Here We Go!, or how I’m going to roil some Journey Internet fans about the first time Steve Perry performed with Journey and how I know that - Part 1

STEVE PERRY'S FIRST PERFORMANCE WAS SEPTEMBER 30th, 1977, not the 28th of that month, which is how it appears on various websites, Steve's Wikipedia page and, although I haven’t seen it, apparently in the liner notes accompanying Journey’s Time 3 release (back in the early ‘90s).

I had about two-dozen photos from those nights, given to me by a now unknown, very nice young woman, someone who must have been connected to the band, because they included many shots from the dressing room after the shows. There were shots of everyone, including Perry. Those photos were lost in the 2017 fire, except for one, which I had scanned for some unknow reason. Friend Roger Silver, part of Journey's inner circle (he's known many of the guys since they were ten), writer/ painter / poet, and co-writer of Anytime (Infinity), was there and even remembers that Perry wore a red shirt for the appearance.

I was there, Gonzo was there too, both of us by happenstance. We were at all three nights at San Francisco's Old Waldorf. How we got there was a trip, literally and figuratively, and although I wouldn’t know it until many years later, what happened during that fateful week was directly related to how Gonzo and I became part of the Journey family.

I don’t remember any specifics of us planning the trip, and instead have a general sense of us coming up with the idea to drive to SF for no other reason than we could and should. I do certainly recall that the morning we were supposed to hit the road, we stood outside Elmhurst's Record Gallery as Gonzo said we should postpone. Somehow I convinced him we should do it. I don’t know how, and he was no pushover but he wasn’t a dick about it, and we left that night for a spur of the moment, 2,115 mile jaunt from the Midwest to the West Coast in a 1970 Chevy van.

Some context and background, as succinctly and compressed as I can manage:

After almost three and a half years jumping out of airplanes, I came home from the Army in the summer of ’75, and started art school as a film-photo-animation major that fall. Gonzo and I had been in high school together, been on the football team together a couple of times (yeah, no need to go into details there), he was the bass player in a band I was in for awhile (I’m a guitar player), he worked after high school, I went in the Army, got married (and divorced before the rest of this story unfolds), and when I came home we reconnected.

We were pretty tight.

The details of how we first discovered and then worked our way into the Journey family are for another post or two or three. That Origin story technically begins when a friend from my upbringing on Chicago's south side called me when I'd returned from the Army. We'd had a band in eigth grade – a fine band for all our naiveté and youth – caught up after my Army stint, and he called one night, exclaiming "You gotta hear this album, the guitar player is sixteen!" A few nights later I went to his place as he and his buddies put Journey's first album on a turntable and turned that sucker up LOUD.

To say it resonated with me is serious understatment.

That Origin story continues with me calling Journey's SF management office (reasons I called to be shared in that future piece), then meeting Pat 'Bubba' Morrow and the band not too long after in the summer of 1976 at their soundcheck in the Waukegan Ice Arena; they 'headlined,' with Pearl Handle Band and Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush opening.

So, skipping around for the moment, by the time Gonzo and I embark on the SF trip in October '77, the band and crew know us because Bubba would call to let me know about Journey’s gigs around the midwest and central states, where we would meet up with the band and work the gigs (without pay). We would’ve sacrificed darn near everything for the band. We toiled happily, loaded trucks, sleept on motel room floors, doing whatever we could (including going to pick up Aynsley at a Madison, Wisconsin police station, where he'd been taken after he made a questionable left turn and then had a 'testy' interaction with a motorcycle traffic cop. I was driving Bubba's rental car in our normal show-night convoy of rental cars – I don't know why Aynsley was driving one – when the altercation ocurred, and at one point was sure that Bubba was on the cusp of accompanying Aynsley when, in a desperate attempt to keep Aynsley with us and continuing to the show, Bubba took out his wallet, approached the officer and said, "We're really sorry officer, how much do we owe you?" To which the large, slightly doughy cop responded "YOU DON'T OWE ME NOTHIN!")

