Neal Schon, Jonathan Cain, Arnel Pineda Speak

I
t’s a little over 24 hours before Journey kick off their Final Frontier farewell tour at the Giant Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and the venue is a beehive of activity. It’s guitarist Neal Schon‘s 72nd birthday, and he’s onstage strumming a new electric guitar gifted to him by his wife, former Real Housewives of D.C. cast member Michaele Salahi. The crew is testing out pyro effects it will unleash during big songs like “Separate Ways.” Keyboardist Jonathan Cain, who turned 76 the day before, is backstage with his wife, Paula White-Cain, a televangelist who serves as a senior adviser to Donald Trump’s White House Faith Office; she just drove up from D.C. to be by his side as he recovers from a recent knee replacement surgery that caused him to miss nearly all the rehearsals. 

There’s a lot of work to do today as the members of Journey figure out exactly which songs they’ll play on opening night, and prepare for their one and only production rehearsal with the entire band present. They’re going to hit just about every market in America over the next two years — including out-of-way towns like Laredo, Texas, and Fort Wayne, Indiana — and there’s talk of booking football stadiums before it all ends.

This may surprise some considering that Steve Perry, the voice of every single Journey hit and the face of the band throughout their late-Seventies/early-Eighties heyday, hasn’t been a part of the band in 30 years, and he last toured with them in 1987. When the alt-rock revolution began just a few years later, Journey were lumped together with REO Speedwagon, Styx, and Foreigner as fossils from a bygone corporate rock era, and that seemed unlikely to change.

But while those other acts continue to slog it out on the state fair/casino circuit, Journey has become a touring colossus that somehow seems to grow more popular with each passing year. It’s easy to simply pin the resurrection to The Sopranos, Glee, Stranger Things, and other TV shows that have shined a bright spotlight on their music, but something deeper took place. Journey hits like “Open Arms,” “Faithfully,” and, of course, “Don’t Stop Believin’” are no longer seen as dusty artifacts from the early days of MTV. They’re a part of the classic-rock canon, loved by generations of fans, and a reason why Journey endures even though Schon and Cain are the only remaining classic-era members.

But before the first production rehearsal begins, lead singer Arnel Pineda, who has been in the band since 2007, sits down with me in his dressing room — a sparely decorated space with little more than a tea kettle, sliced lemons, and some bananas on a table — and reveals that this tour nearly didn’t happen, at least with him.

The reason why is a sad, complex story that involves his aging body and voice, a difficult divorce, and some very public allegations of domestic abuse that made headlines in his native Philippines. As soon as we start talking, Pineda makes it clear that he wants to talk about all of it.

“Back in 2024, I said to them, ‘If you’re planning to do a farewell tour, you better tell me, because my issues and my personal problems are getting more intense, and I don’t know if I want to go with you,’” he tells me. “I said, ‘I want you to discuss the schedule with me.’ It is what it is now…. But then, I was really not happy with how they scheduled this tour. My body has changed. I can’t take the cold weather anymore.”

Without consulting him, Pineda claims, the band booked a 60-date U.S. tour for this year — with at least another 40 shows slated for 2027 — kicking off in February in cold-weather towns. He told them he was unhappy in an email. Their response? “Nothing,” Pineda says. “As they say, silence can be louder than explaining.”

Frustrated with the impasse, Pineda says, he told them on two occasions he wanted to leave the band: “I said to them I wanted to retire because of my personal problems. No answer. Obviously, they don’t want to find another singer.” (According to both Schon and Pineda, it’s not that simple: They claim that the touring giant AEG’s contract with the band actually stipulates that this tour cannot go forward without Pineda. A representative for AEG did not respond to a request for comment on this.)

Pineda was 40 when he joined Journey back in 2007. He’s now 58, and the strain of belting out operatic songs like “Open Arms” and “Faithfully” nearly 800 times across two decades has taken a toll on his voice. “Jonathan was really worried about me about eight or nine years ago,” he says. “He said, ‘We should use a ghost voice so that you can relax.’ I said, ‘No.’” He emphatically denies the internet rumors that he’s been using Auto-Tune at recent shows. “I don’t,” he says. “I swear to God. If you hear me being flat out there, that’s just me being human.”

