Welcome to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. Hi, a very big welcome to you. So glad you could join us today.
Our guest this week is a favourite with many of you. He’s an iconic musician and songwriter, best known as the co-founder and lead guitarist for the rock band Journey. From his early days with Santana to his stints with rockers Bad English and Hardline, Neil Sean’s incredible guitar playing and pop sensibilities have yielded massive commercial success.
Neil was born at an Air Force Base in Oklahoma. He was a child prodigy, joining Santana at age 17 and making his debut on 1971’s 3LP. In 73, Neil co-founded Journey with fellow Santana buddy Greg Rowley.
Journey’s always had a style that’s been difficult to define or pigeonhole. They had their biggest commercial success between 78 and 87 when Steve Perry was lead vocalist. Recently the band has released its first album of new material in more than a decade and they’ve celebrated their 50th anniversary.
Neil Sean is here to tell us about the band’s genesis, Steve Perry’s departure and their latest album. Hello there. Nice to talk to you too, Sandy.
It’s a big new album and it’s called Freedom. It’s been 11 years since we’ve made new music and you know after I realised that I was not really going to be able to go on tour with the COVID, I just decided that I don’t care if anybody’s interested or not interested in making a new record, this is something that I need to do and I just started creating and luckily enough we had gotten through a pretty nasty lawsuit with a couple ex-members that weren’t really interested in making new music and that time you know I’ve known Nordic Michael Walden for a long time, drummer extraordinaire and producer and songwriter and you know goes all the way back to when he was playing with Ma Vishnu Orchestra and John McLaughlin many years ago when he opened up for Ma Vishnu. I decided to choose Narda as a drummer to work with on a new project and Randy Jackson.
I knew it would click and so we got to work just Narda and I and we started carving out a lot of songs and co-produced this album together and started experimenting a lot and me cutting live guitar solos with him even when there’s no bass or keys or anything. I left Narda and Arnel alone to work on vocals as that’s Narda’s forte. I still believe in love We were in the same studio.
We live like about five miles away from each other and he has a great studio. It was perfect for the times because I don’t feel that it would be it I think that you can make a lot of different types of music remotely and cutting to a rhythm machine later replaced by drums but when you do something like that it’s all click track and everything gets a lot more sterilized. For rock and roll I was just like it doesn’t really have a place in my mind you know you need that kind of winging it like a song like rain let it rain or beautiful as you are in the end after the drum solo.
All that was like just loose chaos of him and I going at it Freelance like the the real bands used to do that I used to go see when I was a kid my favorite bands you know from the UK whether it was The Who or Zeppelin or Hendrix or Cream or Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart they were all doing it nothing was ever the same night to night so I was like why can’t you make a record like that if you have to use pro tools later use it to chop it down to make sense like they used to cut the two-inch tape like Queen did many stories I heard Thomas Baker about cutting the two-inch tape everybody having a heart attack. I remember those days well yeah there was an engineer that we worked with who’s no longer here and he was a wild Englishman and they used to be juiced out of his head and gacked out of his head and he would hold up the two-inch tape like this with a razor blade the master and he’d go like that in the air and everyone’s hearts would drop and then he’d put it together and it would be perfect I’m like it had to be some kind of good trick but I swear to God I watched him do it about three times and I never saw another piece of tape. Neil when you were little was it the bands from the UK that you admired most? You know when I was growing up when I was very little my folks were both musical my father was a big band leader my mom was a singer like in in a big band in the Air Force that’s where I was born and so as a child growing up there was always music around the house or they were rehearsing in the house you know playing a lot of standards like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ellis Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, all the greatest jazz musicians, Dan Getz, my dad like you know.
