’s on there.” Of course, that was the biggest single of their career and the #1 power ballad of all time according to MTV. That was the kind of mentality they had. These guys would have shot themselves in the foot. My mother always told me “Do not cast your pearls before a swine” and I’ll be dammed if I didn’t go and waste my life on a bunch of losers.
I had a great run but I came away from it with not a lot of respect. I wouldn’t be surprised if every one of these guys ended up with a pencil cup in their hands, impoverished and bankrupt at some point. I had them poised to be very, very wealthy guys.
CRR: The next record Frontiers was the really the beginning of the end.
Herbie: They just wanted to change everything. They wanted to change the album art. They didn’t want to use Kelly and Mouse all of a sudden. They wanted to do anything to change my formula. Instead of the Freedom album, they made Raised on Radio. They just kept bastardizing their own image and themes that should have been carried on. It was just stupid; they threw themselves under the bus.
CRR: It was a real tug of war between you and the band.
Herbie: By 83-84, in that time period, the band would sit there in our Board of Directors room, at this very long table. Each guy would be sitting with his attorney and accountant. At one end would be Steve Perry and Lee Phillips and at the other end would be me and Michael Krassner. It would be just me and Perry going at each other and all the other guys watching it like a tennis match -- right to left, left to right. Not one of them ever once grew vertebrae and said, “You know I can’t remember Herbie ever making a mistake on any of this stuff.” They just let it all go down. In ’84 and ’85, when they refused to tour, they made me liquidate all of their real estate investments and holdings that would have made them all so fabulously wealthy just like me [laughing]. I had other independent investments. To me they’re an embarrassment. They have played more shows with this new kid, Steve Augeri, than they did when they were originally together. How can people miss you if you don’t go away? They need to get themselves into a financial position where they do not need to tour every year but they can’t seem to break away from that.
CRR: Was it Perry’s decision to fire both Ross and Steve?
Herbie: Yeah, for which I totally stood up and said, “You will pay them as if they were on this tour. We will have the additional expense of sidemen. You can get Mike Baird and Randy Jackson if you want, but you’re making a stupid mistake and it’s going to cost you.”
CRR: How did your relationship with the band end?
Herbie: I continued to work it through ’93. When Bill Graham died I wanted to retire from everything and stop. Somehow Jon Cain hallucinates and says that he phoned me up and fired me [laughing]. He said that in an interview on some T.V. show but I fail to recollect that. Who was he? I was the only shareholder. As I stepped back, I issued stock to all of them in Nightmare Inc. and just walked; that’s basically it.
CRR: Did you feel betrayed by Perry? After all it was you who brought him into the band, gave him the opportunity and fought for him to be in the band, but ultimately it came down to issues of control.
Herbie: Betrayed by Perry? That’s never really occurred to me because he has never been loyal to anyone let alone himself, so there were never any expectations. However, at the point of time in the early ‘90’s when it was time to move on without him, I would have worked with the band again and taken a singer like Kevin Chalfant on.
CRR: I know Ross, Gregg and Steve and worked with him in The Storm. Was there ever any serious considerations to have Kevin front Journey?
Herbie: I was really moving towards retirement and I was roasted for Thunder Road, which is a drug rehab center that I’ve worked with. I was in Hawaii while Joel Selbin was putting the show together. I didn’t know who would perform. Moby Grape came and performed and all these bands that I was friendly with and Journey performed with Kevin Chalfant. I was shocked. Rolling Stone magazine, in one of their more biting random notes, they said that not even Steve Perry’s mother would have missed him in the band, that’s how good Kevin Chalfant was. So, he did that one show. He’s a considerably better singer than Augeri -- might not look as good, doesn’t look bad, but he can really sing.