Some of the more obsessive online fans have posted videos on YouTube comparing Pineda’s voice of today to his voice from when he first joined the band, and to Perry’s voice from the early Eighties. Many of the comments aren’t kind. “I actually agree with them, to tell you honestly,” he says. “You’d be surprised. I agree with them. Steve Perry’s voice is really far superior to mine. But I’m almost 60 now. What can I do? And the band wants to move on with me, and they like the voice that I produce out there with them … They can fire me any time they want, but they’re not.”

Pineda wasn’t around for rehearsals, and he just learned the current plan is two hourlong sets, with an intermission in between. He’s not happy about it. A break, he says, “puts my voice in trouble…. It’s like a car where you go full-speed, and then have to stop, and then go full speed. I also worry the fans will mellow…. It kills the momentum of the show.”

He’s also displeased that they added the 2011 super-deep cut “City of Hope” to the proposed setlist. “I was expecting that they would spare me to sing those songs that I haven’t sung in years,” he says. “[‘City of Hope’] isn’t in my system anymore…. I think I really need to discuss this with them.”

As our discussion gets heavier and heavier, tears begin welling up in his eyes. “I don’t know what’s going to be their reaction to this [interview],” he says. “I’m just trying to be as honest as possible. As much as I don’t want to offend them, I’ve got to be honest.”

I didn’t plan on asking Pineda to talk much about the divorce, since his young children are nearby, and it’s a highly contentious issue that I figured he wouldn’t want to discuss publicly. It involves Pineda formally accusing his wife of adultery in court in 2023, and her subsequently responding with allegations filed in the Philippines under the Violence Against Women and Children (VAWC) Act of “verbal assaults, manipulation, and coercive behavior,” following what she claimed was a long period of him committing adultery. (Pineda’s wife could not be reached for comment for this story.)

But Pineda brings the matter up many times, and is eager to defend himself. “It’s one of the nastiest experiences that I have ever experienced in my whole entire life,” he says, before going on to vehemently deny the allegations made against him. “I am not perfect, but I never laid a hand on her.”

MY CONVERSATION WITH Pineda was a lot to process, and five minutes later I enter Neal Schon’s dressing room a little overwhelmed, knowing I’ll have to ask him about many things his lead singer just told me. But first, I wish Schon a happy birthday, and take a look around. Great effort has been made to transform what is ordinarily a plain, beige room into a festive space. The walls are festooned with bright purple curtains, streamers are everywhere, a neon “Happy Birthday” sign is hung on the wall, there are at least 50 blue and white balloons on the floor and ceiling, and three large candles are lit. On a table rests an enormous guitar-shaped cake, Rice Krispies Treats and cupcakes with the Journey logo on them, and a second cake shaped like a Marshall amp. The amp cake looks so real that I nearly touch it to make sure they aren’t messing with me. “Happy Birthday Neal Schon,” reads a sign on the dessert table. “Journey Founder ’72 – ∞.”

We start by chatting about Journey’s early years as a struggling jazz fusion band that formed after Schon and original lead singer Greg Rolie left Santana, years before anyone else in the current lineup joined their ranks. “We were like one of the original jam bands,” he says. “Herbie Herbert, our original manager that I started this thing with, had us playing in front of everyone. We played in front of Kiss and Thin Lizzy when they were still in theaters. We played with anyone: Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Cheech and Chong, Lynyrd Skynyrd, you name it.”

Things changed forever in 1978 when Steve Perry joined, and they started landing hits on the charts like “Lights,” “Wheel in the Sky,” and “Any Way You Want It.” By 1981, they were arguably the biggest band in America thanks to their LP Escape and the hit singles “Who’s Crying Now,” “Stone in Love,” “Open Arms,” and “Don’t Stop Believin’.” 

But in January 1987, after a three-night stand in Hawaii followed by another three shows in Anchorage, Alaska, Perry told them he was fried from nearly a decade of solid work, and ready to move on. “We were like, ‘What? We’re not even halfway through this tour,’” says Schon. “But that was that. He was done.” 

After a brief reunion with Perry in 1997, which fizzled out before they could play any shows (partly due to a hip injury that Perry suffered while hiking that year), the group moved on with vocal doppelganger Steve Augeri as their new singer. “We had some very great shows with Steve Augeri, but it took its toll on him as well,” Schon says. “And I don’t recall where we were, but we were opening up for Def Leppard and one night he came out to sing and nothing came out.”

