"Don't stop believin" is the ultimate 80's skating rink song. Close your eyes and picture it; glide, set-up... and... jump. There ya go.

It doesn't have to be any deeper than that.

I guess I would have been about 14 years old when I saw Journey do that song live. I sort of hated Journey (for all the reasons many people have listed here), but my best friend loved them. She loved Schon in particular, enough that she persuaded her mom to drive us to the airport in hopes of catching the band as they boarded their private plane. Midnight, Memphis International Airport, 1983... two teen girls running barefoot around the concourse, holding their shoes in their hands, asking security guards if anyone knew where Journey was. Would you believe it, someone told us?

Thus, my face-to-face encounter with Journey. Large bodyguard, bundling Steve Perry onto a plane while he peered around to see what was happening. Spotlights everywhere. My lunatic friend charging across the runway shouting "ARE Y'ALL JOURNEY?" "Yes," I hissed. "That is Journey. That is Steve Perry. Now get back here before we both get arrested."

1983 was a gentler time. We didn't get arrested; we just got escorted out of the airport. I'm pretty sure my mom's friend bribed someone. In any case, a night to remember.

Tony's a little older than I am, but I bet he has a few memories set to that song too.

"As a longtime Journey fan..."

Click.

. . . can be found here:

http://tinyurl.com/yqdp5c

Journey sucks...

it was Paolo Colandrea of Penndel, New Jersey. http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/111-06092007-1360360.html

Journey may not suck, but I haven't heard anything from them that isn't bland and insipid. But my friends think I'm strange for believing that Keith Jarrett is God, so don't take MY word for it.

Thanks for the info about Paolo Colandrea. I won't be wondering about whether I only imagined Steve Perry in the scene...now I know I did.

A music critic who shills for Journey is at the same level of intellectual failure as a food writer who supports McDonald's.

To illustrate, one can like McDonald's food all one wants; I've eaten it before, and I probably will again. It is still not good food. People who say McDonalds deserves to be respected as a school of haute cuisine have thus revealed themselves to be culinary buffoons. This is not because McDonalds is a big corporate entity, or becasue of any other business practice reasons. It is simply because the food is pasty, mushy, long on grease, short on flavour, and sure to cause constipation.

In haven't read all of the comments, but I do feel that today's installment of "Tom the Dancing Bug" is eerily appropriate to this article. Beyond that, it's just true that music's variety means there is something for everyone.

with the quotes from Steve Perry, especially the one about the streetlight, I now know what's wrong with this song:

Steve wrote Don't Stop Believin when he was a 14 year old girl in a junior high school studyhall.

"In a weird way, (Journey) wasn't that different from punk."

If, by "wasn't that different" you mean "was the complete opposite of," then yes, I'd agree...

Um, no -- it's Vanilla Fudge that rules. "Set me free" indeed! But are we supposed to believe those old folks would really listen to that in their car?

"He was without question the greatest rock/pop singer in the history of Rock & Roll."

Steve Perry might be a nice singer, but rock 'n' roll isn't about nice and it never has been. Bands that pretty themselves up in order to climb the pop charts make money in the short term, but become more and more forgettable as time goes on. I'm astounded that Journey is even being mentioned in the same breath as groups like the Ramones and Led Zeppelin. They're lightweights, they're inconsequential. Thirty years from now, people are still going to know who Joey Ramone was, who Jim Morrison was, who Kurt Cobain was. Steve who? Without question the greatest rock/pop singer in the history of rock 'n' roll? Comments like this sicken me.

It's overdone already, but I must interject here along with the many others and say David Marchese has potatoes in his ears. Journey is easily the worst band of any profile of the 1980s, and quite possibly the worst band of all time.

The comparison with Abbey Road is an interesting one. Certainly Abbey Road was more slick than the first Ramones album. I'll give you that. But you could probably set it up against the entire Perry-era Journey's output and Abbey Road would still win for lyrical depth, musical range and melodic invention. It's not a kind comparison for even the best artists. Journey just looks silly within half a mile of it.

Steve Perry..man, where do I start? I'll admit, the man has vocal strength and agility. And how does he use this? By mercilessly aping Sam Cooke without ever adding a scintilla of taste or soul to the mix. I kind of want to compare Perry to Pat Boone in the 1950s, but there's a much more accurate, recent analogous artist. Johnny Lang, whose guitar playing was a technically brilliant, soulless copy of earlier, grittier virtuosos. Lang, however, was 15, and allowed to be an empty copyist while he (in theory) matured and developed a sound more authentic to himself. Perry has no such excuse. He's ruined damn near every Sam Cooke album for me with his pitch-perfect, utterly mechanical belting. That is unforgivable.

They were never a great band, even in those early days when Rollie, Schon & Co. were just looking for Santana-free space to play, but Steve Perry's arrival signaled an era of deep, enduring mediocrity. I will always harbor a deep hatred for those hacks. I hated them when it was nominally cool to like them. I hated them when it was cool to hate them. And I hate them now, when not hating them is held up as some asinine badge signifying one's not being fooled by empty hipsterism. Frankly, Journey sucks. They always sucked, and they always will. And I may be throwing my lot in with the hipsters, who knows. But I refuse to be cowed into denying the truth by that threat.

On a wholly different note (and in reference to a different column), the stroh violin rocks.