Journey's Jonathan Cain Talks 'Don't Stop Believin'' Memoir

If you like sex and drugs in your rock n' roll memoirs, Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain's upcoming Don't Stop Believin' might not be your escape. But Cain promises plenty of creative insight and positive message in the tome, which comes out May 1 to coincide with Journey's summer tour with Def Leppard.

"I like the way we did this, because it's a musical, songwriter's book," Cain, who co-wrote Don't Stop Believin' with Travis Thrasher, tells Billboard. "I'm excited. I'm scared, a little nervous but grateful. I never thought this would happen. I started writing this book 10 years ago."

The story Cain set out to tell is "just one of perseverance. It's about dealing with the setbacks of the music business -- the ups and downs, the dedications, the rejection, dealing with everybody that says 'You're not good enough' and carrying on. Just because somebody tells you you can't write and you can't sing doesn't mean you've got to quit, it just means you haven't gotten to the right position yet. So it's a book of hope and faith." And the pages reveal that the primary source of Cain's own faith was his father Leonard Friga, the guy who told him to not stop believing in the first place and even predicted that his tenure with the Babys before joining Journey in 1980 was "just a stepping stone."

"I had the greatest father on the planet," Cain recalls. "He was a real vision-keeper, just a whole icon for me in my head, and I was so lucky to have his love. So part of this (book) is a love story -- my love for him and all he did for me, and the way he picked me up whenever I seemed to get knocked down. He was always there."

Don't Stop Believin' chronicles the tragic 1958 fire at Chicago’s Our Lady of the Angels, in which 92 students and three nuns died, and how Cain found solace from that in music, as well as his early career struggles as the leader of his own band, which also had a brief recording contract. Journey's inner-workings are detailed as well, and Cain is confident the book will provide insights into his relationship with former frontman Steve Perry, both as a songwriter and a friend.

"It was kind of divine intervention that the Lord would bring me to this guy that could just sing like that, and how many things we had in common and how much we loved just writing great songs," says Cain, who has not seen or heard from Perry since Journey's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction last April. "It was just magical. I wanted to show the reader that I got lifted up and swept into this vortex of greatness and was in the studio making Escape with a band I hadn't played a note with. I can't make that up. It happened. I want the reader to know just how supernatural that felt, and how after the years of rejection and failed attempts at trying to be a solo artist and trying to take my music down the road that I'm part of something this cool."

Journey will, in fact, be getting back on the tracks May 21 when it begins its 58-city tour with Def Leppard. The groups toured together 12 years ago, and Cain predicts the complementary pairing is still intact. "The music fits together well," he says. "We're so different than them. Our sound is different, (with) keyboards and our ballads. We just go different places with our music, so I think it's going to be a really different musical night." He also promises that Journey is "clicking" even though the tensions between him and guitarist Neal Schon that surfaced last year via social media haven't been fully rectified.

"Y'know, we just tolerate it," Cain -- who's married to minister and presidential advisor Paula White and released his first Christian album, What God Wants To Hear, in 2016 and the Christmas album Unsung Noel last year -- says with a chuckle. "He just did an interview and aired his laundry again, so I'm like, 'OK, whatever dude...' The music is bigger than us, bigger than all this stuff and the fans are more important than all that stuff. So I'm not going there. I haven't even thought about it, to tell you the truth. I really haven't. I'm just out there for the fans. I'm out there for the legacy. We just got the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, so you want to live up to that and I think that's the spirit you go out with, not anything else. I'm just looking forward to making music again, music I love and I loved to help create."

Journey Keyboardist Jonathan Cain's New Memoir: 10 Things We Learned

Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain first got the idea for his book Don't Stop Believin': The Man, the Band, and the Song That Inspired Generations (in stores May 1st) while traveling around the country on one of the band's many long tours. "I'd be on the bus a lot with [Journey bassist] Ross [Valory] and often I'd just start reminiscing about my life," he says. "I'd talk about growing up in my Italian neighborhood and going to Dick Clark shows and listening to Wolfman Jack. I think it was Ross that said to me, 'You should write a book.'"

Cain thought that was a splendid idea, though he didn't quite realize how much work it would take. He began writing the book on his own laptop, starting with his earliest childhood memories, but eventually grew frustrated. He estimates that he re-wrote the first chapter alone eight different times. "I realized my grammar wasn't so good," he says. "I can write a song, but actually putting in the punctuation marks and knowing where to put the quotes? I had to learn all that stuff."

He eventually was teamed up with novelist Travis Thrasher, who turned out to be an invaluable resource. "He re-organized it all and put things in their proper places and showed me where I was missing things," says Cain. "It was about 500 pages when he got it and he said, 'Let's get to the essence of the thing.' He showed me how to outline. I really owe him a lot."