(At the time, in 2006, rumors flew that Augeri was lip-syncing to pre-recorded vocals at his final shows. “I can’t answer that question,” Augeri told me in 2022 when I asked him if the allegations were true. “I can’t legally answer it.”)

With a co-headlining run of dates with Def Leppard coming up, Schon asked former Yngwie Malmsteen vocalist Jeff Scott Soto to join them for the tour. “We went in the studio afterwards and the chemistry was not quite there with Jonathan and Jeff,” says Schon, explaining that they ultimately felt Soto’s hard-rock sound wasn’t a match: “That wasn’t really Journey. So we went on another hiatus.”

Back in those days, Schon and Cain were largely on the same page when it came to band issues. But over the past decade or so, major schisms have emerged. From Schon’s point of view, they stem largely from Cain’s public embrace of right-wing, evangelical causes, his support for the Trump administration, and differing views of how to run the business of Journey. 

“I stick by the roots of how we started and what was embedded in me from Herbie Herbert with all the original guys,” says Schon. “We were never going to affiliate politics with our music and we’re never going to affiliate any one religion, not that we’re unreligious. Everybody has their own religion. But why attach yourself into one portion of something? Why be red? Why be blue? Why be green? Because you know what? You’re going to lose half your fans when you do that. It’s everybody’s music. I just don’t agree with it. I still don’t. And it’s probably one of the reasons that things are still a bit shaky.”

Things grew even shakier once lawsuits and cease-and-desist letters started to fly back and forth between Cain and Schon — who co-own the Journey trademark and cannot fire each other — over a number of issues, including alleged misuse of the band’s corporate credit card (both disputed each other’s claims), Cain’s desire to appoint a neutral third director to mediate disputes, and Cain’s 2022 performance of “Don’t Stop Believin’” at Mar-a-Lago with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Kari Lake. 

In a situation with very few precedents in rock history, Schon and Cain continued to tour together in Journey in the middle of all their legal and personal dramas. “The music we’ve created together is amazing,” Schon says. “And so, you have to celebrate that music with the fans. The fans are incredible. When I’m onstage, I don’t think about any of that.”

That doesn’t mean he’s in a good place with Cain. “I feel like I get one [lawsuit] served every week from his camp,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Jesus Christ!’ And learned to defend myself, really…. I remember every aspect of everything that’s gone down. I’ve been sober for 18 years completely, and my memory is sharp. I know everything about every Journey contract, every LLC, every corporation. So I feel very confident about being able to stand up to anything that I need to.”

Schon held band rehearsals for the farewell tour with a slimmed-down lineup of Journey that just included drummer Deen Castronovo, bassist Todd Jensen, and keyboardist Jason Derlatka, because Cain was recovering from surgery and Pineda was still in the Phillipines. Has Schon even spoken with Cain since he got here a day earlier? “I talked to him last night onstage and wished him a happy birthday,” he says. “I’m sure we’ll talk soon, but he just got out of here. And there’s been so much that’s gone on. I hate all these attorneys. It’s so nuts.”

He continues to vent: “There’s just so much ongoing noise. And I just want some fucking peace, for real. I’m just really tired of all the legal [battles]. It’s meaningless to me. I don’t have any time for it. I turn 72 today. I’m no youngster. I still have a lot of fire in my soul and energy to do things, but I also want to feel comfortable. Jon made a statement a while ago that this was his farewell. And so, I’m treating it as such.”

This seems like a good time to bring up Pineda’s concerns, beginning with his opposition to an intermission. “I’m not a lead singer, so I’ve never heard of that before,” Schon says. “But Arnel is Arnel. I think he would know his voice better than anyone else. We agreed last night that we can play for two hours straight, or we can take an intermission, a very short one. I would think if you sang all the way through the first set that you would be well opened up.”

I find myself in the odd position of telling him that Arnel doesn’t want to sing “City of Hope,” the only song from his era of the band in the proposed setlist. “We don’t have to play that,” Schon says. “I just saw Arnel for the first time in a year last night. We haven’t really had a chance to sit down and discuss these things, but we’ve got lots of singers in this band. Deen is a tremendous singer. Todd is a tremendous singer. So [Pineda] doesn’t have to feel all that pressure. It’s a long show. If he wants to take a break, take a break, and one of those guys can step up to the mic and sing.”

