cyndy! wrote:Red13JoePa wrote:What comes first, his "allegiance" to The Giants, White Sox, Dodgers or Diamondbacks?
who's on second?
There is no question who is on first.
NICE ARTICLE FROM YESTERDAY.............. JUST WANTED TO SHARE.
'Don't Stop Believin'' making journey to stadium near you
Sep. 16, 2009
By Scott Miller
CBSSports.com Senior Writer
Tell Scott your opinion!
SAN FRANCISCO -- So how exactly did I wind up talking baseball and The Sopranos the other day with Steve Perry, former lead singer of the rock band Journey, just before the lights went down in the city?
"I came up because I love the Giants," said the 60-year-old Perry, who has been here for the Dodgers and Rockies series' this week. "I love baseball. And the Giants are my team."
The White Sox were the first team to adopt Journey's song as their theme during their championship run back in 2005. (Getty Images)
One of the most popular rockers of the 1980s, Perry, who once basked in the limelight of adoring arena applause, now gets some of his kicks from the quiet of early batting practice. The man whose legendary voice served as '80s background to everything from proms to parties to (lovin', touchin', squeezin') teenage makeout sessions, now is thrilled to be in the stands himself and part of the cheering.An
The guy was dressed in orange and black from head to toe. Giants cap, black T-shirt, black socks, black tennis shoes with orange trim. He was leaning on the railing in front of the Giants dugout. And don't even ask him to name his favorite Giant.
"I don't have any," he said. "I love them all."
You might say he comes to them with open arms, nothing to hide, believe what he says. ...
Which is why, as Don't Stop Believin', the iconic song he co-wrote with Jonathan Cain and Neal Schon, continues to steamroll forward as a cultural touchstone and one of the greatest stadium anthems going, he is more than a little chagrined these days.
Perry and Cain wrote the lyrics to the song, which was released in 1981. And, though it wasn't necessarily Journey's biggest hit (Open Arms charted at No. 2 in 1982), 28 years after the midnight train goin' anywhere started running, the song not only became the theme of the 2005 World Series champion White Sox and hit cultural gold with its pivotal use in The Sopranos two years later, it's now piano-riffing its way into the historically heated Giants-Dodgers rivalry.
See, the Dodgers started playing the song in the middle of the eighth innings late last season as they were battling Arizona in the NL West, and it became so popular that it's become a nightly sing-a-long at Dodger Stadium, some 40,000 strong, from the top.
Just a small town girl
Living in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin' anywhere
Just a city boy
Born and raised in south Detroit
He took the midnight train goin' anywhere. ...
Now, as the Giants go all out to catch Colorado in the NL West race, it would be perfect in AT&T Park, especially with Perry in attendance. Except, as Giants president Larry Baer notes, "The Dodgers are already playing it."
"I told him, 'So what? It's got magic!'" said Perry, chuckling.
That it does. Boosted in part by its key role in The Sopranos finale, the song, which peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the early '80s, now is the top-selling catalog track in iTunes history with more than two million downloads.
Though the lyrics were written over a period of time, Perry says the song was "sketched out" in an Oakland warehouse, where the Bay Area-based band wrote and rehearsed between studio sessions and tours.
"The song is about hope," Perry said. "It's about not giving up, believing you can do something that you don't think you can do."
He said that Detroit, a popular tour stop for Journey back in the day, just "came into my mind when we started writing the record."
That made Don't Stop Believin' a no-brainer in Michigan sports arenas and stadiums for years (you might have heard 100,000 people singing along during a break in the Michigan-Notre Dame game on television Saturday). Even though, as any Michigander worth his Great Lakes will tell you, the way the geography works, there is no south Detroit -- that's actually Windsor, Canada.
Still. The '05 White Sox deserve credit not only for winning the World Series, but for being farther ahead of the pop culture curve than Entertainment Weekly. It was the Sox who adopted the song as their theme and essentially made it a crossover hit into the world of sports.
The Sox were in Baltimore in the summer of '05 and A.J. Pierzynski, Joe Crede and Aaron Rowand were in the hotel lounge -- isn't that where the majority of classic rock and roll stories begin? -- and, as Rowand recalled, "A lady was singing jazz in French, so we really couldn't understand her. So A.J. yells, 'Play some Journey!' It was kind of funny. It just came out of nowhere."
A week later, somebody brought a Journey CD into the Sox clubhouse. And during batting practice from that point on, if the stadium people played a clunker, Pierzynski, Rowand and mates would look back and shout up to the press box, "Play some Journey!"
Three years and several wheel in the sky spins later, the rock star remains giddy over those memories. He still recalls sitting in the trainer's room while Rowand, Crede and closer Bobby Jenks were icing following Game 2 of the World Series.
"They were going to Houston, and I told them, 'I wish you all the luck in the world,'" Perry said. "We had just re-mixed the Live in Houston 1981 DVD and I was supposed to go to Los Angeles for some publicity.
"Crede said, 'You've got to go to Houston.' I said I couldn't that I had to go to L.A. to do interviews. And then I said, 'Besides, I don't have any tickets.' And Crede said, 'Tickets will not be a problem.'"
Perry still laughs at the thought of that. There he was, worried about tickets, and he was sitting in the White Sox clubhouse with the team already lugging him around as some sort of lucky Rally Monkey.
Anyway, now look. Don't Stop Believin' has exploded in popularity. It's been featured on American Idol. It was the closing number on the pilot episode of Glee. It plays prominently as the finale in the Broadway musical Rock of Ages.
As Rowand says, "Who doesn't like Journey?"
During a four-day period surrounding its use in The Sopranos in June, 2007, sales of the song on iTunes jumped a stunning 482 percent.
Not bad, especially considering that it was dicey until the last minute whether the song was even going to be included. The other band members had signed off early on it. Perry was the lone holdout.
"I really didn't want any of the Sopranos to be whacked while the music was playing," said Perry, who was envisioning a gory, Martin Scorcese Godfather-type thing. "I held out until Thursday before the Sunday show. I said, 'I need to know.'"
Finally, an assistant to David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, phoned the band's music publisher and said that if Perry would agree to be sworn to secrecy, they'd divulge some of the information.
"They told me nobody was going to be whacked," Perry said. "They told me that there was going to be a scene in the diner, and they would be thumbing through the jukebox picking out music, and they promised me that there would be no bloodshed to the music."
Then?
"It was unbelievable," Perry said. "I had no idea that they were going to cut to black. I stood up in my living room and said, 'Yessss!'"
"He's great, man," said Rowand, who now plays for the Giants. "He's so much fun. He really is just a great guy.
"I know he still follows the White Sox and the guys who are still there. But he's a big Giants fan."
So much so that, when this homestand ends, Perry, who now lives in the San Diego area, plans to journey to Los Angeles for the Giants' next crucial series against the Dodgers. Even if he does usually leave Dodger Stadium before the eighth inning because he can't stand the sight of the hated Dodgers and their fans rallying to the song.
"The thing that's amazing about baseball is that the players are like musicians," Perry said. "But in music now, you don't have to play. There's Pro Tools [personal digital studio systems for creating music] and Auto-Tune [for correcting voice pitch]. There's no Pro Tools or Auto-Tune for baseball.
"I get captivated by watching people play live."
Right now, especially, his Giants. The playoffs are approaching.
Hold on to that feeeee-lin'.
Available @ 
SP will be a very happy Giants fan if they pull it off. 