The book begins with a pivotal moment in his life: the day in 1987 that Steve Perry decided he no longer wanted to be in Journey. "In less than a year, my band would be over, my marriage would disintegrate, and, worst of all, my father would pass away," he writes. "The year ahead would be one of the toughest I would ever have to endure."

It then goes back to Cain's childhood in Chicago, his early success as the keyboardist in the Babys, joining Journey in 1980, co-writing "Don't Stop Believin'" with guitarist Neal Schon and singer Steve Perry, and the long, difficult road toward rebuilding Journey in the aftermath of Perry's departure. It's packed full of info that will be new even to hardcore Journey fans. Here are 10 things we learned from the book.

1. Long before Cain was famous, he attended the premier of American Graffiti.
Afterward, he mingled with the cast at Ernie's Steakhouse in Century City. "I see the director, George Lucas," Cain writes. "I hear he's a graduate of the University of Southern California and quite the up-and-coming filmmaker. I recognize Opie Taylor from The Andy Griffith Show, though Ron Howard is now a young man. ... I sit down next to someone who introduces himself as Harrison."

2. Bruce Springsteen inspired some of Cain's early songwriting in Journey.
"I felt we could take a page from his songbook and write songs about the working-class lifestyle, singing about the very issues they were thinking and dreaming about," he writes. "Springsteen had given us permission to write about the street life, something that hadn't been done much before."

3. Neal Schon wasn't initially thrilled when Cain and Perry began writing ballads like "Open Arms."
"After we played [that song] to the band, Neal looked dumbfounded," writes Cain. "'Where are we supposed to play on this?' he asked. "Into the awkward silence, Steve Perry said, 'We'll find the right arrangement.'" Perry was confident we could turn it into a rock anthem and began suggesting ideas for when the bass and drums could come in. I asked Neal to play the opening theme with me. The song started to grow wings and fly."

4. The phrase "Don't Stop Believin'" is something that Cain's dad said to him on the phone one night in the 1970s when he was frustrated with his life and career.
He scribbled it down on the last page of his spiral notebook and found it when Journey was writing songs for 1981's Escape. "I came up with a cool chord progression and and started humming the lyric 'don't stop-believin'-hold onto that feeling' over the changes. I didn't know what the other lyrics were yet, but I planned to show the guys the idea anyway."

5. The infamous "Don't Stop Believin'" lyric "born and raised in South Detroit" came to them very quickly.
Initially, Steve Perry tried "born and raised in Detroit," but Cain felt it needed another syllable to flesh it out. He suggested "South Detroit," though Perry wondered aloud of such a place even existed. "Heck if I know," Cain said. "If it sings well, I say let's move on." No such place exists because "South Detroit" is Canada.

6. Steve Perry broke the news to Cain and Schon that he was done with Journey after calling them to meet him near San Francisco's Richardson Bay.
"Guys, we're done," Cain remembers Perry saying. "We can't get any bigger. If we keep going, we're going to end up some classic rock nostalgia band. We'll end up just being a memory – a shadow of what we used to be." Cain was absolutely crushed. He'd been in the band a mere seven years. "Steve eventually walks away towards his car, leaving Neal and me near the shore," he writes. "As we stare out at the water, I see the city by the bay. It feels like a stranger."

7. Perry begged the band not to tour without him after a severe hip injury made it impossible for him to perform in support of the group's 1996 comeback LP Trial By Fire.
"Do whatever you guys need to do, but don't call it Journey," he said. "Call the band something else. Anything. Don't fracture the stone. I don't think I can come back if you break it." Perry has held true to his word by not singing a note with them since they began touring with a new singer in 1998.

8. Cain had major doubts about hiring new Journey singer Arnel Pineda after Neal Schon discovered him on YouTube in 2007.
"Initially, the thought of Arnel singing with us made me hesitant," he writes, "wondering what our fans in places like Raleigh, North Carolina, and regions in the middle of Texas might think. I feared the twisted mentality that went, 'That's no Steve Perry – he's Asian.'"

9. He randomly met his wife Paula White – who serves as Donald Trump's spiritual advisor – on a Southwest Airlines flight to San Antonio, Texas.
He had no idea who she was, but they started talking when a book dropped out of her bag and he picked it up for her. "The likelihood of Pastor Paula White being on a Southwest flight was highly improbable, just like Journey," Cain writes. "She had needed to get a flight to San Antonio for some time, and a seat just happened to open up on our plane that very day."


10. White played an instrumental role in Cain's spiritual awakening, which has caused no small degree of conflict within Journey.
"I told her how deep I used to feel in my relationship with Jesus," he writes. "I told Paula I hadn't been to church for many years, and how hungry I was for my faith to return."