Schon isn’t surprised when I tell him about Pineda’s uncertainty about doing the tour in the first place. “It’s been very confusing,” says Schon. “He sent a lot of messages that he was overwhelmed with his personal life and didn’t know if he could do it. But we all signed contracts, OK? So, honestly, I’m signed up for the next two years. I’m ready for it. Really, I have to be honest, whatever goes down, I’m ready to plow through it, survive, and float to the top. I hope that he feels better about things. Last night at rehearsal, I thought he sounded really good.”

He’s also aware that Pineda didn’t want to start the tour this early in the year, but says they had little choice. “He wanted to go out in the summer, and he told our agent that,” says Schon. “And they don’t like us to go out in the summer, because especially this year, everybody’s touring. So, your odds are not as good as far as selling out the arenas when there’s so much traffic.”

With more than 100 dates slated between this year and next year, I ask Schon what might happen if Pineda simply can’t handle it. Would a different singer be brought in? “I’ve thought about it,” he says. “I mean, it’s natural to think about it. It’s not something I want to think about. I love Arnel. He’s been a total martyr, like a warrior. This is his 17th year. But still, at the same token, if he said that, I have to respect it. Do I feel that we could continue? I would say that we could.” Ultimately, he says, it would be AEG’s call: “If they go, ‘No, pack it up and go home,’ then you call it a day.”

We step out into the hallway at the end of our talk, and we’re greeted by his wife and members of the crew. An impromptu rendition of “Happy Birthday” breaks out, and we sing it again for a camera guy who’s been trailing Schon all day for an upcoming documentary about his life and career. “It’s a guerilla-style doc of myself out here while we’re doing this tour,” Schon tells me. “It’s time for me to tell the stories of my life. I remember it all so vividly.”

LIKE PINEDA, CAIN has been absent from the world of Journey since they last played in April 2024. When the band performed on The Voice and halftime at a 49ers game without either of them, rumors flew that he might be out. It turns out he was merely recovering from a knee-replacement surgery he had in September. “That was a wallop,” he tells me. “It’s been five months, and it’s still a little sketchy. But it’s coming along. I needed a new knee, though. I had no cartilage left. It was bone on bone, and I had arthritis. It was very painful. I don’t have any pain in the leg right now. It’s just the leg accepting the titanium. And I’ve got a whole suitcase full of rehab equipment that I’m bringing on the tour.”

Cain is stationed in a bare-bones dressing room far from Schon’s, with Pineda’s room placed strategically between them. It’s not a new situation for the singer. “I’m always in the middle of them, and I’m always trying to be the peacemaker,” Pineda told me earlier. “It’s just hard sometimes, and it breaks my heart that it’s come to that point that they have to fight like this. When I go onstage, it’s in the back of my head that all these negativities are lingering there.”

When I enter the room, Paula White-Cain shakes my hand before running out to attend a Zoom meeting. It’s unclear if it’s related to her ministry or her work with the White House. Days earlier, she took some heat online for an event at the City of Destiny Church in Apopka, Florida, where she urged the crowd to give her $100,000 for the ministry. “I’m telling you, there’s an anointing of release right now,” she said from the stage. “I want $100,000 to come in. There are 10 people that could give $10,000. There’s a hundred people that could give $1,000. Get a check, make it payable to Paula White Ministries…. This isn’t for me. This is about kids that will die without you being obedient.”

I plan on asking Cain about all the challenges in his relationship with Schon, along with Pineda’s delicate state. But I start by having him finish the story of the band’s resurrection, right around the time they parted ways with Jeff Scott Soto in 2007. “When we went on the road, young people would come to the front of the stage,” he says. “I was like, ‘Isn’t this interesting? What’s going on?’ They all knew the words because they’d been singing them at karaoke bars. And of course, The Sopranos just put it over the top.”

He’s referring, of course, to the last scene of the HBO drama’s series finale, where Tony Soprano plays “Don’t Stop Believin’” on a jukebox, right before the screen goes black forever, and Tony maybe, possibly, dies. “David Chase let us know a year before that this would be the closing Sopranos song,” Cain says. “I kept it a secret for a whole year. And lo and behold, it came out at the right time.” They enjoyed a couple of months of renewed attention to the band before coming across Pineda singing Journey covers on YouTube: “Neal found him, and there it was. It was a gamble, but Journey was back.”