So my ear got trained in music as a child even before I started playing instruments and I could differentiate what was what, who was playing, who was singing and you know my dad played woodwind instruments and so he taught me how to play some woodwind instruments and I became kind of bored with that wasn’t really my thing and started messing around with piano a little bit that never really stuck when I heard the twang of electric guitar when I was about nine years old I got interested in playing guitar you know and it was really I think the Beatles first my father bought me my first you know rock and roll record and it was Rubber Soul you know I listened to that I thought it was a you know a really cool album and very musical. You mentioned earlier that that was the sounds of The Who and Jeff Beck and the like that were really smashing you at the time when you were growing up. Right so you know I started playing at 10 whatever got me started got me started by the time I was 12 I was really deep into the blues and I was listening to my favorite black artists it was you know Albert King, B.B. King who I later got to play with and meet and Buddy Guy, Michael Bloomfield from San Francisco played with Electric Flag and Paul Butterfield blues band and anyone else you know that I felt was a good blues guitarist but those are the main guys I learned to play from and those were my roots.
Well my first friend went down when I was 17 years old well there’s one thing I can say about that boy After I learned a lot of that note for note opera records then the British Invasion came in and so then I started you know learning Jimmy Page’s style and Jimmy Hendrix style and Eric Clapton style and Jimmy Page’s style of their interpretation of the black blues you know and that’s what I became at that time before I started Santana I was kind of like a kid with that was making Cajun soup and I kind of put it all in a pot and mixed it up and that’s what came out of me. Neil’s love for music wasn’t just a hobby it was an obsession he practiced relentlessly soaking up all the sounds around him. While he idolized those guitar gods like Eric Clapton, Jimmy Hendrix and BB King he didn’t just mimic them he made their techniques his own so much so that by the time he was in his early teens he was already getting noticed by local musicians for his blistering technique and soulful phrasing.
When Neil was just 15 he was invited to audition for Eric Clapton’s new project Derrick and the Dominoes but fate had other plans around the same time Carlos Santana who was already a legend with hits like Black Magic Woman also wanted to jam with the teenage prodigy. How’d you get to be hired by Santana? I just I was out and I was playing a lot uh out and about in clubs and you know managed to meet a lot of club owners that would allow me in being so underage and it was like illegal to be for me to be in there but they allowed me to come in and just play and out the back door don’t drink water don’t drink anything just come in and play and get off yeah and so that’s how I met the two you know Santana guys was Greg Raleigh and Michael Shreve came in to see me playing in a little club in a peninsula. And I asked you to join the band? Well I sure I what happened is I was playing with another band at night uh band there was one of the bigger bands in a peninsula and they stayed around afterwards and a club owner allowed everybody to stay afterwards he you know had everybody ushered out the door except for us the band and Greg Raleigh and Michael Shreve and we ended up jamming to the wee hours of the morning and I became very good friends with Greg Raleigh he used to pick me up at high school and I’d cut and I’d go hang out with him and go play music at his father’s house and um it just evolved.
Right so I mean he obviously recognized your super talent and took you under his wing. Yeah exactly. Fog of noon I’m so slowly tired without you I can’t see why my open eyes can’t see So much to look by, so many things to be Can’t keep looking in out of me Tell me about how you got Journey together in the first place that was what year was that 1973? Well it really uh took form right before you know 73 it was like still 72 in the middle of 72 uh the Santana band had disbanded at that time uh you know I’d made two records with them I did Santana 3 and Caravan Sarai and then you know there was musical differences and people were having issues with each other and it just kind of fell apart.
Long story short the classic lineup of Santana splintered because the members wanted different things musically. As we all know Carlos Santana kept the name and kept evolving the band’s sound right up until today.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. It was the early 70s and there were plenty of the usual rock and roll pressures, egos, exhaustion from touring and lots of drugs.
Carlos Santana was deeply influenced by jazz, spirituality and the avant-garde. He wanted the band’s music to become more experimental and improvisational. Greg and Neil felt creatively boxed in and decided to walk.
And so I was looking for something to do at that time and I started playing with Larry Graham and Gregorico from the Sly and Family Stone Band. And we were going to do a power trio. And it sounded very interesting, you know, and very new for what we were doing.
