JOURNEY’s NEAL SCHON CAN’T RECONCILE STEVE PERRY “It’s not like I haven’t tried.”

In a brand new interview with the San Francisco Examiner, JOURNEY guitarist Neal Schon was asked why the band and its former lead singer Steve Perry can’t reconcile after all these years. He responded: “It’s not like I haven’t tried. I love Steve, I love the legacy of the music we wrote together. We wrote some timeless music. But if you look up Steve‘s last interviews, he said, ‘There’s no way I can ever do that — that was then, this is now.’ So that’s what he feels. And he has not allowed me to talk directly to him — I always have to give a letter to his attorney to send to him. So the resistance is not on my end.”

Schon recently said that a reunion with Perry wouldn’t make JOURNEY more successful than the band currently is.

Speculation that Perry might one day rejoin the band he fronted from 1977 to 1987 and 1995 to 1998 gained strength two years ago when current JOURNEY singer Arnel Pineda wrote in a tweet that Perry would be welcome to reclaim “his righteous place.”

The guitarist told the Detroit Free Press: “What people don’t understand is that we couldn’t possibly be doing better right now, even if he was with us.

“It’s taken a lot of hard work to build it back up, but you know what? We’re here again. We’re sitting there. And management is the first to tell me it couldn’t possibly be bigger.”

JOURNEY has released four albums since Perry‘s departure — “Arrival” (2001), “Generations” (2005), “Revelation” (2008) and “Eclipse” (2008) — with the last two featuring Pineda.

The rest of JOURNEY‘s current lineup is the same as the one that recorded the band’s two biggest albums, 1981’s “Escape” (which sold 10 million copies) and 1983’s “Frontiers”: Schon on guitar, Jonathan Cain on keyboards, Ross Valory on bass and Steve Smith on drums.
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