Paging Jeff Scott Soto! Paging Jeff Scott Soto!
From RollingStone.com:
Two minutes before Journey kicked off their world tour in February, with new singer Arnel Pineda, the whole thing nearly fell apart. "I told them I wanted to back out," says the 41-year-old Filipino vocalist, whom the band discovered on YouTube. "[Journey guitarist] Neal Schon told me, 'It's too late now.' He pushed me a little and said, 'Go. Go sing for us.'" Pineda overcame his butterflies and took the stage in front of 20,000 fans in Chile, singing an hour of hits in a soaring voice incredibly similar to former Journey frontman Steve Perry. Since then, Pineda has played more than 63 concerts with Journey, including a current three-month trip through American amphitheaters, which has been averaging 13,000 people a night. The tour is the sixth-highest-grossing of the summer, and the band's performances are as high-energy as they were during Journey's heyday.
Unfortunately, Pineda isn't finding the tour nearly as fulfilling as his bandmates are. He misses his girlfriend and son, and the grueling pace is grinding him down. "It's very, very sad," he says. "There are days I just break down and cry. This is a job I'm doing for my family. That's all the consolation I'm getting." Traveling around America isn't what he expected. "It's all buses, stage, microphone," he says. "I never really get to go around and walk. They wake me up for soundcheck, then I wait until the show at nine. It's a fantastic job, but at the same time it's a curse. . . . I told Neal that the only thing that will make me quit this is if I get sick. I guess that's the same reason Steve Perry bailed out."
Just last summer, Pineda was fronting The Zoo, a band specializing in Eighties rock covers. YouTube clips of Pineda singing "Don't Stop Believin' " and "Faithfully" came to the attention of Schon, who had recently parted ways with Journey's fourth lead singer, Jeff Scott Soto. "I told him, 'You have to show your face so I can believe you,' " Pineda recalls of his first conversation with Schon. "I challenged him to talk to me on a Webcam."
Read more of "Sad 'Journey' for New Journey Singer"...