Those times were a joy, an education, and a privilege. If I hadn’t made the choice do those things, including drop out of art school to go on the road with the band, my life would have been very, very different. Thank you, Buddahverse.

As to not using Gonzo’s given name for this story: people he worked with will tell you he’s one of the nicest, funnest, and funniest guys ever – all true. But what many didn’t know is how intensely private he could be. For lots of reasons, our friendship drifted apart in the ‘80s, and I haven’t spoken with him since. He has receded from public life and I respect his privacy, but he’s integral to this tale, so he’s here. He stopped going by Gonzo at some point, but those who knew and know him from this period know who ‘Gonzo’ is. We spent a lot of time together, and I feel fortunate for that, because I have rarely laughed so hard or had a better time with a friend than when we were known as Dr. Gonzo and Duke (hence the special crew pass, and yes, we adopted those names from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).

Forward…

Rather than make this an overly detailed memoir of what happened (another future piece), I’m going to pull out and expand upon journal excerpts. That I kept a journal during the trip is, um, unexpected. I was a ‘creative,’ in the most wide ranging sense. I’d drawn all my life, I’d been in high school plays, and when I came back from the Army I’d done community theatre. I’d played guitar since sixth grade, been in some kind of band since then. I did a stint as part of an acting troupe at the first Great America park, in Gurnee, Illinois, was picking up freelance illustration gigs, painting murals, and worked, as did Gonzo, in our town’s record store, the Record Gallery (fondly remembered owner Lee Swanson also managed a local band and a solo artist, and I had also worked with both for a time).

And while I’d started writing, well, nonsense kind of stuff while still in the Army, I didn’t consider writing as my sole ‘thing’ yet. I loved humor, grew up watching the great comics of late night TV, and kept a book of notes, jokes, and bits during my high school years, which is probably why my first pitch as a ‘writer’ during my Army time was to National Lampoon magazine (the editor's polite rejection letter was a treasure, and I still mourn its fiery demise).

So, keeping a journal? It’s a head scratcher. Maybe I had an inkling something cool was ahead. Gonzo and I had a catch phrase that I used as the journal’s title. For those of you that didn't see the 'Here's what's coming' post about all this, that I have the journal is remarkable – it wasn't in our house the night of the 2017 fires, the only reason it's still around.

A final note, and not that you readers could know, but I’ve made slight changes where appropriate, usually around recreational drug use and names of the imbibers, and names of those who were part of some uncomfortable show-related incidents.

“We left the burbs at 12:00 a.m….and made Des Moines by 9:00 a.m….” By 3:30 p.m. we were in Grand Island, Nebraska where, according to me, “we were cunningly spied upon” by people in the A&W where we stopped for burgers. Apparently, “the people…stared right at us…two decrepit hippies.”

We must’ve looked rough around the edges, because we were. Gonzo was big, with long dark hair and goatee. I was in a long-hair faze, might have had a mustache, occasionally wore a derby, and definitely had an attitude.

Somewhere in Nebraska, 8:00 p.m.: “Dr. Gonzo just purchased a six pack of Coors beer for $1.90…” and we washed road crud off the van “in one of those 35¢ jobbers.” I include this not just to highlight what a six pack of Coors cost back then (and that you could do a ten-minute do-it-yourself car wash for 35¢) but because at that time you couldn’t buy Coors beer in Illinois. It was not quite but close to a mythical thing that friends would bring back from a state that had it, or you only heard about.

About the van… when new it had probably been a nice blue, something between slate and royal, now faded, with a white roof, the style with no windows around the side, space in the back to lie down or carry stuff. Nothing special, certainly, and Gonzo maintained it mechanically, so it was reliable.

The entry goes on to describe seeing an impressively beautiful, distant thunderstorm and sunset. I remember the awe and can still conjure up visual fragments of the horizon and cinematic vistas.

