Contact Stigmaweb's video: 1091 Journey - 30 years of Don t Stop Believing

Thirty years after releasing their song to the world, the rock band Journey is still believing in the uplifting power of what it says - and that includes band's newest member. Al Jim Axelrod now with a Summer Song: It's been on Journey's song list every night for three decades running. (Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world) "Do you guys ever do a show without 'Don't Stop Believing?" "We haven't, not since it's been written, no." "You'd have a revolt from the audience, wouldn't you?" "Yeah, I think they would be throwing stuff at us" It may have started as solely Journey's song - but it belongs to all of us now. The most covered, karaoked, and parodied song in modern music history. From baseball to Broadway, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing'" has become a national anthem of sorts - and with digital sales at almost four and a half million, it is officially the most downloaded song ever recorded in the 20th century. "When you put that number in your head, what do you come up with?" "You know, we did something right in the studio. We did something right when we wrote the song. You know, we hit a chord." It began as the brainchild of keyboard player Jonathan Cain, who had been laboring in obscurity in 1980 with a band called the Babys, when he got the chance to join Journey. It was a dream shot nobody could have predicted. Well, almost nobody. "I was starving before I hit Journey, very, very rough times...I didn't know where the next pay check was gonna come. I sold stereos. I quit the business. I was so lost, you know? And I was borrowing money from my father, who wouldn't let me come back to Chicago. He said, 'You stay there. Something good is gonna happen. Don't stop believing.' And he would always say that to me. 'Don't stop believing, Jon.'" Armed with his father's advice and the seeds of a song, Cain sat down with guitarist Neal Schon and then-lead-singer Steve Perry. Within an afternoon, Cain's catchy chorus was transformed into a rock'n'roll classic. "When you came in with the chorus--that's all you had, right?" "Yeah! We worked backwards. So, it sort of happen...you do the rolling piano thing you do." "I heard his guitar, and I said 'that sounds like a train to me. And I go 'don't you love that song, Midnight train to Georgia?' And Steve goes, 'yeah.' I go, 'it's the midnight train going anywhere.'" While it barely broke the billboard top ten in 1981 as a single, "Don't Stop Believing'" anchored Journey's monster album "Escape" - which went straight to No. 1 that year. Still, when the band broke up six years later, it looked like "Don't stop believing" would slide off into the realm of rock'n'roll nostalgia, rarely to be heard from again. Until 1998, when a string quartet provided the soundtrack for Adam Sandler being left at the altar in "The Wedding Singer," dusting off the song for the first time in more than a decade. While seven other movies and more than a dozen television shows would borrow it, including the cliffhanging series finale of the Sopranos, no one sent the song into the stratosphere quite like the harmonic and hormonal misfits of "Glee." That boulevard is a two-way street. After Glee's premiere, Journey saw an 87 percent spike in sales. And the Glee cast version of "Don't Stop" has sold over one million downloads - making it their best-selling song. But perhaps no one can relate more than the man who's singing it for Journey now. Just four years ago, Arnel Pineda was a singer in a smoky room - fronting a Filipino cover band - when Neal Schon, searching for a replacement for the retired lead singer Steve Perry, found Arnel on YouTube. "I heard his voice and I went, whoa. I go, 'who is that? And I was just completely taken back by his voice. I just went, this guy's incredible. We gotta find him." But what the band didn't know was that Arnel was singing to survive. His mother died when he was just 13, after a long illness that left the family bankrupt. He ended up homeless, sleeping in a park in Manila, collecting scrap metal to scrape up enough money to eat.