The comeback period brought the band back into arenas and even stadiums, but it also brought a lot of intense disagreements between the two principal members that spilled out into the legal arena. “It is called the music business, and I’m very fiscal about the way I like to do things,” Cain says. “I learned from the best managers on the planet, the best accountants on the planet. All I want is to run a smooth ship. Sometimes you have to get someone’s attention and say, ‘Let’s do this the right way, and then it’ll be fine.’ I just want our business to be a good business. That’s it. It’s no power trip for me. I don’t want any drama.”

Journey were managed for many years by industry titan Irving Azoff, whom Cain still calls a “terrific” manager. But Schon and Azoff butted heads, and eventually parted ways. Right now, they don’t have an outside manager. Cain and Schon handle all business affairs themselves. It’s not an ideal situation, from the keyboardist’s perspective. “Every band needs a manager,” he says. “Neal and I talk on Zoom when we have to run our business, but I think manager-less bands are always destined for trouble. You can get a book on the music business, and in the first chapter it’ll say, ‘Every band needs a manager.’… So I wanted one. I mean, I prayed for one. But [Neal] just wants to run the show, and I want to play music. I don’t want to manage it. I’m a music guy.”

Cain’s faith is very important to him, and he makes no apologies for sharing his religious views with the world, or his political views, even if this enrages Schon. “I don’t care,” he says, when I relay Schon’s take that he’s alienating fans. “It has nothing to do with politics or anything partisan. I believe in policy, and what I stand for, because it affects my life. It affects my taxes I pay. It affects everything we do. I was a Democrat, I voted for Bill Clinton, and now I’m a Republican. I vote for the best guy. I vote for the best policy. And I’m not in love with any party. I just like to see the country going in the right direction.”

And that video of him playing “Don’t Stop Believin’” at Mar-a-Lago with MAGA superstars? “People do that at a karaoke bar,” he says. “I can’t do it at Mar-a-Lago? And, you know, it lit the room up. It was so great to see all these dignitaries go, ‘I think I know this song,’ and start singing. And I have to tell you, when you can light up a room and have some fun with a song that you helped create, then you’re doing a good thing. Everybody had a good time. I didn’t get paid for it.”

He remains unapologetic on this. “I don’t go out and make speeches about anything onstage, but I will stand up for what I believe in,” he continues. “And if somebody asks me about Trump, I tell them what I think. My agent called me after an interview where I did that and he was like, ‘What did you do that for?’ I said, ‘Because they asked me.’”

Moving away from politics and religion, I bring up Pineda’s concerns about the tour. “I think he’s going to be OK once we get it right for him,” Cain says. “We just need to make him comfortable, shorten the show, make it work. You can make it work. We’ll do whatever we’ve got to do.”

The conversation moves to Pineda’s vocal issues, and his memory that Cain told him to simply lip-sync a few years ago. Cain seems genuinely shocked by this. “I never said that,” he says, emphatically. “No, no, no. I would never. I don’t know where he got that from. It wasn’t from me. I didn’t say it.”

But Cain does say that he no longer wants to tour once this one wraps up sometime next year. “I’m 76, and it just feels like the right time to stop,” he tells me. “I just woke up one morning and saw that John Lodge from the Moody Blues died. That kind of spooked me. I was like, ‘Wait a minute, he’s 82 and he’s dead.’ I know the road takes a lot out of you as far as your adrenal glands and your ability to fight off infection, anything like that. It is very grinding. And I’m 45 years now with Journey.” If you count his stint with the late-Seventies power-pop band the Babys, he adds, “That’s 50 years on the road. That’s kind of enough.”

AS OF NOW, nobody in Journey knows where or when the final show will be held. But their singer has a vision in his head. “This is just a child’s wish — this three-year-old in me, who adores his parents so much,” Pineda tells me. “I wish Steve Perry would make an appearance. He doesn’t even have to sing. He can just take a bow with the guys. If he doesn’t want to do it, I would respect that. But if he would do that, that would be such an amazing sight.”

Steve Perry comes up a lot when you speak to the guys in Journey, even if the only in-person contact they’ve had with him in the past 30 years took place in 2005, when the band received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and again in 2017, when they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The latter was the only time Pineda has met his predecessor, and it was just a few seconds in a backstage hallway, during which he literally bowed down to Perry.