Jon and Kevin were in a band called 707 together and there is some kind of baggage there. With Jon Cain, baggage is his middle name. That was a mistake though, they really should have followed through with that but to me it was really Neal Schon who threw me under the bus because they were all unanimous to go forward with Kevin. Then Perry contacted Cain and they met. After they met, they contacted Neal with the notion that it was so important to re-unite with Steve Perry and continue Journey with him, which makes complete and total sense. Everybody wants all the original players. There was this one little snafu. Steve Perry couldn’t sing. I said “Do you remember when Bill Graham died and the band came back together and performed in Golden Gate Park?” Jon and Neal were there and when Perry showed up he said “Herbie, what songs are we going to play?” I said, “I don’t know, maybe ‘Lights’ or ‘Don’t Stop Believin.’” I rattled off three or four choices and he says, “You get the lyrics together because I certainly don’t remember the words. You write them down and tell Jon and Neal to take them down two steps.” That means if you’re in the key of ‘E’ you have to go down to ‘A.’
Taking a song down two whole steps is a monumental thing. It really demonstrated how good Jon and Neal are as musicians, that they were able to pull it off without any practice or rehearsal. With over half a million people in the park, surely people tape-recorded that performance and you can hear that it’s two whole steps down. Even then Perry could not hold his pitch and sing in tune; his voice was really rough. If he could, he would be Journey. He went out and did that solo tour to do Journey but he couldn’t. He kept postponing shows and ultimately he had to cancel the thing. He doesn’t have the health and he can’t sing anymore. He lost his talent. Think Karma.
CRR: Have you had a chance to see the DVD that he produced of the Escape show?
Herbie: He produced? I produced it. I wanted to release it as a live record and DVD a long time ago but Steve Perry said, “No, absolutely not. I look like a candy cane in heat.” That’s a direct quote.
CRR: A candy cane in heat? [laughing]
Herbie: A candy cane in heat. Now all of a sudden it’s out. There was nothing to produce. It was already fully mixed and ready to go back then. It is what it is. What did he do? He didn’t add anything; he didn’t overdub a fuckin’ thing. He didn’t change a d**n thing. So now he puts it out because he realized that it was pretty fuckin’good. Anything to be in defiance of me and my projects, and that was one of my projects. Talk about way too late. Back then it could have really sold, but now who cares?
CRR: It’s a footnote.
Herbie: A footnote. Just stupid on steroids. I said to Neal and Jon “You wanna reunite with Steve Perry. Are you fuckin’ high? Do you remember Golden Gate Park?”
CRR: What did you think about Trial By Fire?
Herbie: Monotone. If you can tell me where I missed the lift off -- it just never went anywhere. Not one song ever started somewhere and went somewhere, and that’s what Journey was all about. Let’s take it and take it higher and if you want to come back to earth with it fine but go somewhere first. It just never launched or got off the ground.
I told them this “Here’s the deal, you can hold me to this and I’ll put it writing. I will eat nuts, you provide the excrement, and I will bark at the moon, you designate the time and place, if this m*th*rf**k*r ever does one show with you. That would mean that I am totally out of my mind and I am totally wrong but I believe this m*th*rf**k*r will never take the stage with either of you. He hates you. He’s gonna lure you into his little trap and he’ll get complete control of you and then if he has a little bit of a feeling of sympathy and compassion, he’ll then tell you, ‘f**k you’” That’s exactly what he did. That album didn’t earn itself back; they spent too much making it. It never got into the black and he never did a show with them and so they wasted, in truth, from the end of the Frontiers tour until they did their first shows with Augeri in ’98 --that’s 15 fuckin’ years. The chips they left on the table over those 15 years can never be recovered and the purchasing power of 1984 and 1985 dollars cannot be duplicated by 2006 dollars. This is just simple rudimentary math. You’ve heard of inflation? These guys are so impaired. They have infinite creative intelligence but when it comes to acquired knowledge, they couldn’t be more, [pauses] ignorant is the word. They’re just ignorant of the simplest stuff.
CRR: You did keep their back catalogue selling very well though through all the years they weren’t together.
