That voice

Saw Monster last night, and it was great, but what's left ringing in my ears is not Charlize Theron's obscenity-laden screeds but the piercing tenor of Steve Perry, whose singing with Journey accompanies the most improbably romantic love scene I've seen in a movie since The Cooler.

The timing is funny, because I heard a couple of Journey songs while driving around the other day, and I was really struck by Perry's voice. This was a bit of a shift for me, because I never cared much for Journey. I was in fifth grade or so when the band was most successful, and even then I could perceive that they were the apotheosis of North American rock circa 1982, an overwrought genre that was sort of a slicked-up version of 1970s hard rock. At the time my musical leanings were to the past, in the Beatles and Zappa, and to the future, in the New Wave music MTV was streaming into our home. And I was just getting over a crippling addiction to Styx, who by any reckoning were Journey's peers in 1982, so I was keen to ignore the state of the art in rock music in the age of Reaganomics. (That included REO Speedwagon, whose music also is featured in Monster.)

But when I heard Journey on the radio last week (the 6/8-time anthems "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'" and "Lights"), I listened to the band's music with nearly new ears. I'm really into great belters these days, people like Pink and Johnny Rivers and Kelly Clarkson, and say what you like about Journey's arrangements--Steve Perry's voice is one powerful instrument. How does he sing like that? He almost sounds like some kind of machine, and listening to him, I can sort of see how if it were 1982 again, and I was 19 and stoned to the bejeezus at a Journey concert, I just might think Journey was pretty cool.

Here's a photo of Perry with Monster director Patty Jenkins.