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THE JOURNEY ZONE
http://www.journey-zone.com
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Jrnydv.Com’s
Exclusive Telephone Interview
with Robert Fleischman
January 8, 2003
Part Two: With Journey
Robert’s only appearance on VH1’s Behind the Music: Journey was a single scene in which the singer was shown onstage with the band during the 1977 tour with Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, screaming out a line or two, and holding a tambourine. The crowd didn’t really seem into it, and Neal rolled his eyes in front of the camera. But was that the whole story about Robert’s experience with Journey, or, for that matter, Journey’s experience with Robert? And was Neal expressing disgust at Robert, or at something else? The scene seemed chosen to portray the Fleischman period of Journey’s history as little more than a waste of time, something to get through before moving on to the “real” story, that of the advent of Steve Perry. As a historian, I questioned the teleological viewpoint that the validity of the period was determined by subsequent events. As a viewer, I questioned the set-up of the scene, the director having obviously gone out of his way to portray Fleischman in as poor a light as possible. And as a journalist, I certainly wanted to hear Robert’s side of the story.
DG: So what happened after the Denver showcase?
RF: Well, okay, about two weeks later I was sitting in Los Angeles at the CBS offices with Bruce Lunville who was the president, I believe, at the time of CBS records. So I sat with them, and they said that they have this band Journey, and that they were looking to have a lead singer for the band because they wanted to change its demographics, and they were just selling so many records, and at that time I think Foreigner and Boston were coming out and they wanted to get on that whole bandwagon.
DG: Had you heard of the band before that time?
RF: No, not really. I mean, my brother used to go see them, but I wasn’t into it because they were a jazz-rock fusion band. But I knew they were really good players. And that’s about all I knew about them because they were not something that I would probably listen to too much, because I was really into—I was just really into songs. Just a pop songwriter.
DG: So you went up to San Francisco to meet the band. What was going through your head at that point?
RF: I was just trying to keep as positive and up as possible and I was scared—and I didn’t want to appear scared—and so I just was very confident that everything was gonna’ work out. And they were talking, and I said “Oh, don’t worry,” and I think that kinda’ shook them up a little. Because here’s this kid and we just picked him up and he’s telling us not to worry.
DG: So tell me about that first day in San Francisco. You got off the plane, and [Journey Manager] Herbie [Herbert] took you directly to the rehearsal studio?
RF: Yeah, he did.
DG: S.I.R., right? Studio Instrument Rentals?
RF: Yeah. So, then I got there and met everyone and then we started jamming.
DG: And they were like rockets in your back pockets, you said.
RF: Yeah, and it was like them having rockets on the back of your pockets. And they’d been together so long and they were so tight that it was great to play with people that way. You know, it’s like if you play tennis with somebody. You don’t wanna’ play tennis with somebody who’s worse than you, you want to play tennis with somebody who’s better than you, because that’s when you learn.
DG: Right. So you’d say you learned something?
RF: Well I learned that it was great to play with a great band and be able to rally, you know? I’d been longing to rally with a lot of people, and these were people I could rally with. And that’s what made it so good. And that’s where the chemistry came from.
DG: And then you recorded some demos, including “For You,” which appears on the Time (Cubed) Box Set and which you later re-recorded with Neal and Gregg for your Perfect Stranger solo album.
RF: Yeah. After we rehearsed at S.I.R. for a couple of weeks, we went across the street to the Automat and we went in there and we started recording. And I’m quite sure they had plenty of time being in the studio, and I had my time in the studio, so I knew what I wanted to hear, and I had a good idea of how things wanted to be balanced and all that, and I pretty much sort of guided the sessions. I was sort of semi-producer for all those demos.
DG: And “Producer” is a hat that you’ve worn quite a few times in your career.
RF: Yeah, I mean it’s just, sort of--I don’t know, it just falls that way. I mean I have an idea for my puzzle, and I put my little pieces in there, and they’re just signatures, you know? And eventually it just comes out the way it comes out.
DG: Is it true that you actually laid down enough demos at CBS to put together an entire album? I mean how much of that material was later re-recorded for Infinity?
RF: I think the only things that were recorded, I mean, the songs that I wrote with them we split up. And they said, “Well, we really want this one,” and “We’d like to have this one,” and “We’d like to have that one,” and so I said “Here, you take these and I’ll take these and we’ll split.” You know, “You go your way and we’ll go our way.”