It was like heavy blues metal funk in one. Kind of like what Mother’s Finest ended up being, but it was more in a trio form. A lot of improv going on with Larry Graham singing lead vocals, you know, with his baritone voice.
I just tell them if it ain’t right Well it sure don’t mean that now I can Cause I just don’t believe it’s fair To judge a man by the length of his hair Hey hey Hey hey High aspirations and need to do that. And Larry kind of got cold feet at the last minute. He thought maybe it was a little too outside and he wanted to do more of a straightforward R&B thing.
And so he did Graham Central Station. And I ended up playing in that for a bit. And, you know, learned quite a lot hanging out at his house in Oakland with Ruddy Stones, you know, Sly’s brother.
And learned how to play a lot of really stripped down funk, hanging right in it. And having fun. For anyone who doesn’t know, Larry Graham was the pioneer of slap bass.
He literally invented it when he played with Sly and the Family Stone. After leaving Sly’s band in the early 70s, he formed Graham Central Station, which was one of the tightest, funkiest groups around. Neil at this time was only about 18 or 19.
He was already a prodigy and still trying to find out exactly where he fit musically. His time with Larry didn’t last very long because Neil’s style, that big, melodic, soaring guitar, didn’t quite mesh with Larry’s heavy slap funk vibe. Love that played its dames on me so long I started to believe I’d never find anyone Doubted, tried to convince me to give in Said you can’t win But one day the sun came a-shinin’ through The rain had stopped and the skies were blue And oh, what a revelation to see Someone was saying, I love you to me A one in a million chance of a lifetime And life showed compassion And sent to me a stroke of love All to you A one in a million you Your question before that was, how did Journey start? So there was a manager that had taken over really managing Santana at the time because the manager that was there at the time had a serious drug problem.
And so Herbie Herbert approached me and he was Carlos Santana’s guitar tech at the time and he said, look, I’m going to start a management company I want to wrap a band around your guitar playing. At the time, you know, I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I said, sure. You know, we kind of learned together.
He had Bill Graham teaching him all the ropes of management at the time. And we formed a band from that. But it was really Herbie and I from the get-go and he introduced me to the different musicians that he was thinking would work that ended up, a lot of them ended up being you know, on the first Journey album.
You were the baby of the group, weren’t you? These guys were a whole lot older than you. Yes, definitely, yeah. Did you always feel like the baby in the band? I, you know, I didn’t.
I tried not to think about it too much because everybody was always crazier and a lot older than I was. And I got to tell you, I mean, Santana was a really wild band. You know, they were like nuts.
It was off the hook crazy. I mean, you know, just, you know, wild. Did you join in the wildness or did you keep yourself a little apart from it? I was, you know, I kept myself pretty far from it for the longest period.
Doubled in a little bit, but I was still very young and very shy. You know, kind of tried to steer away from it, you know. I can imagine.
Yeah. And so once Journey got going and you had your mainstays in the band, you started getting really successful really fast, didn’t you? You know, we, Journey, when we first started, we were always like the San Francisco favorite band and we were known as, in San Francisco, at the time there was no jam bands. There wasn’t Phish and all these spinoffs like bands like the Grateful Dead.
It was just the Grateful Dead that were really doing that kind of jam thing. And then there was Santana that was, you know, a different type of jamming thing that was, you know, a bit more Latin rock and fusion kind of mixed together with a lot of percussion, which was really interesting to me. But at the time we were known as the jam band, the fusion jam band on steroids from San Francisco.
And we could basically play in front of anybody and really pretty much blow them off the stage, you know, from sheer energy. And, you know, San Francisco loved it. Just loved it.