Herbie: When they stopped, and this will give you the benefit of the doubt, including Raised on Radio, they had sold 20 million records. When they started back up again in 1998 they were well over 65 million.
It also seems to me that he is rewriting history a bit with his version of how Steve Perry came to be in Journey.
The story of Neal and Jon giving Steve a hard time in the studio when he was recording Open Arms just shows Jon has always been a jerk.
If you are offended by crude language, you may not want to read this "CRUDE" is Herbie's middle name.
www.classicrockrevisited.com/Interviews06/herbieherbert06.htm
CRR: Gregg and Neal weren’t completely sold on the idea of Perry as the new front man were they? How did you finally convince them that this was the guy who was going to play a pivotal role in changing the direction of the band?
Herbie: Absolute force of will, for which no good deed goes unpunished. When I initially talked the label into doing it, the head of product development at CBS had a singer that he liked who was managed by Barry Fey the promoter out of Denver.
CRR: This was Robert Fleischman?
Herbie: Yeah, Robert Fleishman. I brought him out and tried him out and the band loved him. I put him in the band and put them out on tour to see how he’d do and the guy just proceeded to just totally gross me out. He was such a fuckin’ poodle. We were playing this arena in Fresno, Steve Perry’s hometown. Steve Perry had been coming in and out of my life for years and years. He was a jack off. He would give tapes to Jack Villanueva and Jack would throw them away because he lived with another friend named Larry, who grew up with Perry in Fresno. Perry would come up and snort their blow, smoke their weed and basically tell them if they didn’t take care of him and give him everything he wanted that he would rat out what Larry was doing to his mother. So, they just considered that to be a shanghai, you know?
He would always be asking them to introduce him to me and give me his tape. One night at a show at The Kabuki, where I was trying to get the band Azteca a deal, Perry walks up to me and gives me the big spiel and gives me a real-to-real tape of himself. The problem was I didn’t have a reel-to-reel player. It just sat in my office and my buddies who I grew up with, Tower of Power, were looking for a singer to replace Rick Stevens, who had murdered somebody. I said “The guy on this tape might be able to sing . Why don’t you take the tape?” They did and they listened to it and they liked it. They auditioned him and a month later I asked them “Hey, did you ever check that tape out?” They said, “Yeah, it was good. He can really sing.” I said “Why didn’t you put him in the band?” They said, “He was white; we wanted a black guy.”
CRR: Steve Perry actually auditioned for Tower of Power?
Herbie: He actually did. When I was on the Golden Gate Bridge driving across with John Villanueva, I was on my way to meet with Cindy Fey, Barry’s wife, to negotiate the deal for Robert Fleishman, I looked at John and he looked at me and we both just said “Steve Perry.” I thought what the f**k, why does this guy keep popping into our heads? I still hadn’t even heard the m*th*rf**k*r. So, while we had Robert Fleishman touring with the band, and I’m dealing with his nonsense, we happened to be in Hawaii and our product manager Charlie Coplen, who was in charge of Journey’s product at CBS records, is having lunch with me. He says “Man, I almost left the label.” There was this act that his best friend played drums in, Craig Kramph, and none of the labels wanted to sign them. They had had a showcase where they had all the mangers in town. He believed in them so much, and nobody was interested. I said to him, “Charlie, I bet you’re gonna tell me the singers name is Steve Perry.” He goes “How’d you know?” I said to him, “Send me a copy of this tape which blew your skirt up” and he did. I listened to the tape for about 60 seconds, turned it off and dialed the number on the box.
Steve Perry’s mother answers the phone. I said “Could I speak to Steve?” She says “He’s at work but he’s left the music business.” I go, “Why is that?” And she says, “He’s 29 years old. He’s made so many demos and no one ever wanted to do anything. He got sick worrying about it, so now he cleans turkey coops and on the weekend he works with his step-father building houses trying to pay off his debts. He’s through with the music business.”