By 9/29 we’ve made it to Reno, and then… “We crossed the Wyoming state line high on hash, drinking Coors beer, and listening to Steve Martin on the 8-track.” Whew, that sentence makes me chortle. I’m going to transcribe the rest of the entry here. As I stated earlier, I wasn’t solely focused on writing at the time, so while much of the journal’s writings are the excited but barely passable quality of the kid I was then, I find my remembrance here to be…nice, although I could have used some maturity and editing:
“…A full moon illuminated everything to our left and right. Mountains started to appear and, far off into the distance in front of us, thunderstorms to the north and south lit up the skies… Gonzo went to crash in the van's lounge area…as I drove through the rolling hills and ranges of Wyoming and crossed into Utah…
A grand moment came [when] I noticed a large constellation of stars on my left, reached for my glasses and put them on at the exact moment I saw a meteorite…”

Entries go on for another page plus, then pick up on October 3rd, documenting the days from our arrival in SF on October 1st. It’s evident we called Pat ‘Bubba’ Morrow when we arrived.

Reading this may come across as kind of, well, mudane, but every moment was a trip, experiencing those things we'd wondered about, we talked ab0ut: how does it all work, how does a band with albums and fans and songs... what is it all, really? And how we even  here?? What had started for us in a nothern town in Illinois, in an ice arena in the summer, was continuing here – realizing that everything is 'real', that what we listened to on albums and the radio, and experienced as a tribe with a couple of thousand like minds at concerts in funky halls in funky parts of towns and cities, that thing that made us feel some very special kind of special energy, it was made and written and worked and done by people, like us but not like us, but who could see in us some kind of something that they felt deserved the opprotunity to come into a special circle and be a part of it all.

Yep.

We hung with Bubba, left when he fell asleep and went to a motel. The next day...

Knowing now what would become of all of us over the next decade, I can't help but grin at giving Bubba a ride in the van to the Old Waldorf. We all come from some place and as I think about it, I remember that when I first met the band and Bubba at the ice arena, the band and manager Herbie Herbert were in a station wagon when they left after the show... so a van ride for Bubba wasn't anything more or less than a ride to the gig.

My memory of what came next starts as we walked in and tracks with what I wrote, but what's not in the journal was how revealing it was to me and my vibrating existence back then to see the guys come in with a different energy than I had felt when we were on the road. Here, they had the 'yeah, just drove over from home...' kind of thing, guys coming to work – work they really enjoyed – shootin' the shit, laughing. Certainly, they were all like that on the road, but this was more relaxed, more fun. I don't remember Steve coming in, but I know he did, I just don't have that specific image like I have when Gregg and Neal showed up.

The cool thing for me as I read this entry is that we were 'remembered.' We'd been at many of the shows in '77, and we both worked our ass off, but we also had added bit a freshness and reliability. Gonzo was physically memorable and made the band and crew laugh as he worked. I wasn't that far from having gotten out of the service, was in great shape (I'd been a competitive lifter while I was in), and though goofy I retained a bit of a mission focus when I did things. There had been some memorable moments that the crew and band could easily recall: I'd helped Aynsley with a couple of things, been in the dressing room during a couple of serious band meetings, been trustworthy security for the dressing room and sometimes the stage... We'd been accepted, essentially, but being received as we were as we walked into the Old Waldorf was, well, gratifying.

Full disclosure – I could have digitally altered the line where I called the venue "the Waldorf Astoria," but there's enough altered 'truth' out in the world and I ain't gonna add anymore. It's truth or nothin'. Here's the entry:

And that brings us to the shows (I honestly don't remember it being two shows a night), the Steve Perry performance, and the week after, hanging with gracious and fun bassist Ross Valory at his home, meeting George Tickner, touring Marin with Ross' then wife Di', dropping into the studio while the band is recording Infinity...

Um yeah, it was a fine, fine time.

Part two comes soon.

MWH