Bizarrely, I’ve spent way more time with Perry lately than his ex-bandmates have, due to a 2018 Rolling Stone feature tied to Perry’s comeback LP, Traces, where I got to hang with him for a day in New York, and another in San Francisco. We’ve also spoken on Zoom several times, most recently in 2024. Pineda is stunned when I tell him this. “Oh, my God,” he says. “I want to be in your place. I want to know how he did it back in the day. He’s a rock god. And I can never even be half the man that he was during his prime…. As a fan, I wouldn’t want Journey to have another singer except for Steve Perry, to tell you honestly.”

Schon has made many attempts to reconnect with Perry over the years. But it’s resulted in little besides brief communications about business matters, and no actual meet-ups. Back in 2018, I asked Perry why he was so reluctant to reestablish even a friendship with Schon. “I’m not sure that’s possible without stirring up hopes of a reunion,” he told me. “Please listen to me. I left the band 31 fucking years ago, my friend. You can still love someone, but not want to work with them. And if they only love you because they want to work with you, that doesn’t feel good to me.”

Today, Schon can only shrug his shoulders when the impasse with Perry comes up. “I liked parts of his album,” he says. “And I was like, ‘Wow, I miss playing with him. I could have added to that.’ I almost took a couple of the songs and overdubbed a few guitars and I was going to send it to him, then I just didn’t.”

Days before the farewell tour rehearsal began, Cain gave an interview to Ultimate Classic Rock where he said that Schon floated the idea to Perry of a guest appearance on the farewell tour. “He says [Perry’s] thinking about it,” Cain said then. “I hope he comes out. It’s never too late. We’ve got 100 shows, so he’s welcome at any one of them…. He didn’t say no — leave it at that.”

Predictably, this led to headlines all across the Internet about a possible Journey/Steve Perry reunion. Within hours, Perry put out a statement firmly denying it was even a possibility, closing the door yet again. “To all my friends, I’ve been hearing these recent rumors, and I wanted to speak to you all directly,” he wrote. “While I’m always grateful for the love people still have for Journey, the rumors about me rejoining the band are simply not true, and I want to gently put them to rest. I completely understand why people would hope for that. The music we created together means a great deal to me too. But I’m continuing to explore new creative work and really enjoy working on new music that reflects where I am today.”

Cain says that the interview he did was a deliberate act of provocation. “I just kind of planted a little seed out,” he says. “I was trying to fish a little bit, and say, ‘Well, he’s thinking about it.’ He came immediately out and said, ‘No, I’m not.’ I kind of did that on purpose, because there’s just so much fake AI stuff going on. You just look at it and go, ‘Wait a minute, no, that’s not true. None of this is true.’”

Back in 2018, I brought up Cain’s memoir, Don’t Stop Believin’, to Perry, and he interrupted me before I could even finish, making a face as if he’d just bit into a lemon. “I don’t really care to read Jonathan’s book,” he said. “And I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell me about it. I don’t need to know. It’s none of my business.”

Cain has a hard time understanding this. “He’s never even read the book,” he tells me. “He’s afraid to read it. There’s nothing but adoration in it. There’s nothing but praise. When he came out with his album, people wanted to talk to him about Journey. And he said, ‘Oh, it’s like a knife in my heart.’ No, that was some of the best times of your life, dude. It’s sad he didn’t get to enjoy a lot of it.”

Perry’s unease with fame and his defection from Journey near the peak of their popularity created a lot of heartache for Cain, but he’s come to terms with how it all played out. “[Steve] ran into some strange spirits,” he says. “When I first met him, he was so confident. I thought to myself, ‘I’d like to learn the swagger he has, because I’m not this confident.’ And it sort of rubbed off on me, and he gave me a lot of confidence. And I tried to give it back to him, and it seemed like the longer we were together, the less confident he became. But you know what? He was an architect and a genius and a terrific bandmate, a band leader. I can’t say enough about his work ethic. He taught me what it took to be great.”

They’ve had no direct contact since the Hall of Fame, but an unexpected mediator between them has emerged in the form of Trevor Lukather (son of Toto bandleader Steve Lukather), who happens to be Cain’s new son-in-law. The young Lukather has become a close friend of Perry’s, and they worked together in 2024 on a new version of the 1986 Journey obscurity “It Could Have Been You. “I communicated some things through him, just to tell Steve that I’m thinking about him,” Cain says. “I remembered why there was no video of us working on any records or creating anything. It’s because Steve said it was sacred time that should never be filmed. Trevor said, ‘Steve said you were right. He can’t believe you remembered.’”