I got his number at work and talked him into painfully taking a week off. I told him I’d make up for his salary. I had to get permission from his father and I had to negotiate every iota of it, but I got him up there. I said to him, “I love this tape, I wanna manage this band.” This was the 4th of July weekend in ’77. Steve said, “Call me after the weekend and we’ll discuss it.” I called him on a Tuesday after the four day weekend and he was really upset. I asked him, “What’s up?” and he goes, “The bass player in the band just died in an accident over the weekend; he’s crucial, the band is no more. Forget it, I’m done.”
I eventually called him back and convinced him to just come and hang with me; maybe I would do something different. It wasn’t until then that I thought that maybe this guy could be a viable replacement for Fleishman. We were on tour with ELP and I got Perry to come to my house and I got him to go to some shows. I told everybody he was John Villanueva’s Portuguese cousin. He spoke fluent Portuguese and he certainly looked fresh off the boat, so everybody believed me. I had him watching and observing but he wasn’t all that interested. When we were in Long Beach, I made sure that Fleishman was completely preoccupied doing interviews so he couldn’t make the sound check. I just went up there and said, “I want you to do ‘For You’ which was an original song that they hadn’t put out. It was one that Robert sang. Perry knew the lyrics so I handed the mic to Perry and said, “This guy’s going to sing it.”
The band played it, he sang it and ushers, stagehands and security came from all over the arena -- they’re all there watching this guy sing this song and when it was over they all applauded like it was scripted. I just grabbed the mic after the song and the band was like, “What was that?” I said, “Never mind, just a little experiment.”
When we played Fresno, Pat came out to the mixing board and said “Herbie, Robert says if he doesn’t sing the whole show, from beginning to end, he’s quitting.” I go “Are you serious? Is that a promise, a threat or a personal favor?” What we would usually do was start the show and Gregg Rolie would do 2 songs. Then, he’d introduce Robert and he’d do the balance of the show. It was the right way to handle it but this guy was just power tripping. A few nights before, at the Oakland Coliseum in the dressing room, he said “Would you get all these people out of the dressing room, they’re smoking.” He was just being a poodle; I wanted to slap him. I told Pat that he should go back and tell Robert to not get too sweaty or anything. I told him to tell him just to go out the back door and not look back. If he was still there after the show, he could have got his ass kicked severely. Sure enough, he does the show the way he’s supposed to and he tries to behave. I ran from the mixing board at the end of the show and I grabbed the towels that Pat usually distributed. They all came off and headed backstage and I put a towel around Robert and had him leave towards the back door and I said, “Robert, you must not have heard the instructions. Listen carefully, pick ‘em up, lay ‘em down, if you look back I’ll beat you so fuckin hard you’ll have to eat dinner through a straw for 2 years.” You don’t get a second chance to give me a ration of nuts. That was the end of that. I went into the dressing room and I’m eating from the deli tray or whatever and I’m talking to the guys and they go “Hey where’s Robert?” I say, “Robert is no longer with us.” Neal says, (adopts Neal’s voice), “What do you mean?” I said, “He’s no longer in the band anymore; he pissed me off so I showed him the door.”
Neal really wanted to stand up to me at that point and he made a big deal about not wanting Perry. I went outside and gave the cassette tape to Neal’s wife at the time, Tina. I said, “Tina put this in the stereo and when Neal wakes up hit the play button. When he finally asks, ‘who is that?’ just dial my number and hand him the phone.” She actually pulled it off and did exactly that. All of a sudden I hear “Hello” and I go “Neal, that’s Steve Perry, the new singer in Journey.” It happened exactly like that.
CRR: How would you describe the initial chemistry in the songwriting between Steve and Neal?
Herbie: I brought him in and said, “Let’s talk about songs and material” and he basically played “Lights” and “Stay Awhile.” They were impressed. As the tour went on, they were in Denver; Neal and Steve got together and within the first half hour they collaborated and wrote the song “Patiently,” which I think is a brilliant, beautiful tune.
