Bruce Springsteen has taken some hits for his vocal opposition Trump, and the latest hit he's taken comes from one of his peers, a fellow rock and roll musician who owes his career to being in the right place at the right time - and to pure luck.
In 1980, Gregg Rolie, the keyboardist and singer from Santana who had started Journey with fellow Santana alumnus and guitarist Neal Schon five years earlier, decided to leave the band. He and Schon went to a show by a British band, the Babys, whose lead singer, John Waite, would eventually find success as a solo artist. Rolie admired the prowess of the Babys' American keyboard player and told Schon that he might make a good replacement for him as Journey's new keyboardist. Schon agreed, and he later approached the fellow and offered him the job of becoming Journey's new ivory tickler. The musician accepted, and that's how Jonathan Cain joined Journey. one of the most successful - commercially, anyway - rock bands of the late seventies and early eighties, debuting with the band on their 1981 album Escape.
At least that's how I remember the story. I heard it on MTV years ago.
Now, anyone who knows me would say that I more or less agree with the critics, despite my respect for Neal Schon as a guitarist and Gregg Rolie as a keyboardist (and their first two drummers, Aynsley Dunbar and Steve Smith, are accomplished musicians in their own right, Dunbar as a blues drummer in John Mayall's group and Smith as a jazz drummer), that Journey's music is mostly junk. It's corporate rock that follows a straitjacketed formula of pumped-up rockers and power ballads, the spectacularly insufferable "Don't Stop Believin'" being a prime example of the latter - rock and roll on automatic pilot. It's all hackwork, and as a member of Journey at its commercial peak - and as the composer of "Faithfully," another power ballad that led some rock fans to wonder if Lionel Richie had written it under a pseudonym - Jonathan Cain may very well be the biggest hack of them all.
So bear that in mind when I tell you this: Cain said that Springsteen should "shut up" and stop telling people how to vote and what to think of Donald Trump, saying that music should be apolitical and that the sole purpose of musicians is to entertain, not preach politics.
"Guys like Bruce Springsteen should shut up, you know?" Cain said. "I mean . . . really? Do your art. I try to keep politics out of my music."
Cain could have stopped there, but he accused Springsteen of lack of patriotism, having just found out after forty-two years that the title song of Springsteen's 1984 album Born In the U.S.A. was not a celebration of right-wing Republicanism.
"And Bruce, I mean, what the heck? I used to like him, and now he’s just annoying. He's an annoying, bitter old man. I mean, stop it. Really. You were born in the U.S.A., weren’t you, dude? So act like it. But even that song, if you look at the lyrics, I mean, it’s a kind of a diss to our country," he said.
Even that song, if you look at the lyrics, it's the thoughts of an embittered Vietnam veteran who can't reconcile the American promise of freedom and opportunity to what he was fighting for in Vietnam, even as he can't get a job in the local oil refinery in his hometown and can't even get any help from his local Veterans Administration office. Cain speaks as if the concerns of the working class folks that didn't achieve the success that Springsteen and Cain himself did don't matter.
By the way, because Journey was so faceless, even their own fans couldn't name one member besides singer Steve Perry without looking at the credits of one of their Journey LPs, it appears that Cain is the annoying, bitter old man here. He happens to be only a year younger than Springsteen. But nowhere nearly as renowned.
The way Cain attacks Springsteen for being unpatriotic and dismissive of American values - when Springsteen is engaging in the greatest American value of all, freedom of speech, especially in the face of a tyrant like Trump - you'd think Cain was one of those Christian conservatives who think being against Trump is like being against America. Well, he is.
"Now, people say, 'Well, you’re a Christian, and you’re conservative,' and I’m like, 'So what?'" Cain said. "I don't preach it on stage. I don't spend ten minutes talking about it," Cain said.
Well, he has his wife do that for him. See, his wife is Paula White, Trump's spiritual advisor - the chick who famously speaks in tongues at the drop of a hat. "Aka kaka wokka makka koka kola oko uno iki icki kama taka tiki torko ticky tacky kaka waka maka braka ooga ooga ooga ooga chaka!" She sounds like Fozzie Bear on acid.
Did I happen to mention that this is the third marriage for Cain and White - so much for Christian values, eh? - and that Cain is notably older than his wife? She was fifteen years old in 1981, when her schoolmates - and possibly White herself - were buying Journey's Escape album.
But then. younger conservative women marrying older men is the thing these days. Look at Karoline Leavitt.
And seriously, where has Cain been all this time? Bruce Springsteen, critical of Republican politicians? He just got that? How far back do you want to go? During his 1988 tour, Springsteen famously yelled at one of his audiences, "Don't vote for that f**kin' Bush!"
Being the keyboardist in one of the most popular rock bands of the early eighties is nothing for Jonathan Cain to brag about, as Journey, like most bands of the time, made the sort of bland, unchallenging rock that was as satisfying as a diet soft drink and more bloated - the sort of rock music that led many young listeners to embrace the even more awful sounds of hip-hop and synthesizer-based disco that suddenly flowered like algae blooms after MTV premiered, because rock and roll, thanks largely to bands like Journey, had become that lame. As you can gather, I don't think Journey is worth the trip.
And it's appropriate that Cain was in the Babys, because when he disses Springsteen, he certainly acts like one.
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