DG: You mean at the end.
RF: Yeah.
DG: Okay, let’s talk about what happened next. What was life like on the road with Journey? What were the dynamics of your relationships with your bandmates? With the fans? And how were the reviews?
RF: From what I understand the reviews were pretty good. Everybody was surprised. And we—the band, I mean—we got along famously, and we had great times, and had lots of laughs. We traveled in jets, and we traveled in buses, and we traveled in station wagons, and we had a great time. But I was always reminded that I had the easy life. Constantly. Because by then they were in better hotels and stuff like that, so, they’d go “You’re lucky—you get to go—you don’t have to go to the ratty hotels like we had to go to with all the stuff”--typical stuff like that.
DG: How about the fans. They were flipping you off every night from the front row?
RF: Well the fans were—you know, well, Journey was a cult—they had the cult thing going. They had a really strong fan base. So all their fans would get front row seats and start flipping me off every night, but they’d usually come around by the end of the show.
DG: Did it seem that it started to get easier, even at the beginning of the shows, towards the end of the tour?
RF: Yeah, it seemed like it. But again, we had started playing larger and larger places so the crowd wasn’t as concentrated.
DG: Okay. Let’s talk about some of the allegations made against you regarding your time with the band. An official Journey publication (footnote 1) states that you were fired by Herbie because you were overly demanding and arrogant. Another (footnote 2) states that Herbie fired you when you complained that you didn’t have enough of the limelight. And in his 2001 interview with my colleague Matt Carty, Herbie stated that you were a “pompous little poodle, and really tough to deal with.” How do you respond to that? What’s your side of the story?
RF: I—it doesn’t really matter what Herbie said about me. But I felt it wasn’t the thing to say. I thought he’d have been a little bit more understanding, have more of a heart. But he did [say it]. Hey, Herbie can sell ice cubes to Eskimos, and I really admire him for that. He had this band, and he had the vision. The only way I was hard to get along with was that we were playing this huge gig, and Herbie didn’t want me to sing. Why should I, I thought--I told him, “I thought you guys wanted me here, and then all of a sudden, you don’t want me singing tonight, so why should I even go up on the stage? It’s not like I’m playing drums, so you just want me up there to clap, and—”
DG: To shake the tambourine?
RF: Yeah! And because we were playing in Fresno, and he was afraid of what was gonna’ happen. He was desperate for it all to go well in Fresno.
DG: What was that about?
RF: Well, I mean, he felt that Fresno was the biggest Journey—you know, it was crazy there, and it was just the way he did it, pressuring me. And then they probably thought I was really pompous and everything because they would come to me with these songs and—I couldn’t write anything to that song, or I couldn’t come up with a really great idea with that song, I would just kinda’--I’d drop it. So then they’d come to me and say “Oh, have you finished that song yet?” I’d go, “No I haven’t, I’m still kinda’ working on it,” and everything, and they felt that I was controlling—because of that they felt that I was controlling. You know? But yet it just was that I couldn’t come up with an idea for it. They thought I was trying to ignore it, or I was filtering what they were doing, their music, but it was just—it didn’t inspire me to go from A to Z, you know? Finish it off. I’d get rough ideas, but that was about it. I guess I just procrastinated and I felt like this wasn’t necessary. But the ones that I did finish and everything like that, and that I had feeling for, they came out, and they did well.
DG: “Wheel in the Sky” being the most notable example.
RF: Yeah, I guess so.
DG: Let’s talk about your replacement by Steve Perry, The official story is that Herbie was floored by Steve’s demo tape, and he knew then and there that he wanted to get him in and you out.
RF: It just came down to—Herbie had connections with a guy named Michael Dilbeck who had put a lot of money into Steve Perry’s demos, and so Dilbeck was part of CBS records—he was a big honcho in the A&R department. So he kept bringing up Steve to Herbie and I guess they worked out some deal where, well, “If you get Steve in the deal then I’ll help you out more here with CBS and you’ll have a better connection with us”—it was one of those political moves. And they brought Steve in, and Steve’s a great guy—I mean, I see Steve occasionally and we talk together, and we’re friends.
