Tim Mosenfelder/Getty ImagesNeal Schon wants to make something clear.
When Journey paid tribute to late-Aretha Franklin by performing an extended solo and flashing images of the Queen of Soul at a concert in Tampa, guitarist Schon had a problem with the way Tampa Bay Times critic Jay Cridlin wrote about the tribute.
“The correct way to say (it is) Journey’s Neal Schon did the tribute to Aretha Franklin,” Schon wrote in an email to the reporter earlier this week. “That would be honest journalism of what it was and is.”
The portion of Cridlin’s largely positive review that Schon took issue with reads, “(Schon) took several extended solos during the show, meandering and mugging it up as his fingers flicked across the fretboard. He put some honest-to-goodness heart behind the last one, just before Wheel In the Sky, as the band scrolled photos of the late Aretha Franklin on the screen behind him.”
Upon publication, Schon’s publicist, Tom George, reached out for a correction.
“You said that the band scrolled photos of the late Aretha Franklin,” George said. “The tribute was done solo by Neal himself. It was a tribute from Neal to Aretha. Can you please change the word band to he or Neal? We want to make it clear it was a tribute from Neal to Aretha.”
Schon had another issue with the review, though. Cridlin wrote that Ross Valory was the band’s “founding bassist,” but Schon claims the correct terms is “original bassist.”
“I myself started the band with ex-manager Herbie Herbert,” Schon wrote in the same email. “Everyone else came afterwards including Ross Valory. You can’t rewrite history man. It is what it is.”
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