They realized then how good each of them was and the respect built but Perry was basically a primate -- more primate than human. He wanted to divide and conquer and get between the relationship Neal and I had, which was really a father/son kind of thing.
CRR: When did the relationship between you and Perry start to become strained?
Herbie: From the very first moment. Instantly with a person like that -- he is a real consummate piece of excrement. I haven’t seen the guy in years but he’s just a bad person. I wouldn’t piss down his throat if his heart were on fire.
CRR: It took the band awhile to develop a real solid steady lineup and just when things looked like they finally might stabilize, Gregg decided he was going to leave. How did you feel when he told you?
Herbie: I was devastated. We went to lunch in Frankfurt. We were on the Departure tour in 1980 and he told me he wanted to stop; he wanted to have a family. He felt that he had done really well with Santana and he’d made eight records with Journey and felt that he wouldn’t want for anything. I was devastated because he was the best client I’d ever had. It was no accident that he was the founding member of two multi-platinum acts. He was just a solid citizen by comparison to anybody else that I ever managed. I thought that it was fuckin’ bullshit. How was I going to fill his shoes? We had the Baby’s opening for us on that tour and Gregg told me their keyboard player, Jon Cain, could do the job. I hadn’t even noticed the guy he was so nondescript. He said “Yeah, well he’s kinda homogenized and pasteurized but he can do it.”
CRR: What were your initial feelings about him?
Herbie: He was a total piece of nuts; a fuckin’ not a very nice person.
CRR: Did he have his own demands and agenda from the beginning?
Herbie: I picked him up at the airport and I put his keyboards in the back of my Porsche. I get in my seat and as soon as he sits down in the car, he says, “This is a tape of my wife Tané Cain. You’re gonna manage her career, get her a label deal and make her happen or I’m just gonna get back out and unload my keyboards.” I had the band waiting at the rehearsal hall. We had never discussed this. I said “You’re gonna lay this on me right now?” He says, “Yeah, and you’re going to agree right now or I’m going to get out of the car.” I felt like I was over a barrel. I should have taken his keyboards out leaned them up against the wall and just driven away and found a real human being. I don’t care if you’re a high yogi in the Himalayas and you can levitate, you can’t get a tiger to change his stripes. This guy is never going to be a good guy. He’s going to be a guy that if you make him rich, holy nuts. They’ve even written about this in the Wall Street Journal. I read an article called “Situational Narcissism.” It said that when sudden fame and fortune come to people, they could develop narcissistic personality disorder. Really? What the f**k? Coming from the Wall Street Journal, I have a higher expectation -- let’s get real. This disease is so fuckin’ pervasive that for you to be writing about it at this late date, shame on you people. Their IQ increases geometrically, their fuckin’ thingy dimension increases, everything.
CRR: The Escape album was definitely the pinnacle for the band commercially; would you say it was artistically as well?
Herbie: That was a d**n fuckin’ good record and Cain did bring some real songwriting talents to the band. We were in the studio making Escape -- and this is another true story -- the guys should be fuckin’ embarrassed out of their minds about this one. Neal and Jon were in the control room behind Kevin Elson and Mike Stone, who were engineering and producing.
Perry was in the booth trying to sing this ballad called “Open Arms.” He is singing his heart out and these guys were just busting his balls, taking cheap shots and calling him Wayne, like Wayne Newton. They were doing all this really derogatory and negative stuff. I go, “What the f**k is the matter with you guys?”
This was a hit song and he was trying to do a monster job of it and here they were taking shots and f**k**g with him. I took them into the lounge and said, “This is unacceptable. He’s obviously written a fabulous song and this is exactly the type of song that will launch a career.” Jon Cain says, “I wrote it.” I said “You wrote the song and you’re taking potshots at him and teasing him, talking about how lame it is? You are a sick fuckin’ dog.”
