According to an extensive report from Billboard, early in Journey’s 2022 arena tour, lead guitarist Neal Schon became convinced people were out to get him.
So he stationed two off-duty police officers outside his dressing room, according to sources familiar with the tour. And at a Florida show last spring, Schon and his wife, Michaele, sent an assistant into keyboardist Jonathan Cain’s dressing room to snoop around – to find what, the sources have no idea.
Cain caught the assistant red-handed, and then hired an off-duty officer to guard his own dressing room, the sources say. So for much of the tour – which sold 296,000 tickets and grossed $31.9 million, according to Billboard Boxscore – two of the three musicians who wrote “Don’t Stop Believin’” and performed it every night for decades squabbled over whether one guard outranked the other in the event of a dispute between Schon and Cain.
“That’s just the level of pettiness and control and conspiracy they came to believe in,” a source says of the Schons.
Jonathan Cain is suing Journey’s Neal Schon, after the guitarist charged the band’s American Express credit card with over $1 million in personal expenses, including $400,000 in a single month.
Here’s Cain’s lawsuit:
“Schon’s charges placed considerable pressure on Journey and its ability to cover normal tour expenses. Schon was spending Journey’s money, and Cain is the one who was and is ultimately liable for the AMEX Account and Schon’s charges on the AMEX Card.
”Even with the $30,000 limit on Schon’s card on the Nomota AMEX account, Schon still managed to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional, excessive personal expenses through other tour personnel and travel agents.
“For example, the budget allocated a maximum of $1,500 per night for hotel rooms for Schon and Cain. However, Schon demanded to stay in hotel suites that cost in excess of $5,000 per night. After the recent tour ended in Honolulu, Hawaii, Schon stayed an extra week in a hotel suite that cost $6,000 a night and charged more than $100,000 in expenses to the AMEX Account.”
1 comment
Wow these people sure know how to spend an extra week at a $6000 a night hotel is way too excessive. Journey should really change their name to “rivalry”