Despite all the battles, past and present, Cain remains immensely proud of Journey’s work. The music even feels spiritual to him at this point. “Being a Christian, I would say God has his hand on this band,” he says. “And we have pleased him. We have pleased the Lord. That’s why I’m here, because I know when I walk on that stage, I’m not going out there alone. We told the world to not stop believing. You could say, ‘Oh Lord, you stand by me, I’m forever yours faithfully.’ You know? You could say, ‘I come to you, God, with open arms…Nothing to hide, believe what I say.’”

BEFORE LONG, IT’S time to head into the arena and finally see the members of Journey come together and make some music. I walk through the empty arena and find an aisle seat on the floor, about 15 rows back, letting various family members and crew sit in front: The Schon clan is on the right, Pineda’s family in the middle, and Cain’s people to the left.

Pineda told me he wasn’t going to sing at full strength in order to save his voice for the following night. But by the third song, “Stone in Love,” he’s unable to hold back, and he starts letting it rip. Per his wishes, there’s no intermission, and “City of Hope” is dropped. Cain sings lead on “Just the Same Way,” Castronovo handles the vocals on “Lights” and “Mother/Father,” and Derlatka delivers “Suzanne,” giving Pineda time to rest. Between a few songs, he even takes some oxygen from a green canister.

Pineda sounds stellar the entire time, and he seems positively joyful. There’s no hint of the downcast fellow I spoke with just a few hours ago. The music of Journey, no matter how many times he’s performed it live, is once again giving him nourishment to carry on. “I’ve really had a bad life,” he told me earlier in the day. “I’ve been hungry and homeless, with no friends, and no place to go.” Back in 2007, he recalls, “I wasn’t even dreaming about this. Me and my wife were just doing our laundry when I got the call from Neal that he wanted me to come over to San Francisco in one week.” 

That call kicked off one of the most improbable events in rock history, a completely unknown singer from the Philippines fronting one of the most popular bands on the planet. Despite everything, Pineda’s main feeling remains extreme gratitude. “I love the guys,” he said. “I respect them so much. And I will remain until the last days of my life grateful, and really feeling blessed, for what they’ve done for me.”

The production rehearsal closes with an ecstatic “Don’t Stop Believin’.” There isn’t a single interaction all show between Cain and Schon, who are stationed on opposite ends of the stage, but someone unaware of the history would never know there was any beef. “The first time I had to go on the road after he sued me, I asked my lawyer, ‘What do I do?’” Cain recalled to me earlier that day. “And he said, ‘You get onstage and play the music.’ Again, those fans came to hear the music, and not the drama. I come here to put on the best show I can do. That’s what I come here for.”

A fleet of black SUVs is waiting outside the loading dock doors to take the members of the band to their hotel for the night. Cain and his wife are the only ones headed to a tour bus. His wife is leaving the tour soon, but his two German Shepherds are coming to keep him company, which means they have to set up a series of crates on the bus and in hotel rooms. 

I’m about to leave myself when I see Pineda and ask him how he feels after the rehearsal. “I was just trying to bring back that muscle memory,” he says, noting that he used oxygen “because you need to do a lot of breathing when you do these songs.” I ask if he’s ready to do that show 100 more times. He nods, starts to leave, and then doubles back to share one more thought.

“Remember when you were asking me if I was ready to retire?” he asks. “My personal problem really took a toll on me. That’s why I wanted to prioritize my family. It’s not that I hate touring with [Journey]. It’s like the same thing that happened with Steve Perry. He has a hip problem. Me, I have a personal problem that’s taking a toll on me. It’s getting in my head, emotionally. I told them that I was a wreck and needed a little more time so that I could fix my family. But I still have to do this.”

Pain returns to his eyes, and I quietly ask if he’s happy he’s here. “Sixty percent,” he says with a sigh. “The other 40 percent of me is still there in the Philippines.” 

And with that, Pineda, Cain, and Schon go their separate ways for the night. Cain stays back on the bus, and Pineda and Schon get into their SUVs and drive off to their hotel — all three of them united for this final chapter of a saga that Schon started 54 years ago, but still worlds apart.