Costa Rica times...

[SteveForever]

http://www.contracostatimes.com/enterta ... urce=email


Celebrating the legacy of Journey
YouTube tape lands Filipino a dream gig as new frontman for rock band
By Paul Liberatore
MEDIANEWS STAFF
Article Launched: 12/31/2007 02:59:11 AM PST

The classic rock band Journey has a history of rags-to-riches lead singers.
The golden-voiced Steve Perry, the operatic tenor who sang the band's anthemic '80s hits, was plucked from a construction job in a Central Valley farm town.
Steve Augeri, who replaced Perry in the mid-'90s, was working in a Gap store when he got the call to join the band.
Now we have the cyberspace Cinderella story of Arnel Pineda, Journey's brand-new frontman.
Even Pineda himself, "the Steve Perry of the Philippines," hasn't wrapped his head completely around what has happened to him.
"Who in their right mind would believe they would call someone like me, in the Philippines?" the boyish 40-year-old said from his Marin County hotel room. "This is Journey. They are superstars in the music business."

A new lead singer is especially crucial at this point in the band's 35-year career. No longer just an '80s nostalgia act, the group has suddenly become au courant, thanks to some mobsters from New Jersey.
When "The Sopranos'" final episode made pop culture history in June, ending with Journey's "Don't Stop Believing," the once-mighty stadium rockers found themselves back in the national consciousness, positioned for a comeback.
Not a good time to be without a frontman.

Since Perry and Journey parted ways a decade ago, it's been a revolving door for Journey vocalists. The previous lead singer, Jeff Scott Soto, was reportedly fired last summer after a brief stint. He'd taken over from Augeri, who dropped out in 2006 with voice problems after eight years with the band.
Enter Arnel Pineda, whose hiring was announced in early December. He talked about his unlikely rock stardom one afternoon recently, hours before he was to get on a plane for the long flight back to his home in Quezon City.

He had been in the Bay Area for seven weeks, singing nearly every day, learning an album's worth of new songs and reworking the old hits, which the band facetiously calls "the dirty dozen."
He was hoarse from a cold he said he hadn't been able to shake, but insisted it hadn't affected his singing voice.
And what a remarkable voice.
"He's got the legacy sound and then some," said Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain, speaking from his home in Novato. "He's blessed with tons of emotion and soul, stuff you can't teach. He's a find."
Journey guitarist Neal Schon, who's trying to return to the Journey sound from the Steve Perry era, gets credit for finding Pineda in an intense Internet search.

"I was frustrated about not having a singer," Schon said. "So I went on YouTube for a couple of days and just sat on it for hours. I was starting to think I was never going to find anybody."
But his tenacity paid off when he stumbled on a video of Pineda singing Journey's hit "Faithfully" with a Filipino cover band called the Zoo.
"After watching the videos over and over again, I had to walk away from the computer and let what I'd heard sink in because it sounded too good to be true," he said. "I thought, 'He can't be that good.'"
Schon fired off an e-mail to Pineda, but the singer dismissed it out of hand, thinking it was a prank.
"My friend Noel picked up the e-mail and told me it was from Neal Schon," he recalled. "I told him it was a hoax. How could you believe such a thing?
"But my friend persuaded me. He said, 'What would it hurt to give it a shot? Send him one e-mail back. Ask him if he really is Neal Schon.' Since he's my friend, I said, 'OK, OK.' I sent a short e-mail and left my cell-phone number. I challenged him to a chat. If he was really Neal Schon, I would know."
Ten minutes later, Schon called.
"I told him, 'I don't think you're Neal,'" Pineda recalled, amused. "He was laughing his (behind) off. It took two minutes for him to convince me."
No longer one color
After getting Pineda a work visa, the band flew the singer to Marin in August for an audition. It didn't take long for him to prove he really is as good as Schon had hoped. "Right off, they told me I had the gig," he said.
Two months later, he returned to record 11 new songs he had never before sung with the band.
"I only learned them when I arrived here," he said. "They didn't give me an advance tape, so it was even harder. There was a lot of pressure. Sometimes I didn't sleep. There were days I only slept two or three hours and I still had to learn the songs and record them."
Since English is Pineda's second language -- his first is Tagalog -- he worked on phrasing and diction with an accent reduction coach.
When he was hired over a singer from a Journey cover band, he also had to learn to deal with an undercurrent of racism among some Journey fans.
"When there were rumors about me joining Journey, there was a lot of that," Pineda said. "One of the worst things I read on a fan messageboard said that Journey is an all-American band and it should stay like that. But I don't care. I just say, 'Hey, grow up.'"
In this era of globalization, having a non-American fronting a classic American band such as Journey is an invigorating development that gives the band a new look and the possibility of expanding its fan base among Filipinos and Asians.
"We've become a world band," Cain said. "We're international now. We're not about one color. I kind of like the whole idea of having a singer like him. It's exotic."

Pineda will be back in Marin by late January or early February for two weeks of rehearsals before a concert in Santiago, Chile, and a couple of shows in Vegas in March that will be filmed for a live DVD. This summer, the band tours the United States and then heads to Europe. The new album is due in the spring.
From Pineda's perspective, he's not trying to be Steve Perry, one of his idols, but he's trying to sound as much like him as he can.
"We have to make sure the hard-core fans will be satisfied listening to the songs," he said. "They're so used to Steve Perry's voice, so we have to be really close to how Steve Perry has done it. That's the hardest part.
"Anytime Steve Perry wants to walk in, I would be glad to step out," Pineda added. "It's his right. It's his band. I'm just here to celebrate the legacy of Journey."

[larryfromnextdoor]

i appreciate that you posted this...but where is Costa Rica? please provide a map next time..

it brings me back to reality,, "jss was fired".. this part still upsets me.. he comes in .. saves the tour.. the band rocks harder and tighter .... etc.. and this is the best Cain and Schon can do to show that appreciation..they should have just said THANK YOU and moved on their way.. JEFF was on the wall for them..

[Escape Artist]

Funny that the press release is so different from the one we got in the states.