They didn’t want the track on the record but I insisted on it. I sequenced all the records and I said “I’ll put it as the last song on side two but it’s on there.” Of course, that was the biggest single of their career and the #1 power ballad of all time according to MTV. That was the kind of mentality they had. These guys would have shot themselves in the foot. My mother always told me “Do not cast your pearls before a swine” and I’ll be dammed if I didn’t go and waste my life on a bunch of losers.
I had a great run but I came away from it with not a lot of respect. I wouldn’t be surprised if every one of these guys ended up with a pencil cup in their hands, impoverished and bankrupt at some point. I had them poised to be very, very wealthy guys.
CRR: The next record Frontiers was the really the beginning of the end.
Herbie: They just wanted to change everything. They wanted to change the album art. They didn’t want to use Kelly and Mouse all of a sudden. They wanted to do anything to change my formula. Instead of the Freedom album, they made Raised on Radio. They just kept bastardizing their own image and themes that should have been carried on. It was just stupid; they threw themselves under the bus.
CRR: It was a real tug of war between you and the band.
Herbie: By 83-84, in that time period, the band would sit there in our Board of Directors room, at this very long table. Each guy would be sitting with his attorney and accountant. At one end would be Steve Perry and Lee Phillips and at the other end would be me and Michael Krassner. It would be just me and Perry going at each other and all the other guys watching it like a tennis match -- right to left, left to right. Not one of them ever once grew vertebrae and said, “You know I can’t remember Herbie ever making a mistake on any of this stuff.” They just let it all go down. In ’84 and ’85, when they refused to tour, they made me liquidate all of their real estate investments and holdings that would have made them all so fabulously wealthy just like me [laughing]. I had other independent investments. To me they’re an embarrassment. They have played more shows with this new kid, Steve Augeri, than they did when they were originally together. How can people miss you if you don’t go away? They need to get themselves into a financial position where they do not need to tour every year but they can’t seem to break away from that.
CRR: Was it Perry’s decision to fire both Ross and Steve?
Herbie: Yeah, for which I totally stood up and said, “You will pay them as if they were on this tour. We will have the additional expense of sidemen. You can get Mike Baird and Randy Jackson if you want, but you’re making a stupid mistake and it’s going to cost you.”
CRR: How did your relationship with the band end?
Herbie: I continued to work it through ’93. When Bill Graham died I wanted to retire from everything and stop. Somehow Jon Cain hallucinates and says that he phoned me up and fired me [laughing]. He said that in an interview on some T.V. show but I fail to recollect that. Who was he? I was the only shareholder. As I stepped back, I issued stock to all of them in Nightmare Inc. and just walked; that’s basically it.
CRR: Did you feel betrayed by Perry? After all it was you who brought him into the band, gave him the opportunity and fought for him to be in the band, but ultimately it came down to issues of control.
Herbie: Betrayed by Perry? That’s never really occurred to me because he has never been loyal to anyone let alone himself, so there were never any expectations. However, at the point of time in the early ‘90’s when it was time to move on without him, I would have worked with the band again and taken a singer like Kevin Chalfant on.
CRR: I know Ross, Gregg and Steve and worked with him in The Storm. Was there ever any serious considerations to have Kevin front Journey?
Herbie: I was really moving towards retirement and I was roasted for Thunder Road, which is a drug rehab center that I’ve worked with. I was in Hawaii while Joel Selbin was putting the show together. I didn’t know who would perform. Moby Grape came and performed and all these bands that I was friendly with and Journey performed with Kevin Chalfant. I was shocked. Rolling Stone magazine, in one of their more biting random notes, they said that not even Steve Perry’s mother would have missed him in the band, that’s how good Kevin Chalfant was. So, he did that one show. He’s a considerably better singer than Augeri -- might not look as good, doesn’t look bad, but he can really sing.