They loved it so much that when we first introduced Steve Perry and we played our first show and introduced him and he came out on stage, it was met with great resistance. Like, what are you guys doing? But, you know, in reality, it opened up so many doors because it went out of that jam band thing that we still can do, you know, but it got us onto the radio, which made our lives a lot easier because we really worked our asses off. We were, you know, three years, like, 10 months out of a year on tour to 11 months of every year the first three years traveling around in a station wagon, you know, just barely getting to the town we’re going to play, jumping out of the car, jumping on stage, jumping back in the car and bolting and going on to the next city.
Winter’s here again, oh Lord Haven’t been home in a year or four I hope she holds on a little longer Sent a letter on a long summer day Made of silver, not of clay Yeah, ooh, I’ve been running down Ooh, the wheel in the sky keeps on turning The wheel in the sky keeps on turning Until we met, we played, we opened up for everyone. We opened up for Kiss, we opened up for Thin Lizzy, we opened up for Cheech and Chong, we opened up for everyone you can possibly imagine, you know, and when we finally met Leonard Skinner, that was the band that really, their audience really took to us. You know, we started playing in front of these huge outside stadium crowds and started getting over with them before there was Steve Perry and we were getting like three encores, strong encores in front of them and so I was always so thankful to those guys and I felt like we were on the verge of like busting wide open with where we started before all the changes.
Why did you decide to bring Steve Perry in? You know, at the time, our manager, Herbie Herbert, you know, he came to us and he said, look, Columbia Records at our time was our label, they’re gonna drop us unless we get a new frontman and we get anything on the radio and suggested Steve Perry and Greg and I listened to it and to be honest, we were like, he sounds great but I don’t think it’s what we’re doing, you know, so we conformed and made it work. I got together with Perry and we had immediate writing chemistry. Before the world knew him, Steve Perry had slogged it out in a few semi-obscure bands.
One was the progressive rock outfit called Ice, another alien project. Steve almost turned his back on music after tragedy struck when the band’s bassist, Richard Michaels, died in a car accident. But then fate and his mother’s encouragement intervened.
His mum told him she’d had a dream that he was supposed to be with Journey and when he gave it a shot, stepping on stage to sing Lights for the very first time, everything just clicked. We wrote patiently in about 10 minutes within just sitting in a room with an acoustic guitar and him singing and we continued like that throughout our first three albums together. It turned out to be a really good move, didn’t it? You’ve had 18 top 40 singles over the course of your career.
Talk to me about Don’t Stop Believin’. That’s been your biggest number one hit, hasn’t it? Don’t Stop Believin’ just came about after Greg Raleigh decided that he needed a break and he’d been on tour for so many years. He wanted to start a family and he just had enough of the touring life.
We had been playing with the babies and Jonathan Cain and I had met and I suggested bringing Jonathan in at that time because I felt that he was a good keyboard player and he also played guitar. I had not written with him yet but it was one of the songs that we wrote together when we got together and started compiling material for Escape. Journey’s Escape is one of those records that doesn’t just sit on the shelf, it defines an era.
Released in 1981, it was the band’s seventh studio album and the first with new keyboardist Jonathan Cain. Adding Jonathan was a game changer. He’d come from the babies where he’d worked with John Waite but his real superpower was songwriting.
Jonathan plugged right in to the Steve Perry, Neil Sean creative pipeline and gave the band a fresh spark. Escape was packed with radio-ready hits that blended rock edge with glossy production, a formula that defined 80s arena rock. The album went straight to number one on the charts.
It sold over 12 million copies in the US alone and still sells today thanks to tracks like this one. Just a small town girl Livin’ in a He took the midnight train Goin’ in Just a city Raisin’ softy drugs He took the midnight train Goin’ in A singer in a smoky room A smell of wine and cheap perfume For a smile they can share the night It goes on and on and on and on Strangers Wait in The shadow How did it feel that that just exploded? It wasn’t a surprise to me because I felt at the time when I heard the song I felt that it was going to be much bigger than it actually became at the time when it was first released. And so I thought it was one of the best songs on our album and that it would be the biggest immediately and it wasn’t until many years later.
