Journey guitarist and founding member Neal Schon is calling time on the band’s career after more than 50 years and 100 million album sales.
The Final Frontier farewell tour will see the band perform 60 shows in North America in 2026 – but the guitarist has declared that he will continue to make music in the future.
Schon states: “This tour is our heartfelt thank you to the fans who’ve been with us every step of the way – through every song, every era, every high and low.
“We’re pulling out all the stops with a brand-new production – the hits, the deep cuts, the energy, the spectacle. It’s a full-circle celebration of the music that’s brought us all together.
“As its founding member, I carry the Journey torch to this day, wherever I go. The sentiment and spirit of the band will always remain.”
But he adds: “While this marks a farewell to one powerful chapter of the Journey we’ve shared, I want everyone to know I’m not done. Music is still burning strong inside me, and there are new creative horizons ahead.
“This tour is both a thank you and the beginning of what’s next.”
Alongside Schon in the current line-up of Journey are singer Arnel Pineda, keyboard player Jonathan Cain, drummer Deen Castronovo, bassist Todd Jensen and additional keyboard player Jason Derlatka.
The band’s greatest success came in the late ’70s and early ’80s when Steve Perry was the singer.
But before Perry joined, Journey made three albums of jazz-influenced rock – a self-titled debut in 1975, Look Into The Future in 1976, and Next in 1977.
In a 2013 interview with Classic Rock, Neal Schon said that those early albums were very much a product of their time, when the influence of soft drugs was commonplace among rock groups.
“There was a lot of that going on,” Schon said. "You know, there was a lot of that going on everywhere – and especially in San Francisco.
“It was no big deal. In the music scene, smoking pot was like eating a ham sandwich.”
Prior to forming Journey, Schon had been a member of Santana, but in the Classic Rock interview he denied the rumour that Carlos Santana had introduced him to LSD.
“I’d already taken it before I met him!” Schon said. “I was a teenager hanging out with some friends and we all dropped acid when we went to see The Beatles’ movie Yellow Submarine. That was a trip. I couldn’t stop laughing the whole movie. That’s all I remember.”
Schon also spoke in this interview about the guitarists he most admired.
“I love John McLaughlin’s stuff,” he said, “all those great Mahavishnu Orchestra records. When I listen to that stuff, there’s so much there musically. He’s such a creative person. I just really admire real musicians, you know?”
And he paid tribute to his formative influences, including Jimi Hendrix.
In 1993, Schon had teamed up with former Free and Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers to record an E.P. named The Hendrix Set, comprised entirely of classic Hendrix numbers.
“I felt very at home playing those songs,” Schon said. “I was weaned on that stuff as a kid, and I learned every little nuance that I could off the records, as well as Cream and Clapton and Jeff Beck’s stuff and Jimmy Page’s stuff.
“And then I had a lot of deep roots in blues – Albert King, B.B. King, Michael Bloomfield. I had my jazz guys, I had my blues guys, my fusion guys.
“I really did a lot of studying as a kid, to try to embed it in my own soul as much as possible. If you live and breathe it, you sometimes become a part of it.”
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