With the departure of Journey’s long-time front man Steve Perry and the impending dissolution of the Trial By Fire world tour, it was looking like the Journey was over for these ex-Santana rockers.

Fortunately such was not the case, as Journey’s guitarist Neal Schon had plans for the band, with or without Steve Perry. Indeed, it turned out that he already had a successor to the Journey sound chosen in former Tall Stories lead singer Steve Augeri, whose songs he had heard on the radio. By this time, a disheartened Steve Augeri had retired from music completely and was working at a Gap store when he got the call from Journey’s guitarist. He was initially hired on to replace Perry as a backup singer for the remainder of the Trial By Fire tour, so he was singing with the band in concerts as early as 1998, though he didn’t get his actual debut as the official lead singer for most fans until Journey was chosen to produce a new song for the 1998 film “Armageddon”. The song they contributed was “Remember Me,” a sweeping pop-rocker that was admittedly overshadowed by Aerosmith’s hit contribution “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing.” Still, considering the album’s success and the number of people it reached because of Aerosmith’s hit, there was no reason why Journey’s full-length follow up album “Arrival” couldn’t have been more successful.

The reason why it wasn’t rests largely on the shoulders of the band’s Columbia Records label, owned by Sony Music. A large part of the problem was the fan reaction in response to the band’s decision to continue without Steve Perry.  There were a number of vocal fans at the time, Perry Purists, who believed that the band belonged to Steve Perry and that Journey should not continue with Augeri as Journey (A mistaken belief, as Journey had been initially founded around Neal Schon in 1975; Steve Perry wasn’t even a founding member of the band. Their first lead singer was actually Gregg Rollie). This belief extended, to a lesser extent, into the band’s more casual fan base, which seemed to accept this new lineup as a tribute band rather than the actual Journey. When playing in concert, the band discovered that much of the new material was going right over the audience’s heads. It appeared as though most of the older fans where coming only to hear Journey’s greatest hits. Perhaps in light of this, Sony Music decided not to market the band’s new album as well as they should have, and Arrival was released almost completely under the radar.