But now it is and so, you know, I guess I was ahead of time. I don’t know. It’s just made a whole comeback, hasn’t it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It never really went away, you know. It’s always been a hit when we play it live, like a lot of our tunes. Believin’ It’s been like Before Don’t Stop Believin’ is arguably more famous now than it was in 1981.
In the early 2000s, it got a huge boost thanks to the Sopranos finale. Then Glee made it a TV anthem again in 2009. The song also became the most downloaded digital song of the 20th century.
It’s now a karaoke classic, a stadium sing-along and a wedding closer. It’s the song you shout at the top of your lungs when you need to believe in something.
This is a breath of fresh air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. There were a number of line-up changes.
You started collaborating with people like our very own Jimmy Barnes, with Michael Bolton and as you mentioned John Waite from The Babies. That brought about a whole lot of hit stuff too, didn’t it? Absolutely, they were all great collaborations. The one with Jimmy Barnes was especially great.
I loved working with Jimmy. There’s many songs off that album that I played on, Freight Train Hard, that became a classic album for him. Too Much Love Ain’t Enough.
Funny story, I played on that song and just did some really stripped down R&B blues, on the cleaner side. I got a call one day after the single was released and it was from my good friend Eddie Van Halen and Sammy Hagan. They were in the back of a limo going to one of their own gigs.
They both called me and said, Hey man, I just heard this song. They were talking about you and Jimmy Barnes on the radio. That that was you and Jimmy.
It sounded freaking amazing. That song kind of took everybody by storm in the United States. Many good songs on that album, but as well as the other projects that you brought up.
Bad English, it turned out some really great stuff. The popular stuff, I was not so into. The rock and bluesy side of that.
John Waite and I are still talking about maybe a continuation of blues, a heavier blues rock album. Sitting there for him and I, for real, because that’s really where both of us come from. And then I see you reach for me Sometimes I wanna give up, wanna give in I wanna quit the fight And then I see you, baby And everything’s alright Everything’s alright When I see you smile Just shine a light When I see you smile When I see you smile at me Neil, what are you most proud of in your rather lengthy career? You proud of it all? I’m proud of it all, honest to God.
There’s nothing that I would change. It’s all different. When I listen to everything that I’ve done, whether it’s a solo album that’s completely off the cuff or any Journey record or any Santana material, everything that I’ve ever played on, it’s all different.
You know, when we were recutting Dock of the Bay with Michael Bolton, with Randy Jackson again and Jonathan, I had Steve Cropper in the studio next to where we were recording it, the gentleman that wrote it, on the original album. I was, like, nervous as hell. I was, like, you know, wow, I wonder if this guy’s going to like this version of it because I’m playing a solo on it.
And he came in, he loved it. I think that that was very good, too, you know? Sitting in the morning sun I’ll be sitting when the evening comes Watching the ships rolling Then I’ll watch them roll away again Sitting on the dock of the bay Watching the tide roll away Sitting on the dock of the bay Wasting time It all has merit to me. It all helped me evolve to where I’m at now.
It’s all part of the journey, as they say. Absolutely. Why has it taken you so long? Why 11 years between albums? Some guys in the band just didn’t want to, they didn’t care about making new music.
Most of them are gone now. It’s just a factor of laziness and just being set in your morals of, like, relying on what you’ve already done. Sure, you know, a band of our stature that’s had the success and sold 100 million records, you can do nothing but play that catalog for the rest of your life.
But you know what? I consider myself a true musician, and so I always need to be moving forward, regardless of what type of music it is. There’s only two types of music to me. It’s good and bad.
And it doesn’t matter if it’s jury, doesn’t matter if it’s, like, really avant-garde jazz, doesn’t matter if it’s blues, whatever it is, it’s either good or bad. And I have all that stuff in me that can come out at any moment, so I always need to move forward. Well, we’re very glad you did, because this new album is really great.
It’s called Freedom. It’s, as you said, the first one that you’ve released in 11 years. You’ve played guitar on it, you’ve written on it, and you’ve produced it.