Jon and Kevin were in a band called 707 together and there is some kind of baggage there. With Jon Cain, baggage is his middle name. That was a mistake though, they really should have followed through with that but to me it was really Neal Schon who threw me under the bus because they were all unanimous to go forward with Kevin. Then Perry contacted Cain and they met. After they met, they contacted Neal with the notion that it was so important to re-unite with Steve Perry and continue Journey with him, which makes complete and total sense. Everybody wants all the original players. There was this one little snafu. Steve Perry couldn’t sing. I said “Do you remember when Bill Graham died and the band came back together and performed in Golden Gate Park?” Jon and Neal were there and when Perry showed up he said “Herbie, what songs are we going to play?” I said, “I don’t know, maybe ‘Lights’ or ‘Don’t Stop Believin.’” I rattled off three or four choices and he says, “You get the lyrics together because I certainly don’t remember the words. You write them down and tell Jon and Neal to take them down two steps.” That means if you’re in the key of ‘E’ you have to go down to ‘A.’
Taking a song down two whole steps is a monumental thing. It really demonstrated how good Jon and Neal are as musicians, that they were able to pull it off without any practice or rehearsal. With over half a million people in the park, surely people tape-recorded that performance and you can hear that it’s two whole steps down. Even then Perry could not hold his pitch and sing in tune; his voice was really rough. If he could, he would be Journey. He went out and did that solo tour to do Journey but he couldn’t. He kept postponing shows and ultimately he had to cancel the thing. He doesn’t have the health and he can’t sing anymore. He lost his talent. Think Karma.
CRR: Have you had a chance to see the DVD that he produced of the Escape show?
Herbie: He produced? I produced it. I wanted to release it as a live record and DVD a long time ago but Steve Perry said, “No, absolutely not. I look like a candy cane in heat.” That’s a direct quote.
CRR: A candy cane in heat? [laughing]
Herbie: A candy cane in heat. Now all of a sudden it’s out. There was nothing to produce. It was already fully mixed and ready to go back then. It is what it is. What did he do? He didn’t add anything; he didn’t overdub a fuckin’ thing. He didn’t change a d**n thing. So now he puts it out because he realized that it was pretty fuckin’good. Anything to be in defiance of me and my projects, and that was one of my projects. Talk about way too late. Back then it could have really sold, but now who cares?
CRR: It’s a footnote.
Herbie: A footnote. Just stupid on steroids. I said to Neal and Jon “You wanna reunite with Steve Perry. Are you fuckin’ high? Do you remember Golden Gate Park?”
CRR: What did you think about Trial By Fire?
Herbie: Monotone. If you can tell me where I missed the lift off -- it just never went anywhere. Not one song ever started somewhere and went somewhere, and that’s what Journey was all about. Let’s take it and take it higher and if you want to come back to earth with it fine but go somewhere first. It just never launched or got off the ground.
I told them this “Here’s the deal, you can hold me to this and I’ll put it writing. I will eat nuts, you provide the excrement, and I will bark at the moon, you designate the time and place, if this m*th*rf**k*r ever does one show with you. That would mean that I am totally out of my mind and I am totally wrong but I believe this m*th*rf**k*r will never take the stage with either of you. He hates you. He’s gonna lure you into his little trap and he’ll get complete control of you and then if he has a little bit of a feeling of sympathy and compassion, he’ll then tell you, ‘f**k you’” That’s exactly what he did. That album didn’t earn itself back; they spent too much making it. It never got into the black and he never did a show with them and so they wasted, in truth, from the end of the Frontiers tour until they did their first shows with Augeri in ’98 --that’s 15 fuckin’ years. The chips they left on the table over those 15 years can never be recovered and the purchasing power of 1984 and 1985 dollars cannot be duplicated by 2006 dollars. This is just simple rudimentary math. You’ve heard of inflation? These guys are so impaired. They have infinite creative intelligence but when it comes to acquired knowledge, they couldn’t be more, [pauses] ignorant is the word. They’re just ignorant of the simplest stuff.
CRR: You did keep their back catalogue selling very well though through all the years they weren’t together.
Herbie: When they stopped, and this will give you the benefit of the doubt, including Raised on Radio, they had sold 20 million records. When they started back up again in 1998 they were well over 65 million.