Schon shares further details on Instagram
Last month, founding Journey guitarist and current manager Neal Schon called the lawsuit Steve Perry filed against him and Jonathan Cain for filing trademarks to 20 of the group’s songs for merchandising “a bunch of total crap.” Schon took to Instagram over the weekend to elaborate on the matter on a radio station’s post about the lawsuit.
“He (was present) at the board of directors meeting as no one thought I was there but while being represented by my attorney, I was there listening on the line,” Schon states about the 2020 alleged corporate coup d’état that lead the firing of lawsuit of drummer Steve Smith and bassist Ross Valory. Both Smith and Valory, along with former manager Herbie Herbert, were all fired at separate times in the past.
Schon continues, “So it’s not true that he was only there through proxy. His voice was heard by myself and all that attended voting me off the board, and voting Ross, whom he fired, and Smith, who he fired, as well as Herbie. Smith voted himself in as president, Ross voted himself in as Secretary and they all threw myself under the bus as well as Jon, but Jon had initially called the board meeting.”
Some details remain vague, but Schon says that Perry forced the group to sign an agreement in the mid-90s that required unanimous business decisions between each partner before he’d appear on stage in a series of sold out gigs in Hawaii.
“Also the Elmo Perry was forced upon us all to sign that he and his attorney had drawn up 10 min before we were to go on in Hawaii at a string of five sold out shows Neal Blaisdell Center. We had played the first two then our manager Herbie came to us stating Steve Perry was not going to go on without us signing. Herbie claimed he didn’t know what else to do, so he suggested we sign. We did sign, but I will say under duress and not having any time for any other legal to look at it,” he adds.
He continues, “Bottom line, all these years have gone by then I found out our music wasn’t even trademarked nor the name until 2005 and I trademarked the rest of everything in 2020. So out of all the attorneys, accountants, managers we’ve had, do you think just one of them could have taken care of business and protected the band out of the hundreds of thousands of dollars we spent throughout the years? I’m going to take a ‘wild guess’ and say that they all knew the differences between songwriting/copyright and ultimately the ‘trademarks’ to everything. Just a little something to think about friends.”
Perry was a member of Journey from 1977-1987 and then again from 1995-1998. Schon is the only remaining founding member of the group, and has played at every performance since the inception of Journey in 1973. He, along with Cain and Perry, were the core of Journey and were responsible for the band’s meteoric rise to prominence in the 1980’s. Together, they wrote several of the most well-known rock songs in the world — including “Don’t Stop Believin”, the best-selling digital track from the 20th century, with over seven million copies sold in the United States, and the second most downloaded song of all time.