Tell me a little bit about your favorite tracks. Oh, wow. I love this whole album just as a statement.
What’s it saying as a statement? The statement is that there was nothing in mind going in except trying to make good music. And my statement was that I wanted to encompass everything from the beginning of Journey for myself, because it’ll be my 50th anniversary, to now, where I’ve come as a musician. And I think there’s bits and elements of everything we just spoke about, regardless of what artist.
There’s some bluesy rocking stuff, there’s some funky, filthy, funky, like, hard-rocking stuff that we’ve never done before. And then there’s some ballads that start off, like, very soft, but end up completely ballistic, like, who-ish. And with the looseness of, you know, Electric Ladyland, Jimi Hendrix, or The Who, like a song like Beautiful As You Are that ends up the album.
I watch you sleep Not sure if you’re dreaming Am I in that dream Waiting for you And I hope my love Will surround you As you’re waking Each for me I’m amazed With everything about you Through the years I know Stay beautiful as you are Always beautiful as you are Ooh, sweet moon Always beautiful as you are I wrote those bits in pieces. It became like a suite. But I wrote the first bit first, the second rocking bit second, and then I said, no, to play a drum solo.
And then I kind of just winged it with him, and I take it out in the chords and wrote the bass to go with the guitar later. Kind of like what I saw with Townsend and The Who, that nothing was locked down and set in stone when we recorded this album, because it was just guitar and drums. And then I played the bass later, and then Randy later played a lot of the parts that I created, but played it better.
So do you want people to listen to it in the order that it’s put down? Absolutely. Well, you can listen to whatever order you choose. I actually had a different order that I initially came up with, and it was much harder hitting from the get-go.
I wanted to come with more of the baseball bat upside down from the get-go, because I wanted to start out with holding on, because I felt like it was so off the wall that people would hear it and go, wow, that’s interesting, that’s a Journey record? And they want to hear the rest of it. But bands are about compromise. Jonathan wanted to come from more of a familiar place, like Don’t Stop Believin’ started Escape.
That’s what happened. It’s a little difficult to categorise Journey these days as a result of this new album, isn’t it? We can’t pigeonhole you anymore. You’ve kind of exploded outside of the four walls.
I don’t think that we’ve ever been able to pigeonhole… It’s something I think that critics didn’t like about us, that they couldn’t put their finger on it and say, they’re just doing this, it’s been done, blah, blah, blah. Instead, they kind of tried, and they did pigeonhole us as being a soft rock act. And we’re like everything but that live.
I mean, we do have soft music that’s mated on to soft AC radio, which just means you’re going to sell millions more records altogether, but we never ever were soft live, and actually, you know, I refuse to be. I was like the rocker in the band, I was like, we need to keep this rock thing going, and it needs to be off the wall, and it needs to have that adrenaline. Otherwise, you can have the other stuff, and you might have a cute little single over here, but you’re not going to sell tickets live.
We wouldn’t be selling out arenas again and going into stadiums again at this point in our career if we weren’t rocking. We totally kicked it out of the park this year. And 50 years, Neil, Sean? Absolutely, yeah.
It’s a milestone that Neil is incredibly proud of, and one that he and the band celebrated right across 2023 and 24. They hit the road with a vigorous touring schedule and are still performing their Freedom 2025 shows across the globe today. Needless to say, they’re being received with open arms wherever they go.
With mine Softly you whisper You’re so sincere How could our love be so blind We sail on together Adrift yet apart I’m here, you are by my side So now I’ve found you Hard to hide Believe what I say So here I am Now I do see What your love means to me Open arms Neil, Sean, great chatting with you. Thanks for your time. And congratulations on the album and your 50 years of music.
You’re an awesome musician. Thank you, Sandy. Appreciate it.
It’s a beautiful day You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kay. It’s a beautiful day Oh, baby, any day that you’re gone away It’s a beautiful day