DG: Oh, that’s good. But one thing the official band publications readily admit is that a level of deception was employed not only by Herbie but by [Journey guitarist] Neal [Schon], [former Journey keyboardist] Gregg [Rolie], [Journey bassist] Ross [Valory], and [former Journey drummer] Aynsley [Dunbar], when it came to the way Perry was brought into the band. Apparently Perry was actually pretending to be John Villanueva’s Portuguese cousin.
RF: Exactly! I was introduced to him that way! I mean that’s how he was introduced to me, that way. We had had a show at Soldiers Field in front of probably 120,000 people, and we were in Chicago, and Steve Perry was there in Chicago too, watching me on the sides of the stage.
DG: The Time (Cubed) booklet states that “at a sound check before a concert in Long Beach, Herbert arranged for [you] to be otherwise occupied while Perry joined the band to sing one of [your] songs.”
RF: Exactly.
DG: And how did it make you feel when you subsequently discovered what had been going on behind your back?
RF: (Pause.) Hey—that’s why I never really liked rock’n’roll too much. That’s why I never really went out and all. I like being a solo artist because I don’t have to deal with Peyton Place. You know what I mean? I don’t have to deal with the soap opera. I just think when it gets—everything gets lost. You know, your whole focus, what you’re doing—it’s gone once that element comes in.
DG: It stops being about music.
RF: Yeah. It becomes this—it’s ego. But from what I understand, Neal was very upset that I left, and he was mad at Herbie for a while, I think—that’s what I heard.
DG: Tell us about the relationship between you and Herbie. Barry Fey was your manager at the time, and you were paying him 25%, and Herbie wanted you to drop Barry for him. When you refused, he suggested that you pay him 25% anyway. What was that about?
RF: Well, that’s pretty much it.
DG: So I gave the answer with the question! (Both laugh).
RF: Yeah! I feel it was probably very much political and the fact that Barry Fey was my manager, who was at that time the biggest promoter in the Midwest—it was just pretty much him and Bill Graham who had the United States, and sliced it up for all of rock’n’roll. They came into every town, every venue. And so there was a lot of that.
It would be easy to dismiss Robert’s feeling that Herbie had replaced him for a better deal with the record company as the defensive arguments of a man who was fired for “acting up.” But Fleischman was a great singer—-indeed just as good a singer as Neal was a guitar player, or as Gregg was a keyboardist. And Neal and Gregg could hardly have been perfect angels either—-they were rock stars. The fact that Robert is so forthcoming about his own faults at that time lends credence to his story. But his story even has some basis in Herbie’s own words. While Herbie had initially leaked the story to Robyn Flans that he had made the decision to hire Steve Perry after once hearing the “If You Need Me, Call Me” demo, and this story was repeated in the Time (Cubed) booklet, in Herbie’s VH1 Behind the Music: Journey interview he admitted to having been aware of Steve’s voice “since the beginning of time;” and in his subsequent interview with Matt Carty, he stated that “Perry had been hovering around in my life for years.” He had been warned by Jack Villanueva, who had withheld Perry’s demo countless times, that Perry would bring nothing but trouble to the band. “Even that good, even if you were talking about Elvis Presley right there, he's just a jive mother-fucker.” So why would Herbie want to replace Robert Fleischman with Steve Perry? Perhaps Perry was simply so much better a singer than Fleischman that it was a no-brainer. But if that was the case, why all the intrigue? Why the differing stories? Another possibility is that Herbie is telling the truth—that Robert was impossible to work with. But the members of the band apparently didn’t think so, or Gregg and Neal wouldn’t have continued working with Robert, and Aynsley and Ross wouldn’t have remained friends with him either. Frankly, I think there is a kernel of truth to Robert’s story. The music business is a tough field.
Notes:
1. The insert to the 1992 box set Time (Cubed). “Eventually, Fleischman proved overly demanding and, following a performance in Fresno, Herbert fired the singer.” “But it wasn’t mere arrogance that brought about Fleischman’s departure. It was a tape Herbie had in his hands from another vocalist.” Return.
2. The 1983 book Journey by Robyn Flans. “Herbert fired Fleischman one night when the singer complained that he didn’t have enough of the limelight.” Return.
This transcript ©2003 Jrnydv.Com. All rights reserved.
Last Updated 02 July, 2007 (DHG)
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